Why Brontosaurus is the best dinosaur
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Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 526th episode... We talk about why Brontosaurus is the best. Yeah.

Hey, you had your chance. You did an Ankylosaurus. Why Ankylosaurus is the best episode. It was the last time we were out for parental leave. So it's my turn now. Plus, this was a listener request. So just giving the listeners what they want. Oh, I shouldn't shoot the messenger. Is that what you're saying? It was a request from Charrafter via our Patreon and Discord. So thank you.

But if you want to hear why Ankylosaurus is the best dinosaur, you can go back and listen to episode 395. You could do that. Or you could enjoy this new episode.

So yes, as a quick reminder, we are out on parental leave with our second child. And we would just want to say thank you so much for listening to our show and supporting the show. And I know we've got our I Know Dino patch going on right now if you join at our Patreon. And we're recording this episode early because we're planning on taking some time off. But don't worry, we will be back soon. And we will be giving a shout out to all our new patrons as soon as possible.

As a quick reminder, Brontosaurus was our 100th dinosaur of the day back in 2016, so it was time to talk about it again. It's been a little while. We celebrated that episode with an interview with Dr. Emanuel Schopp, who's the lead author of the paper that brought Brontosaurus back. It felt fitting.

There hasn't been too much about brontosaurus since then, so I recommend listening to that episode for all the dinosaur details, including more details on the story of the mix-up of skulls with Camarasaurus and how for many years it was classified as Apatosaurus, the deceptive lizard. The other cool thing is you can see the holotype of brontosaurus at the Yale Peabody Museum.

We also will go into Dinosaur of the Day, Astrophocadia, which is another sauropod, keeping the sauropod theme going. And our fun fact is instead of fighting with tails, Brontosaurus may have fought with its neck, known as, unofficially, the Bronto Smash. That's pretty good. I guess they did have pretty big necks. Oh, yes.

But before we get into all of that, as always, we want to thank some of our patrons for helping to make this podcast a reality. And this week, we'd like to thank Ellen, Adelosaurus, The Howard Family, Ray, Tara, Jurassic Jim, Zoe Visoris, Planner Sorolophus, Brosis Girl, and Aaron.

And if you want to get in on the brontosaurus versus ankylosaurus discussion, you can join our Patreon and tell us which dinosaur you think is better in our Discord server. Or if you think there's a third better option, even. I think most people might have a third favorite, but... Probably. We like ankylosaurus or brontosaurus. Yes. So jumping into this episode, brontosaurus is the best.

And that's the end. Just kidding. I found a lot of sources for this episode, but the two main ones are O.C. Marsh's paper that named Brontosaurus and Emanuel Shoppe, Octavia Mateus, and Roger Benson's paper that resurrected Brontosaurus. So those will be in the show notes in case you're interested in reading them yourself.

Brontosaurus, of course, was a sauropod. More specifically, it was a diplodocid. And even more specifically than that, it was an apatosaurine. So using that as a jumping off point, sauropods, they are the ones with long necks. They ate plants. They're saurischian dinosaurs.

And all of them are in a group called sauropodomorpha. That includes sauropodomorphs and sauropods. Or maybe you could say basal sauropodomorphs and sauropods because technically sauropods are sauropodomorphs. Good point. So this group of sauropodomorphs

Started in the late Triassic and made it to the end of the Cretaceous, which is impressive by itself. The first sauropod found was Cetiosaurus in Oxford, England, and it lived in the middle Jurassic. That's the whale lizard. We get into that in episode 338. Very fitting name. Yes.

Since they were whale-sized reptiles. And it was mistaken for a whale or some kind of marine animal at first. I guess in that way, it's a little less fitting since they weren't actually whale-like other than size. Yes. An example of a sauropodomorph, the one that usually comes to mind for us, I think anyway, is Pleidiosaurus. It was large for its time in the late Triassic. It walked on two legs, and it could walk on all fours.

And it had a relatively long neck and tail, as well as some big thumb claws. Then, of course, we've got Brontosaurus, a sauropod, which lived much later, was much bigger, walked on all fours, and it still had its long neck and long tail. Much longer neck and tail than Palladiosaurus, though. Yes. Well, in general, just bigger overall. And the name sauropoda means lizard feet.

