"A team of palaeontologists is claiming to have “resurrected” Brontosaurus, the famous long-necked, pot-belled dinosaur. No, they haven’t conducted some mad DNA cloning experiment. They have built a big new family tree of long-necked dinosaurs and argue that Brontosaurus is distinctive enough to be classified separately from its closest relatives. Confused? I don’t blame you. Brontosaurus is of course an iconic dinosaur. If you could only name a few dinosaurs, you would probably come up with Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, and Brontosaurus. Ever since 1903, however, you would have been mistaken in naming the last one. That was the year that palaeontologists determined that Brontosaurus was nearly identical to a dinosaur called Apatosaurus that had been discovered earlier; thus, the latter was the appropriate name to use. Needless to say, this never filtered down to pop culture." - Jennifer Dittrich

"In the meantime, palaeontology became a discipline in which a new species of dinosaur is being found every week. Hundreds or even thousands of dinosaurs have come to light since Riggs sunk Brontosaurus. Tschopp examined many of these dinosaurs in museums across the world and built a huge database that records how they differ in age, size, and anatomical features. From this, his team built a family tree that showed Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus as closely related but not identical. The researchers also applied various statistical analyses to the database and family tree to demonstrate that the skeletons of Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were more different from each other than many other types of long-necked dinosaurs that have long been classified separately." - Jennifer Dittrich

LONG LIVE THE BRONTOSAURUS - Meg VMeg