The Days of Thunder are no more

As any pre-pubescent amateur dinosaur enthusiast, I had my favourites...as you might expect the T-Rex topped that list, but I always had a soft spot for Brontosaurus, a mild mannered, 80-foot long herbivore from the Jurassic Period, that lived 150 million years ago. Now in my adulthood I find myself reacquainted with paleontology, but the one thing I cannot find is my Brontosaurus!

Not only is it extinct, but now they're saying it never even existed. They call it everything from a "major scientific blunder" to a "fraud"...total character assassination. Then, as is the trend in today's profit minded society, they gave it a facelift, merged it, slapped a new label on it and are now selling it off as an Apatosaurus!

Who's responsible for all this? Well, it all started with the original discoverer O.C.Marsh, who in his haste to discover as many dinosaur species as possible, started double-counting. A bulletproof plan, I wonder what went wrong? He failed to see that his 1877 discovery (Apatosaurus) was actually a juvenile Brontosaurus, which he discovered 2 years later and thought of it a different species. D'uh! I have but one piece of evidence to go on, the photo above, and I can clearly conclude that they are the same species. Regardless, the law of precedent prevailed and Apatosaurus (1877) stuck, while Brontosaurus (1879) was discarded.

Oh, and the facelift incident was also his fault. The Brontosaurus skeleton he initially assembled included bones from other dinosaur species, including the head. Once this was realized, the facial features of the dinosaur had to be redrawn, rendering it almost unrecognizable.

Brontosaurus, my centennial brother, they took your legacy and proud name, Thundering Lizard, and tried to diminish it. Well my friend, 'tis better to simply not exist than to be Apatheticsaurus, or whatever. You will always be Brontosaurus to me!

CREDENTIALS:

Although this case is close to my heart, I write not without considerable authority on the subject matter of dinosaurs. I am the author of such works as, Dinosaurs- Grade 5 Project (1990) and co-author of The Ultimate Dinosaur Adventure (2004). In addition, I participated in several self-guided tours of the dinosaur exhibits at the Royal Ontario Museum, and was expedition leader of a backyard dinosaur excavation in 2004. My greatest claim to fame however takes me back to grade 9, and a simple bet. I proposed to a dozen gullible peers that a Grizzly bear would likely win a fight with a Velociraptor*. Having seen Jurassic Park, to a man, they all disagreed with me. I would laugh last however, as by the end of the 90's, the velociraptor was re-cast as a much smaller, feathered creature...more a bird than a dinosaur. Still vicious and cunning, but much too small to do any damage to a grizzly. My peers also failed to take into account that velociraptors hunt in packs, while a grizzly is a seasoned solo fighter.

*This came about due to the NBA's recent expansion into Canada. Toronto got the Raptors, and Vancouver got the Grizzlies. Although a raptor fan, I realized that the image on the raptor logo was misleading. Oddly enough, the Vancouver Grizzlies went extinct, while the Toronto Raptors live on...but for how long?