Although the only thing they have in common with lizards is that they both have five toes. Something. Yeah. Most of the other dinosaurs didn't have five toes. True. And sauropods had pads on the feet. We know this based on footprints, but their hands or their forelimbs didn't have any padding. They could eat plants that were higher than anyone else could reach. That was a big advantage for them. They had small heads and big guts to help them digest food.

And sauropods were the largest dinosaurs. We have an episode on the biggest dinosaurs, and we talk about sauropods that were estimated to be over 100 feet long. That's in episode 486 called How Dinosaurs Got So Big, if you're curious. They're giant-sized, protected sauropods from predators. And for a while, because they were so big and heavy, scientists thought that they spent all their time in water.

Although, Bob Bakker in the 1960s showed that this was not the case because they had these compact, narrow feet for their bodies. They weren't splayed out like aquatic animals. They had narrow rib cages and they were built more like elephants and giraffes than hippos. Of course, when you think of sauropods, the main thing you might think about is the necks that are so long. And these had a lot of hollow chambers in the neck bones, an air sac system, which is similar to birds. They use their air sacs to keep cool and it helps them stay light.

So narrowing our focus a bit to Diplodocids. Diplodocids first appeared in the Middle Jurassic, and they lived until the beginning of the Late Cretaceous. So that subgroup alone did really well. The name comes from the dinosaur Diplodocus, which means double beam. Diplodocids had small bones that attached under their tailbones, chevrons, that were split down the middle, which is how you get the two beams. They also had long skulls and snouts that were squared.

nasal passages at the top of their head above the eyes, but the nostrils were more in the front of the snout so they could sniff what they were eating. Yeah. So even though the opening in the skull for the nasal passages was farther back on the head, we think that there was a fleshy covering over the top and the air actually entered more close to the front of the mouth. They also had pencil-shaped teeth. Sometimes it's been described as crayon-shaped and it's blunt at the end.

That's because they use their teeth a lot. They probably raked their teeth along branches and then pulled off needles and leaves. I always think of their teeth like stripping off of branches, not gobbling up whole branches. Yeah, same. Their front legs were shorter than their back legs, which means that their center mass was around their hips and they could rock back onto their back legs.

So it's possible that they stood on two legs to get even higher into the trees and then maybe even use their tail to get into a tripod pose. Get those tasty leaves. I really like that idea. Me too. They had flexible necks. At least they could use them to look down, which makes sense because if they're up on two legs, then they could bend their neck down in front of a tree and move it up and down to get to the leaves.

They also had long, whip-like tails, and for a while, their tails were thought to be used for defense, or at least they could make a whip-like cracking sound of over 200 decibels, which is similar to the volume of a cannon.

But a number of Diplodocids have been found with fused or damaged tail bones, and that could be from cracking their tails. There was a study in 2022 that found that it was unlikely they used their tails as a weapon because it just would have been too damaging to these large, heavy tails. And in fact, the tail would break. It's possible, though, that they use the tails to communicate and keep in touch with other members of their herd.

Or maybe they did still use it as a defense mechanism because the tails could move pretty fast and they were stiffer than previously thought. They just couldn't move fast enough to break the sound barrier. Yeah. I remember somebody hypothesizing, I think this was more of an outlandish, considered outlandish, I should say,

hypothesis where maybe there was a little tuft of like dino proto feather on the end of the tail the same way you have on the end of a bullwhip so that could be the thing that broke the sound barrier oh yeah i like that idea although obviously very speculative yes

You could see how that would be startling and work as a defense mechanism, though, a really loud crack noise if you're approaching. Definitely. You make use with what you have. Yeah. And like you were saying, too, if you're using it as a defense mechanism, even if it might get injured, it's better to injure a vertebra or two at the tip of the tail than get bitten closer into the body. Yeah. Or get eaten. That's true. Especially when they weren't up to full size yet. Mm hmm.

So then one step further than diplodocids are the apatosaurines. That was a subfamily named in the 1920s. Friedrich von Hune used the name in 1927 and included apatosaurus and the now invalid untasaurus, which isn't considered official by the ICZN. You haven't heard of that one before. Werner Janensch used the name in 1929, but only included apatosaurus in that subfamily.

