I was reading through news articles before my class today when I found
this particular article which says that a new study suggests that the Brontosaurus was in fact its own genus of dinosaur, distinct from the Apatosaurus.
As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation explains it:
The headless skeletons of two large long-necked dinosaurs were discovered in 1870 and described by US palaeontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The first was named Apatosaurus ajax -- the deceptive lizard, the second was named Brontosaurus excelsus -- the thunder lizard.
Marsh wrongly reconstructed the skeleton of Brontosaurus excelsus using the head of another long-necked dinosaur, Camarasaurus.
Shortly after Marsh died, palaeontologists discovered another skeleton that was similar to both Apatosaurus ajax and Brontosaurus excelsus. They decided that Brontosaurus was not anatomically distinct enough from Apatosaurus to warrant its own genus, so it became Apatosaurus excelsus.
Recently many more specimens have been discovered, allowing for a more comprehensive comparison across specimens by Benson and colleagues, who have reconstructed the entire branch of the Diplodcidae family tree.
"If we've got lots of specimens and we've got detailed quantitative info about their anatomy, then for every comparison between two specimens, we can come up with a number that's the difference between them," Benson says.
Lead author Dr Emmanuel Tschopp says there were a number of anatomical features that distinguished Brontosaurus from Apatosaurus.
"Even though both are very massive and robust animals, Apatosaurus has a more wide neck than Brontosaurus has, so I think that's the most visual and obvious thing to distinguish the two," says Tschopp, a post-doctoral research at the University of Nova Lisbon.
If verified by further analysis, this could overturn the century-old decision to classify the dinosaur as an Apatosaurus rather than a genus of its own. I have not had time to read the study in question yet, as I have to head to class now, but I plan on reading it after work today. For anyone who is interested in reading the study in question, it can be found
here.
