sovay: (Cho Hakkai: intelligence)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2015-04-07 10:25 pm

Could I just say, Chris, for one moment, that I have a new theory about the Brontosaurus?

More than a century after being declared a junior synonym of Apatosaurus and demoted from the majesty of the thunder lizard to the lesser mellifluity of deception, Brontosaurus turns out to exist as a valid genus after all.

The resulting cladogram recovers the classical arrangement of diplodocid relationships. Two numerical approaches were used to increase reproducibility in our taxonomic delimitation of species and genera. This resulted in the proposal that some species previously included in well-known genera like Apatosaurus and Diplodocus are generically distinct. Of particular note is that the famous genus Brontosaurus is considered valid by our quantitative approach.

The original paper is freely available here. I don't know if this means Othniel Charles Marsh won the Bone Wars after all, but my five-year-old self who owned many small rubber dinosaurs (and one very dear mosasaur) feels vindicated. My mother wants to know if this means the ruling on Pluto is due to be reversed, too.
spatch: (Default)

[personal profile] spatch 2015-04-08 04:13 am (UTC)(link)
Someone on MetaFilter pointed out that "Apatosaurus Burger" didn't have the same ring to it, either.

[identity profile] martianmooncrab.livejournal.com 2015-04-08 09:35 am (UTC)(link)
I was going to say something about not having to change episodes of The Flintstones from Bronto Burgers to ApataPatties..

[identity profile] martianmooncrab.livejournal.com 2015-04-09 04:16 am (UTC)(link)
I will stay true to Bronto's... (says the girl who named her first dog Dino)