So the name Apatosaurines or Apatosaurinae wasn't really used until 2015 in the paper by Emanuel Schopp and others who found that Brontosaurus was a valid dinosaur. And in that paper, they used a new approach to analyze a bunch of diplodocid specimens. And they found that there was more diversity in Apatosaurines than we previously thought. And they said Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were closely related. They were in sister clades.

They also, in the paper, found Eobrontosaurus yanapin and Elessaurus parvus to be junior synonyms of brontosaurus. And they found that Apatosaurus only had two species, Apatosaurus ajax and Apatosaurus luisei. So this group, Apatosaurus, includes Apatosaurus and brontosaurus. And it may include other dinosaurs too, like Amphicelius and Atlantosaurus.

Members of this group lived in the late Jurassic and the Morrison Formation, and they have more robust, stocky builds and shorter necks proportionally to the rest of their bodies. They also had these robust, boxy neck bones, which is why you can get things like the Brontosmash. Now we've got a background on all the different groups Brontosaurus inhabits. Yeah.

And Brontosaurus itself, O.C. Marsh named in 1879. That paper was published on December 1st. It's a bone wars dinosaur.

He had named Apatosaurus in 1877, two years earlier, which is why when Brontosaurus wasn't considered valid, it was known as Apatosaurus because Apatosaurus was named first. Like it's Dibs. Yeah, I got Dibs. I mean, Deceptive Lizard is a pretty good name, but Thunder Lizard. No bias here. No, not at all. The type species is Brontosaurus excelsis. So we've got Thunder Lizard and then Noble or Elevated for the species name.

And Marsh wrote, quote, this monster apparently belongs in the sauropoda. It's a monster. Yeah. That's how a lot of dinosaurs were described in the early days. It did have monstrous proportions, that's for sure. Mm-hmm. He said in some ways that Brontosaurus looks like Morosaurus, which is now considered to be Camarasaurus because bone wars dinosaurs. There's a lot of dinosaurs that were named based on fragments and a lot of lumping that happened later once there was time to thoroughly study them.

Just as an example of how rushed these dinosaur names could be, Marsh wrote all of three paragraphs to name and describe Brontosaurus. It was mostly about its hip and tail bones. Yeah, just three paragraphs to name a new dinosaur. Now you get hundreds of pages sometimes. Yes. He did mention the double-beamed chevrons and the tail bones being nearly or quite solid. So that's something.

The holotype for brontosaurus is at the Yale Peabody Museum, YPM 1980. It was found in Como Bluff in Wyoming, and it was one of the most complete sauropods of the time.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, and it definitely rose to fame and great name recognition pretty quickly. Yes. As a result, basically, of that display. Could also be some of the controversies around it. As early as 1903, Elmer Riggs argued that Brontosaurus excelsus was Apatosaurus excelsus.

Although the public still often called it brontosaurus. I'll get to that in a bit. And then in 2015, of course, we've got Schopp and others who found brontosaurus was valid and its own genus. Again, they developed the statistical method to more objectively look at the differences between specimens and species. And they found that brontosaurus had this higher, less wide neck than apatosaurus, among some other differences.

Although not everyone agrees. No brontosaurus skull has been found yet, and that would help settle the debate. Yes, and of course we keep hearing whisperings that maybe people have more evidence to swing the brontosaurus debate one way or the other. But until it's published, it's all just hearsay.

Until it's published, we're going with Schopp's paper. Although not everyone accepted the 2015 paper, Michael Demick, for example, wrote an article about it at the time and said that the level of detail of the study was impressive because they had to go to museum basements all over the world to study the fossils. But the study took a non-traditional approach to taxonomy, how to classify the animals, and that it only used anatomy to determine species and disregarded other information like where and when the fossil's from.

He wrote at the time, quote, these new rules for defining a species lead to the return, in quotes, of brontosaurus, just as changing the definition of planet could be made to include Pluto in that category once again. He also wrote, quote, each of the hundreds of anatomical features used in the new analysis is a hypothesis. Schaap and his colleagues outlined these hypotheses in impressive detail, and each requires testing from independent observers in order for science to progress.

