Littlefoot's identity

[Dosu2Dinner]

So, most of you have probably heard about Brontosaurus' return to the valid genera of dinosaurs earlier this year. For some, it may have generated a lot of enthusiasm, but for someone who learned that Brontosaurus didn't exist from quite a young age, I won't be impressed until they use nomenclature to bring back my old favourites Seismosaurus and Anatotitan.  

But the real question is this - what is Littlefoot?
See, I remember vaguely the blurb of a VHS of the original Land Before Time that identified him as a Brontosaurus, which I dismissed as a pop culture error, and from that point on referred to him and his relatives as an Apatosaurus. But since this reclassification I haven't been sure - it doesn't help that his dad's called Bron. Other people I have seen list him as an Apatosaurus ajax, the type species of Apatosaurus, rather than Apatosaurus excelsus which is now known as Brontosaurus excelsus although I always went with A. excelsus...

So, what do you guys think? I know it's rather pointless classifying these guys as such, but still...

And knowing this makes my potential Cera/Ruby ship cooler, cause Ruby is an Oviraptor philoceratops, or an egg-thief who loves ceratopsians...

That's still a maybe...I'm not sure if I can do dinosaur romance convincingly.   Check out my fanfiction and see what you think.

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[Ludichris1]

Hmm... this has also confused me. When I was real young I thought he was a diplodocus by the limited number of dinosaurs I knew about. I later applied and confirmed apatosaurus to it. But whenever i'd look them (apatosauruses) up on just plain Google images... they always seemed so different o-O than on LBT. I had known that the brontosaurus was declassified but... well anyway just now looking up brontosaurus and apatosaurus, the brontosaurus looks a lot more like the 'traditional longneck' i'm used to.. but what if that's just because the artwork is more centered around an older era?

[RockingScorpion]

That might be the case that the artwork is from an older era. Back then, it was believed that the big sauropods were able to lift their head up, but later on it was discovered that the sceleton was constructed in a way that wouldn't allow for this to happen, so illustrations like this are indeed not up to date anymore.

Another illustration I found was this one, and if you look up Apatosaurus on wikipedia, you'll find a similar one.

As for me, until he won't be called Brontosaurus on maybe the description of the upcoming movie or any other release, I will think of him as an apatosaurus, and the only reasons I have there are that I'm used to it and that I like the sound of that name better.

[Dosu2Dinner]

I agree, Apatosaurus does sound better to me also.  

Although Seismosaurus and Anatotitan also sounded better...

[Dino-Mario]

Well, Ever since the creation of the first movie, Bluth himself looked at Apatosaurus skeletons for reference, and the names of most Apatosaurus characters usually begin with A, so it's safe to assume Littlefoot himself and his family are apatosauruses. On the other hand, things get confusing with Bron. He was named still under the assumption Brontosaurus was a synonym of Apatosaurus, but things are now different, so... could this make LittleFoot an Apato/Bronto hybrid?