Tuesday, 7 April 2015

Brontosaurus is Back from the Dead

Brontosaurus
CSA-Printstock/iStock
Brontosaurus lovers, rejoice! A new study concludes that the much-beloved Brontosaurus is, in fact, a separate genus from the Apatosaurus under which it has been misclassified for 112 years.
Paleontologists decided in 1903 that the minor differences between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus didn't warrant classification as two separate genera. Thus, Brontosaurus has technically been a species of Apatosaurus.
A century later, the exhaustive new study from Portuguese and English researchers utilized statistical approaches to calculate the variations between other species and genera of dinosaurs, and the results contradicted 112 years of thinking:
"The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species," remarked study co-author Roger Benson, from the University of Oxford.

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