If that's the case, maybe that's why we haven't gotten a paper yet to refute anything. Yeah.

Because it's a lot of work. Yes. And maybe people are in the process of doing that work. Yeah. And that's true any time a large new data set is put together. It's all judgment calls on these hundreds of characters and what counts as an opening versus not an opening, what counts as a bump versus not a bump, because they're all basically coded as yes, no, for the most part. And there's a lot of interpretation that has to go into that. Yes.

And even just the question of what characters to include or exclude. Yes. But for now, I am happy to accept that Brontosaurus is valid. Because your whole childhood you said Brontosaurus was your favorite. Yes. Well, I knew about Apatosaurus early on. And you know, it just doesn't roll off the tongue as well. I'll get into a little more details of that 2015 study in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. It's your last chance to get your limited edition Allosaurus patch.

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Live in the ring. Don't miss the Harlem Globetrotters on March 8th. A slam dunk of fun for everyone. Tickets are on sale now at CapitalOneArena.com. Don't wait. Grab your seats tonight and secure memorable moments for your whole family. So not only is Brontosaurus back, but that 2015 paper found that there's three species of Brontosaurus. There's Excelsis, Parvis, and Yonapin.

And there's two specimens that are considered to be Brontosaurus excelsis. There's that holotype at the Yale Peabody Museum, which is still one of the best preserved diplodocate specimens. And then there's another specimen also at Yale that was named by Marsh in 1881 as Brontosaurus amplis, large thunder lizard. There he is naming new dinosaurs all willy-nilly again. Yeah.

So, Schopp et al. lumped those two together into Brontosaurus excelsus? I believe so. Some of this lumping might have happened before, but I think they did. So that one includes a partial skeleton and well-preserved parts of the limbs, and now it's considered to be a junior synonym of Brontosaurus excelsus.

The larger specimen of Brontosaurus excelsis is estimated to be up to 72 feet or 22 meters long and weigh up to 16.5 tons or 15 metric tons. That's big. Yes. Although a little smaller than some of my childhood books claimed Brontosaurus was. It's the phenomenon of the shrinking sauropod or shrinking any dinosaur over time as the estimates get more precise. Yeah. The study also found Apatosaurus parvis to be Brontosaurus parvis.

Originally, it was described as Elosaurus in 1902 and then reclassified as Apatosaurus in 1994. And that species includes two partial skeletons that have been found, including one juvenile and one nearly complete skeleton. And it's estimated to be up to 72 feet, 22 meters long and weigh up to over 15 tons or 14 metric tons. So similar in length and slightly lighter than Brontosaurus excelsus.

And then last, they found Apatosaurus yonipin to be Brontosaurus yonipin, so we get the third species. Bob Bakker in 1998 had renamed it Eobrontosaurus because he found it to be more primitive, and the name means dawn thunder lizard or dawn brontosaurus. Brontosaurus yonipin is estimated to be up to 69 feet or 21 meters long, so it's the smallest species.

The species name Yonapin comes from Lakota Makuyonapin, which means breast necklace, and refers to the pair of ribs that look like hair pipes that they traditionally wore. For that species, there's a specimen that's relatively complete, as well as fragments from other individuals. Brontosaurus lived in the late Jurassic in what is now Utah and Wyoming in the U.S. Again, it was found in the Morrison Formation, which is kind of like

a sauropod formation, if you think about it. Largely. Yeah. It's also got Allosaurus. That's true. Not as good. Anyway. I love Allosaurus. I do too. But Brontosaurus is better. Brontosaurus was a heavily built dinosaur. Very robust. The biggest size estimate, like I said, is up to 72 feet, 22 meters long. And when it was first described, it was thought to live in water because...

If people thought surely it was too large to spend much time on land, it walked on four legs, just like its relatives, its front legs or forelimbs were shorter than its back legs, its hind limbs. And those back legs were long and thick. It had a long neck and it had a whip like tail. Again, no skull has been found, but it probably had a skull similar to Apatosaurus and some Apatosaurus skulls have been found. So that means his head would have been small compared to its body.

Its snout would have been squared off and low, and it would have had chisel-like teeth. It also had one large claw on each hand or forelimb that faced towards its body. This claw may have been for defense, which seems unlikely based on the size and shape, or for foraging, or for grasping at tree trunks when rearing up on two legs. On its feet, it had three claws on the three toes in the middle, and it had five toes in total. And it also had large guts to process all the food that it ate.

This also might have helped keep it warm because the plants took time to ferment in its belly. It's got that internal compost heat from warming it up. A little bit, yeah. That's interesting. There was one study in 1999 that found that brontosaurus grew quickly and reached adult size in about 10 years. Wow, that's fast. Yes, although another study in 2008 suggested it took 15 years. That helps that there's a juvenile brontosaurus to study now, brontosaurus parvus.

That study did have an alternative method for estimating how long it took to grow and said that it could have also taken 70 years. Wow. It's a big difference. But growing quickly seems more likely. That would have been a lot more helpful for defense. Mm-hmm. Since we think the main defense basically was just getting too big for animals to try to eat it. Yes. Just like whales. Just like whales. One could call them whale lizards.

All right. So what makes Brontosaurus so cool? I know you've all been waiting. Well, they're giant. As adults, they oftentimes had nothing to fear. And they had such long necks, which they might have used to battle. Again, I'll talk about that in the fun fact. And they had long tails, which still might have been for defense. Plus, we've got Littlefoot from The Land Before Time, who's so cute and so brave and he loved his tree stars. Wow.

That's really the dominant reason, isn't it? Well, that is how I got into dinosaurs. And brontosaurs. Specifically Littlefoot. The name brontosaurus is pretty cool too. Thunder lizard. That's one of the cooler names out there, I think. It's a good one. Again, no bias here, of course. And brontosaurus is one of the earliest dinosaurs named, so it's pretty famous. There's a possibility that baby brontosaurus or at least baby sauropods ran on two legs, which I love that idea.

It sounds adorable. I think we saw this depicted in Prehistoric Planet. Yeah, we might have. I've definitely seen paleo art of it somewhere. Mm-hmm. Scampering around on two feet. It was so cute. In 2010, some baby dinosaur footprints were found in Colorado from the late Jurassic, and these tracks are smaller than a coffee mug. The baby sauropods have been estimated to be about the size of a small dog. Okay.

Could be smaller. They would have been smaller when they hatched. Yeah. I was thinking coffee mug is not that small, but then the adults are more like manhole cover size. That sounds pretty small by comparison. Yes. And one set of baby tracks was parallel to the adult sauropod tracks. Oh. So,

So it seems they were running at a low speed based on the distance between the steps. And the tracks only show the back legs, which is why we think maybe they ran on two legs. But there's always that question. Maybe they just had more weight on the back legs and the front leg impressions are missing. Yes. Or the back feet impressions got crushed by tracks made by the front feet. Oh, yeah, that's true, too. Could have trod on their own tracks.

Or it did run on two legs like a basilisk lizard does today. They're usually on all fours, but they run on two if they're scared. Although its posture would have been different since basilisk lizards have more sprawling limbs and sauropods are more pillar-like. Yeah. You can see these tracks at the Morrison Natural History Museum, which someday we need to get to. Yeah.

That's cool. And I'm not the only one who clearly likes brontosaurus because there's people out there who seem to have never fully accepted not having brontosaurus. It was so popular. I mean, we can fully accept it for now. Thanks to that 2015 paper. But before that, not everyone accepted it. That might be partly because in 1905, Henry Osborne still named the American Museum of Natural History Mount, which was the first mounted sauropod specimen, as brontosaurus excelsis.

Even though he was Team Cope in the Bone Wars, we talked a little bit about why in episode 519 Marsh wasn't the nicest to him. But I think Osborn knew that Brontosaurus was the better name. Yeah.

Yeah, and I know that sign naming it as brontosaurus stayed for a very long time. So even though there was a paper reclassifying as apatosaurus, everybody going through that American Museum of Natural History for decades would see this big impressive sauropod and the label on it said brontosaurus. So that's the name that stuck in people's head. Yes. Because people weren't reading the scientific journal to try to figure out what the latest and greatest scientific nomenclature was. Yeah.

