A Bronto-who?

A lot has changed with dinosaurs since I was a kid. Today, I figured we'd get the bad news out of the way.

For those of you who aren't up to date:

Brontosaurus no longer exists.

I'm sorry if "The Land Before Time" was your favorite movie as a kid (it might have been mine), and if the endearing journey of "little-foot" inspired your parents to teach you something that is no longer true.

To those of you who did know: yes, I am aware that this is slightly old news (like, before-I-was-born old news), but people keep asking me if I knew that Brontosaurus was really just grown-up Apatosaurus, so I figured I would help everyone get on the same page here.

The Apatosaurus: This dinosaur and many of its relatives actually carried their  necks at an angle closer to horizontal. I mean, sticking your nose in the air all the time is exhausting. Try it.*

To sum up the situation:

A not very thorough paleontologist found a baby dinosaur and named it Apatosaurus. Then, he found a grown up of the same species (minus the skull) and named it Brontosaurus. Then, he found the head of a different dinosaur and stuck it on the "Brontosaurus." About ten years later another scientist noticed, and about 80 years after that the world started to catch on.

There's an awesome article in the unmuseum (a website) about it. http://www.unmuseum.org/dinobront.htm

In conclusion, don't let spell check tell you that "Apatosaurus" is misspelled and should be "Brontosaurus" (like it's been telling me for the past hour) because that's wrong.

*This image taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica