Bully for Brontosaurus (9 page)

Which leads—did you think that I had forgotten my opening paragraph?—back to philately. The United States government, jumping on the greatest bandwagon since the hula hoop, recently issued four striking stamps bearing pictures of dinosaurs—and labeled
Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Pteranodon
, and
Brontosaurus
.

Thrusting itself, with all the zeal of a convert, into the heart of commercial hype, the U.S. Post Office seems committed to shedding its image for stodginess in one fell, crass swoop. Its small brochure, announcing October as “national stamp collecting month,” manages to sponsor a contest, establish a tie-in both with T-shirts and a videocassette for
The Land Before Time
, and offer a dinosaur “discovery kit” (a $9.95 value for just $3.95; “Valid while supplies last. Better hurry!”). You will, in this context, probably not be surprised to learn that the stamps were officially launched on October 1, 1989, in Orlando, Florida, at Disney World.

Amidst this maelstrom of marketing, the Post Office also engendered quite a brouhaha about the supposed subject of one stamp—a debate given such prominence in the press that much of the public (at least judging from my voluminous mail) now thinks that an issue of great scientific importance has been raised to the detriment and shame of an institution otherwise making a worthy step to modernity. (We must leave this question for another time, but I confess great uneasiness about such approbation. I appreciate the argument that T-shirts and videos heighten awareness and expose aspects of science to millions of kids otherwise unreached. I understand why many will accept the forceful spigot of hype, accompanied by the watering-down of content—all in the interest of extending contact. But the argument works only if, having made contact, we can then woo these kids to a deeper intellectual interest and commitment. Unfortunately, we are often all too ready to compromise. We hear the blandishments: Dumb it down; hype it up. But go too far and you cannot turn back; you lose your own soul by dripping degrees. The space for wooing disappears down the maw of commercialism. Too many wise people, from Shakespeare to my grandmother, have said that dignity is the only bit of our being that cannot be put up for sale.)

This growing controversy even reached the august editorial pages of the
New York Times
(October 11, 1989), and their description serves as a fine epitome of the supposed mess:

Brontosaurus
versus
Apatosaurus
. Which is right? How important is this issue? How does it rank amidst a host of other controversies surrounding this and other dinosaurs: What head belongs on this dinosaur (whether it be called
Brontosaurus
or
Apatosaurus
); were these large dinosaurs warm-blooded; why did they become extinct? The press often does a good job of reporting basic facts of a dispute, but fails miserably in supplying the context that would allow a judgment about importance. I have tried, in the first part of this essay, to supply the necessary context for grasping
Brontosaurus
versus
Apatosaurus
. I regret to report, and shall now document, that the issue could hardly be more trivial—for the dispute is only about names, not about things. The empirical question was settled to everyone’s satisfaction in 1903. To understand the argument about names, we must know the rules of taxonomy and something about the history of debate on the principle of priority. But the exposure of context for
Brontosaurus
versus
Apatosaurus
does provide an interesting story in itself and does raise important issues about the public presentation of science—and thus do I hope to snatch victory (or at least interest) from the jaws of defeat (or triviality).

Brontosaurus
versus
Apatosaurus
is a direct legacy of the most celebrated feud in the history of vertebrate paleontology—Cope versus Marsh. As E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh vied for the glory of finding spectacular dinosaurs and mammals in the American West, they fell into a pattern of rush and superficiality born of their intense competition and mutual dislike. Both wanted to bag as many names as possible, so they published too quickly, often with inadequate descriptions, careless study, and poor illustrations. In this unseemly rush, they frequently gave names to fragmentary material that could not be well characterized and sometimes described the same creature twice by failing to make proper distinctions among the fragments. (For a good history of this issue, see D. S. Berman and J. S. McIntosh, 1978. These authors point out that both Cope and Marsh often described and officially named a species when only a few bones had been excavated and most of the skeleton remained in the ground.)

In 1877, in a typically rushed note, O. C. Marsh named and described
Apatosaurus ajax
in two paragraphs without illustrations (“Notice of New Dinosaurian Reptiles from the Jurassic Formation,”
American Journal of Science
, 1877). Although he noted that this “gigantic dinosaur…is represented in the Yale Museum by a nearly complete skeleton in excellent preservation,” Marsh described only the vertebral column. In 1879, he published another page of information and presented the first sketchy illustrations—of pelvis, shoulder blade, and a few vertebrae (“Principal Characters of American Jurassic Dinosaurs, Part II,”
American Journal of Science
, 1879). He also took this opportunity to pour some vitriol upon Mr. Cope, claiming that Cope had misnamed and misdescribed several forms in his haste. “Conclusions based on such work,” Marsh asserts, “will naturally be received with distrust by anatomists.”

In another 1879 article, Marsh introduced the genus
Brontosaurus
, with two paragraphs (even shorter than those initially devoted to
Apatosaurus
), no illustrations, and just a few comments on the pelvis and vertebrae. He did estimate the length of his new beast at seventy to eighty feet, in comparison with some fifty feet for
Apatosaurus
(“Notice of New Jurassic Reptiles,”
American Journal of Science
, 1879).

Marsh’s famous illustration of the complete skeleton of
Brontosaurus
.
FROM THE SIXTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, 1895. NEG. NO. 328654. COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY SERVICES, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
.

Marsh considered
Apatosaurus
and
Brontosaurus
as distinct but closely related genera within the larger family of sauropod dinosaurs.
Brontosaurus
soon became everyone’s typical sauropod—indeed
the
canonical herbivorous dinosaur of popular consciousness, from the Sinclair logo to Walt Disney’s
Fantasia
—for a simple and obvious reason. Marsh’s
Brontosaurus
skeleton, from the most famous of all dinosaur localities at Como Bluff Quarry 10, Wyoming, remains to this day “one of the most complete sauropod skeletons ever found” (quoted from Berman and McIntosh, cited previously). Marsh mounted the skeleton at Yale and often published his spectacular reconstruction of the entire animal. (
Apatosaurus
, meanwhile, remained a pelvis and some vertebrae.) In his great summary work,
The Dinosaurs of North America
, Marsh wrote (1896): “The best-known genus of the Atlantosauridae is
Brontosaurus
, described by the writer in 1879, the type specimen being a nearly entire skeleton, by far the most complete of any of the Sauropoda yet discovered.”
Brontosaurus
also became the source of the old stereotype, now so strongly challenged, of slow, stupid, lumbering dinosaurs. Marsh wrote in 1883, when presenting his full reconstruction of
Brontosaurus
for the first time:

In 1903, Elmer Riggs of the Field Museum in Chicago restudied Marsh’s sauropods. Paleontologists had realized by then that Marsh had been overgenerous in his designation of species (a “splitter” in our jargon), and that many of his names would have to be consolidated. When Riggs restudied
Apatosaurus
and
Brontosaurus
, he recognized them as two versions of the same creature, with
Apatosaurus
as a more juvenile specimen. No big deal; it happens all the time. Riggs rolled the two genera into one in a single paragraph:

In 1903, ten years before the plenary powers decision, strict priority ruled in zoological nomenclature. Thus, Riggs had no choice but to sink the later name,
Brontosaurus
, once he had decided that Marsh’s earlier name,
Apatosaurus
, represented the same animal. But then I rather doubt that Riggs would have gone to bat for
Brontosaurus
even if he could have submitted a case on its behalf. After all,
Brontosaurus
was not yet an icon of pop culture in 1903—no Sinclair logo, no Alley-Oop, no
Fantasia
, no
Land Before Time
. Neither name had captured public or scientific fancy, and Riggs probably didn’t lament the demise of
Brontosaurus
.

No one has ever seriously challenged Riggs’s conclusion, and professionals have always accepted his synonymy. But Publication 82 of the “Geological Series of the Field Columbian Museum” for 1903—the reference for Riggs’s article—never gained much popular currency. The name
Brontosaurus
, still affixed to skeletons in museums thoughout the world, still perpetuated in countless popular and semi-technical books about nature, never lost its luster, despite its technical limbo. Anyone could have applied to the commission for suppression of
Apatosaurus
under the plenary powers in recognition of the widespread popularity and stability of
Brontosaurus
. I suspect that such an application would have succeeded. But no one bothered, and a good name remains in limbo. (I also wish that someone had fought for suppression of the unattractive and inappropriate name
Hyracotherium
in favor of the lovely but later
Eohippus
, also coined by Marsh. But again, no one did.)

I’m afraid there’s not much more to this story—not nearly the issue hyped by your newspapers as the Great Stamp Flap. No argument of fact arises at all, just a question of names, settled in 1903, but never transferred to a general culture that continues to learn and favor the technically invalid name
Brontosaurus
. But the story does illustrate something troubling about the presentation of science in popular media. The world of
USA Today
is a realm of instant fact and no analysis. Hundreds of bits come at us in pieces never lasting more than a few seconds—for the dumb-downers tell us that average Americans can’t assimilate anything more complex or pay attention to anything longer.

This oddly “democratic” procedure makes all bits equal—the cat who fell off a roof in Topeka (and lived) gets the same space as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Equality is a magnificent system for human rights and morality in general, but not for the evaluation of information. We are bombarded with too much in our inordinately complex world; if we cannot sort the trivial from the profound, we are lost in terminal overload. The criteria for sorting must involve context and theory—the larger perspective that a good education provides.

In the current dinosaur craze without context, all bits are mined for their superficial news value as items in themselves—a lamentable tendency abetted by the “trivial pursuit” one-upmanship that confers status on people who know (and flaunt) the most bits. (If you play this dangerous game in real life, remember that ignorance of context is the surest mark of a phony. If you approach me in wild lament, claiming that our postal service has mocked the deepest truth of paleontology, I will know that you have only skimmed the surface of my field.)