And then at Yale, it's labeled as brontosaurus too. It's the holotype of brontosaurus. Then we've got Gertie the Dinosaur, one of the first animated films made by Windsor McCain, 1914. And I'm pretty sure Gertie's a brontosaurus. I think so. Pretty cool brontosaurus. They can swallow trees whole.

Brontosaurus is also featured in the 1925 silent film, The Lost World. Where it rampages and... Well, yeah. I guess it knocks some people off a cliff or something. It's definitely chasing around people at one point. Yes. It's also in a chase scene in 1933's King Kong. Oh, yeah. And in The Lost World, they brought it back to London and it's like eating people too. Yeah, it has some carnivorous tendencies.

Still got featured. There's also the Sinclair Brontosaurus, which has been its logo for years. And we've heard about some people who even drive out of their way to sit on these dinosaurs at the gas stations. In 1989, the U.S. Postal Service issued four dinosaur stamps, which included Brontosaurus. There was also Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, and yes, Pteranodon. But, oh well, I guess it was technically three dinosaur stamps.

Some people at the time complained that they called it brontosaurus on the stamp, and then the Postal Service responded in a postal bulletin, quote,

They also said, quote, similarly, the term dinosaur has been used generically to describe all the animals, i.e. all four of the animals represented in the given stamp set, even though the pteranodon was a flying reptile rather than a true dinosaur. So they knew what they were doing. I guess. That's not a good explanation. It's like labeling something incorrectly and be like, yeah, we know it's wrong, but a lot of people are wrong. So why not be wrong too? Yeah.

They doubled down a little bit. Yeah. So yeah, that's Brontosaurus in a nutshell and why it's so amazing. Why you think it's the best dinosaur? Yes. I feel like we should put up a poll to see whether or not we've swayed people, whether they're thinking Kylosaurus or Brontosaurus is better after our two episodes. Yeah, we can definitely do that. So let us know. Or just tell us in Discord.

And we will get to our sauropod dinosaur of the day in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a break for our sponsors. As you write your life story, you're far from finished. Are you looking to close the book on your job? Maybe turn a page in your career? Be continued at the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies. Our professional master's degrees and certificates are designed to meet you where you are and take you where you want to go at

At Georgetown SCS, the learning never stops, and neither do you. Write your next chapter. Be continued at scs.georgetown.edu slash podcast. And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Astrophocadia, which was a request from Tyrant King via our Patreon slash Discord. So thank you. And of course, it's another sauropod because we got to keep this sauropod train going. We gotta. Yeah.

When it's an episode on why brontosaurus is the best, definitely. So Astrophocadia was a Samphospondylans sauropod that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now Texas in the US. It was found in the Trinity group. And Samphospondyli are titanosauriforms. They live from the late Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous. Some of their features include having at least 15 neck bones, neck vertebrae.

Ostrophocadia looked somewhat like Brachiosaurus, though they're not closely related. It walked on four legs, it had a pretty upright neck, that's why I think it looks like Brachiosaurus, and of course the neck was long, as well as a relatively long tail and small head. It's estimated to be about 59 feet or 18 meters long and weigh up to 20 tons.

The type species is Astrophocadia slaughteri. Hmm. That's intense. It is. Although the species name is in honor of Robert Slaughter, who excavated the specimen in 1969. Not because it seemed like it was the slaughtering type. It wasn't slaughtering like the lost world rampaging sauropods swallowing people whole. No, we save that for brontosaurus. Hmm.

The genus name Astrophocadia means non-twisting tail or star tail, and it refers to Astrodon. It was described in 2012 by Michael Demick while he was a doctoral student at the Museum of Paleontology of the University of Michigan. The holotype was found back in 1969, and in 1974 it was referred to Pleurocelus species, SP, so it wasn't clear which species exactly, but now it's considered to be a junior synonym of Astrodon.

And then Demick re-described Trinity group sauropods and named the specimen Astrophocadia. Sauropods from the early Cretaceous were some of the first dinosaurs found in North America, but that also means there's been some confusion around them. Because sauropods, they were common, they were diverse, and they were big, but their large size also makes them hard to study because a lot of their fossils are incomplete, or a lot of the skeletons found are incomplete.

