Elsevier

Endeavour

Volume 30, Issue 4, December 2006, Pages 126-130
Endeavour

Review
Bully for Apatosaurus

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2006.10.004Get rights and content

Thin at one end, thicker in the middle, then thin again at the other end, Brontosaurus is one of the most famous dinosaurs. So why do paleontologists call it Apatosaurus? Othniel Charles Marsh coined both names from two relatively complete specimens in the late 1870s. Additional specimens collected during the second American Jurassic dinosaur rush (1895–1905) provided the material for revisions. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who detested Marsh, systematically sought to overturn his work. Yet it was Elmer Samuel Riggs who showed that Marsh's Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus are synonymous, and Osborn who stubbornly, and inexplicably, adhered to the latter.

Section snippets

Let the contest begin

Once the exclusive domain of entrepreneurial scientists like Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, American vertebrate paleontology shifted gradually into large, urban science museums in the late 1890s. A fierce contest, dubbed the second American Jurassic dinosaur rush, erupted in this new institutional setting, pitting museum paleontologists from New York, Chicago and Pittsburgh against one another in a race to find and collect exhibit-quality dinosaurs. The contest instigated a wave

What's in a name?

Marsh, along with his archrival Cope, had done pioneering work on American Jurassic dinosaurs, establishing dozens of new taxa, many of which were deemed invalid by their successors. Because of their heated rivalry, they sometimes did hasty, slipshod work. Taxonomy honors its practitioners by attaching their monikers permanently to the scientific names they establish. In the late 19th century, in situations where more than one name was given to the same animal, the principle of strict priority

The rise and fall of Apatosaurus

Elmer Samuel Riggs, a paleontologist at Chicago's Field Columbian Museum, made a notorious contribution to sauropod taxonomy in 1903 (Figure 4). It appeared in his description of a well preserved but incomplete sauropod skeleton that he and his party collected near Fruita, Colorado in the summer of 1901. He had made a sweep through several eastern museums examining various dinosaur specimens and in New Haven, Connecticut, he had the opportunity to study Marsh's types. This is what he found:

The fallout for Riggs

There is one final point to be made regarding sauropod research during the second Jurassic dinosaur rush. When Osborn succeeded Marsh as vertebrate paleontologist for the US Geological Survey, he inherited his unfinished, government-funded projects. Osborn assigned a few of these to other paleontologists as a way of currying favor. But the choicest plum of the lot was probably the sauropod monograph, which he kept for himself. However, he was so busy with myriad other projects, most of them

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