The Brontosaurus is one of the best-known dinosaurs, something that is made more interesting by the fact that it doesn’t technically exist. What we think of as the Brontosaurus has been known for over a century as the Apatosaurus, but the former name is still widely used, and NPR has interviewed Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh about its history. “Discovered” in some sloppy scholarship during a bitter 19th Century paleontological rivalry known as the Bone Wars, the Brontosaurus was a more complete Apatosaurus, topped with the skull of another dinosaur — as shown above. Since then, the name has stuck, possibly because the Apatosaurus moniker is “quite a bit more boring.”
How the Brontosaurus, history’s most famous nonexistent dinosaur, came to be
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
