I ca n’t detain off from dinosaur . Any alibi is a good one if I can drop a few hours meander among their adorable skeletons in the museum hall . That ’s how I encountered this Brontosaurus , splendid but incorrect , sop up from another era in paleontology .
On a cool November day in 2010 , I settle to act truancy from the annual Science Writers league , deem that class in New Haven , Connecticut , and wander over to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History . How could I resist ? The dusty dinosaur showing was a monument to the dinosaurs I grew up with , including the one and only skeleton that could really lay title to the name “ Brontosaurus . ”
As much as I admire modern museum exhibit , populated by new or raw - ish reconstructions of classic dinosaurs , I ’m just as fond of gallery full of tubby , tail - drag on monstrosities . It ’s a way of traveling back in prison term , to see dinosaur as the great paleontologists of preceding generations did . Up to a point , anyway . Othniel Charles Marsh – the paleontologist for whom the museum was created by his fertile uncle George Peabody in 1866 – crankily rejected the theme of place dinosaur skeleton up for public video display , lest the eminent skill of bone - reading be reduce to puerile spectacle . The museum only put its dinosaur out for exhibit after 1925 , more than two decades after Marsh ’s death , with the inscription of a young blank space to hold their old osseous tissue .
Those dinosaurs stomach in a stiff , static formation in just the same was as they did in the early 20th hundred , look especially drab under the yellow Inner Light and against the grizzly carpets and wall . The dinosaurs almost seem camouflage in the drab confines of the residence . Little marvel , then , that I was n’t so much immediately make to the dinosaurs , as to Rudolph Zallinger ’s brilliant characterization of comically - outdated dinosaurs plastered against the right paries – The Age of Reptiles .
I had see reproductions of Zallinger ’s notable march through prehistorical clock time quite often . It ’s the quintessential image of twentieth 100 dinosaurs , completed in 1947 . What I did n’t sleep with was that all these images were derived from a smaller - scale practice variant of the fresco secco that Zallinger had drawn up beforehand . I had never see the original , beautifully - elaborate wall painting . I stroll along the timeline , have a strange variance of déjà vu as I souse in the intricacies of a familiar image that I had n’t see in its original sort .
Zallinger ’s “ Brontosaurus ” ( pictured at the top ) was the most striking of all . In the miniature variant of the mural and derivative photographic print , the great swampland - harp sauropod is draped in slightly scrunch charcoal skin , as if the dinosaur had borrowed an elephant ’s coat . But the sauropod as at long last restored on the wall by Zallinger is exemplify in surprisingly touchy particular and with a little more vim . The dinosaur ’s yellowish underbelly stands out from the scaled sheen of the sauropod dinosaur ’s back , against which the lighter wild blue yonder of the dinosaur ’s eye gives the herbivore a concentrated gaze on something unobserved on the Jurassic landscape . By modern criterion , Zallinger ’s “ Brontosaurus ” is ridiculously wrong , but his protection to the sauropod is lovingly illustrated and is the most beautiful rendition of the cherished dinosaur ever created .
The osteological aspiration for Zallinger ’s sauropod stood right behind me – the one , and only , “ Brontosaurus . ” Excavated by Marsh ’s field crowd from Como Bluff , Wyoming , the Jurassic fossils are the very 1 that Marsh himself used to mint the name “ Brontosaurus ” in 1879 . Although the skeleton as it is now is a bit of a hotchpotch . The dinosaur is locked into the same pose it ’s keep since 1931 , but with the name Apatosaurus and a replica of the dinosaur ’s proper skull – a cranium earlier discovered in 1910 in Utah , misidentified in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History ’s collection , and not rediscover until 1975 . The bones are not just an idea of a once - living animate being . Yale ’s Apatosaurus , née “ Brontosaurus ” , is a palaeontological history lesson , record over a century of fossil probe and disputation .
Together , the skeleton and Zallinger ’s renovation embody “ Brontosaurus ” as I met the dinosaur as a child . The sauropod was a dumb , benevolent monster that seemed little more than a biological check on the population ontogenesis of duckweed and algae . From the peak of the dinosaur ’s blunt skull to the ending of the sauropod ’s drooping rump . “ Brontosaurus ” was the epitome of dinosaurian majesty , excess , and ridiculousness – a fantastical evolutionary joke that I could never have ideate had I not know that such an fauna already existed .
But I do n’t want “ Brontosaurus ” back . I miss the name – the deed of the “ thunder lizard ” is wonderfully evocative – but not the beast itself .
Peabody Museum Brontosaurus photo byMark Ryan
As I stand beneath the underframe , imagining the organs , muscles , and skin of the heavy dinosaur , it was Apatosaurus and not “ Brontosaurus ” that come back to life . The Jurassic titan as we now know the animal is even more marvellous – an 80 foot long creature with a raise rump , a complex organisation of air sacs permeate its skeleton , and which lift down plants from high and lowly to fire its warm - running physiology . The dinosaur was so wonderful that fossilist are still stick over the rudiments of its biology – such as how an animal without molars could damp down huge quantities of intellectual nourishment and the cardiovascular details of how the dinosaur kept blood pumping from heart to lead . The trope of “ Brontosaurus ” has been tramp down down by Apatosaurus , a symbol of the complexness of dinosaur biological science rather than reptilian largesse .
And yet we ca n’t really understand Apatosaurus without “ Brontosaurus . ” The discarded imagery that was so well attached to the thunder lizard is a service line for how we used to think of dinosaurs , when paleontologists could often do small more than speculate about the actual lifetime of the fauna .
If we forget “ Brontosaurus ” , we not only push aside chronicle , but we can well forget the tangled and devious process of science itself . The pearl of the dinosaur are the same as they have been for the past 150 million long time or so , but how we translate , understand , and investigate them is a tale of human wonder and discovery . That ’s where the romance of paleontology truly lie . Finding bones in the badlands is exhilarating , but wondering how such freakish fauna actually lived – and how they influence the evolution of our own mammalian ancestors that scurried under their base – is what keep palaeontologist research for trace of Mesozoic history .
After wandering among the student residence ’s other showing and exhibits for a while , I went back to “ Brontosaurus ” for one last look . Wrapped up in that one systema skeletale are fib of prehistoric life and scientific find , news report work up upon stories . quondam and outdated , yes , but still with so many lesson to partake in . And that is why the poor dinosaur is the mascot of My Beloved Brontosaurus . Any ode to the new dinosaur I ’m enamor by had to start with the spectre of the dinosaur that I used to get laid . Dead dinosaur do severalise tales .
Brian Switek is the writer ofMy Beloved Brontosaurus : On the Road with Old Bones , New Science , and Our Favorite Dinosaurs , which is out today .
YouTube cartridge holder from the audiobook , read by Brian Switek .
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