Skull Fraud 'Created' the Brontosaurus

With the correct skull, it's an Apatosaurus as shown here.

This post concerns the very, very ancient, but it’s here because it’s a fascinating tale. It seems the fierce competition for fame between two palentologists ~ O.C. Marsh of Yale and Edward Cope of Philadelphia ~ led to the false creation of the Bronosaurus, a creature that, as it turns out, never existed.

According to NPR, quoting Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History:

It was in the heat of this competition, in 1877, that Marsh discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed, leaf-eating dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, Lamanna says he used the head of another dinosaur — thought to be a Camarasaurus — to complete the skeleton. 

"Two years later," Lamanna says, "his fossil collectors that were working out West sent him a second skeleton that he thought belonged to a different dinosaur that he named Brontosaurus." 

But it wasn't a different dinosaur. It was simply a more complete Apatosaurus — one that Marsh, in his rush to one-up Cope, carelessly and quickly mistook for something new.

You can easily guess the rest of the story. What’s particularly amazing is that the two warring paleontologists even ordered some dinosaur skeletons to be smashed to pieces while still in the ground, just so the other fellow wouldn’t unearth them.

 Click here for the article.

Dueling Paleontologists Dispute Dinosaur Prints

One of the footprints causing a paleontological tempest in Europe.

A German paleontologist has ignited arguments about what he claims is new proof of the world’s oldest dinosaur.

Cajus Diedrich says large footprints he found embedded in a former limestone marsh are 243 million years old, while some other paleontologists say he’s off by at least 15 million years. At any rate, the tracks Diedrich discovered in late 2007 near Bernburg, Germany, are from a huge creature. Some of the tracks are about 14 inches long, indicating the dinosaur weighed nearly a ton.

Diedrich (shown at right) believes the tracks were made by the “missing link” of the dinosaur world, a giant reptile known as the Prosauropod, an ancestor of the long-necked giants such as the Brontosaurus, and an evolutionary bridge with the smaller, lithe lizards that also roamed the region.

But Hartmut Haubold, a paleontologist from Halle, calls Diedrich’s claims ridiculous. "It's as if someone found a 10-million-year-old stone and claimed it was a hand axe made by humans,” he says. “Dinosaurs didn't come into existance until a good 15 million years later than Diedrich claims."

Martin Sander, a paleontologist at Germany's Bonn University, also has doubts. "The first dinosaurs were smaller creatures," he explains, "about as big as monitor lizards. That a much larger dinosaur would have lived so much earlier is extremely improbable."

Diedrich says his critics are upset that they didn't make the discovery and that he's being attacked unfairly. "I don't turn to colleagues for advice anymore, because many of them don't follow the scientific code of honor," he says.

The German magazine Der Spiegel termed the dispute “an all-out brawl” between several of Europe’s leading paleontologists.

Click here for the Der Spiegel article.