Update: I misread the referring article and totally botched the story on this one. What follows is the updated version. The original version is lost to the ages.

I guess this is old news, but it’s new to me… There is no longer a dinosaur called the Brontosaurus. It’s now called the Apatosaurus. Or, more appropriately, the LameNameASaurus.

Here’s what happened:

In the late 1800′s two paleontologists (Marsh and Cope) hated each other, and were in a race to discover more new dinosaurs than their rival.

In his haste to find more dinosaurs than the other guy Marsh discovered a few bones of a 50 foot long dinosaur and called it the Apatosaurus (which translates to “deceptive lizard”).

A little later, he discovered almost a complete skeleton of a 80 foot long dinosaur and called it Brontosaurus (which translates to “thunder lizard”).

Later on, it was discovered that the first dinosaur was really just a baby Brontosaurus, so by the rules of scientific naming, the first (and lamer) name took precedence.

This all came to a head about 20 years ago when the Post Office issued some dinosaur stamps with the name Brontosaurus and was accused by the “scientific community” of promoting scientific illiteracy.

First Pluto, and now the Brontosaurus. The science of my childhood is slowly dying. Pretty soon they’ll be telling me that drinking Lithium is not a cure-all.

He’ll always be Brontosaurus to me.

Incidentally, Brontosaurus is in the spell check dictionary, while Apatosaurus is not.

Source: The UnMuseum