So there's been a lot of confusion around the sauropods, Astrodon and Pluralsilus over 125 years or so. Astrodon was named in 1865. We talked about that as our dinosaur of the day in episode 284. And Pluralsilus was named in 1888, and many consider it to be a junior synonym of Astrodon.

In his 2012 paper, Demick said that he considered both Astrodon and Pleurocelus to be Nominadubia, doubtful names, because they didn't have unique features. And in the case of Pleurocelus nanus, it wasn't clear where exactly the bones from which it was named, the type species, were even found. And it's possible they represented a chimera. There's multiple individuals or multiple species.

In the paper, he also found that some of those Astrodon and Pleurocelus fossils were actually Paluxysaurus and Sauroposeidon. And Paluxysaurus was later found by Demick to be a junior synonym of Sauroposeidon.

The holotype of Astrophocadia is a partial skeleton. It includes two neck bones, fragments of the back bones, 21 tail bones, and about 20 fragmentary ribs, as well as parts of the tail and shoulder blade and hip, and just a lot of other fragments. That doesn't seem too bad. Yeah, it's just they're fragments. Two teeth were also found, but it turns out they weren't teeth. They were part of a vertebra. Oh, wow. That's a small fragment. Yeah. Yeah.

And then three more tail bones or vertebrae were later classified as astrophocadia. They were originally thought to belong to turtles, as well as another tooth was later considered to be astrophocadia.

There seem to be a number of examples in paleontology where dinosaur bones were thought to be turtle or turtle-like bones. Yes, like Therizinosaurus, for example. Yes, that's probably the most famous one. It's a pretty good one. It is a good one. And I love the original art when it was thought to be a turtle. Yeah.

But anyway, those three tail bones were found in a drawer with some other bits and fragments of the holotype, along with a note card that showed that it was thought to belong to a turtle vertebrae. All of the tail bones are from the same location, and they're the same shape, size, and state of preservation, so it seems like they belong together. So that means the holotype now has 24 tail bones, as well as a tooth, and a tooth.

That tooth is 17 millimeters or about 0.6 inches long. Oh, so there was a tooth. They weren't all just pieces of vertebrae. A tooth that was found later. Oh, okay. And Demick found unique features in the vertebrae, which makes sense. There were a lot of vertebrae found. And that's how he ended up saying this is unique enough to be astrophocardia.

Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place as Ostrofocadia include the carnivorous carcharodontosaur, acrocanthosaurus, the sauropod sauroposeidon, and the iguanodont, tenontosaurus. And some other animals that lived around the same time and place include crocodillomorphs, pterosaurs, fish, and, of course, turtles. Hmm, hmm, hmm.

Yeah. Turtles. Well, I was thinking because there was the mix-up. Not because it was trying to eat them, smash them. No. Nothing about that. No evidence of that that we know of. Okay. Moving on. Our fun fact is that instead of fighting with tails, Brontosaurus may have fought with its neck, also known, again, unofficially as the Bronto Smash. Yeah.

Go on.

somewhat like a giraffe style combat where the head's the weapon although with brontosaurus and apatosaurus the skulls were fragile so not exactly like that more like elephant seals where it's more towards the base of the neck but it's hard to know in brontosaurus how much soft tissue padding it had that makes sense too like you were talking about what if they could rear up on their hind legs that'd be very elephant seal like yes oh and there's some amazing paleo art on this

The question then is, yeah, why have the big heavy neck when it takes so much energy to grow, maintain and use? And the answer, according to them, is for fighting. Hmm.

The latest thinking, though, is that they smash their necks more sideways into each other than slam down on each other, which is still pretty good for imagining. But the paleo art that shows them crashing together is just great. The elephant seal apatosaurus idea or brontosaurus, I guess I should say. Yeah, this is a brontosaurus episode. Oh, my bad.

And that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed delving into this topic. Stay tuned. In our next episode, we're going to be doing a deep dive into Zofia Keelan-Jaworowski, the female paleontologist who found the fighting dinosaurs, Deinokyrus and Gallimimus, and just had so many amazing stories. Yeah. Some of the best dinosaur discoveries ever. Yes.

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