The Dinosaur That Was Struck Off and Brought Back
A famous dinosaur lost its name in 1903 and regained it in 2015. Whether it deserved to depends less on bones than on where scientists draw lines.
The palaeontologist Othniel Marsh named Apatosaurus in 1877 and Brontosaurus in 1879, treating them as separate long necked dinosaurs. In 1903 Elmer Riggs argued that the two were one genus, and because Apatosaurus had been named first it kept the name. The name Brontosaurus nevertheless lived on in museums and books, and one famous mounted skeleton long carried the wrong head, which belonged to a different animal, Camarasaurus. In 2015 Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues compared dozens of specimens and proposed that Brontosaurus deserved to be a genus of its own. Some palaeontologists remain unconvinced that the differences are large enough to count at that level, so the answer depends partly on where the line between genera is drawn.
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