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To: FreedomCalls

>> You're out of date. There is no such thing as a Brontosaur anymore. They are Apatosaurs now. What they thought was a Brontosaur turned out to be a misidentification of a Apatosaur, so the earlier discovered one, the Apatosaur, gets to keep the name and Brontosaurs are no more. <<

O, believe me... I know about Ogden Marsh and the Apatosaurus. (Him and Stan from South Park are held by me to be very distant relatives.) Two points, however:

1. I am seeing a lot of sources, such as the Smithsonian, which have dropped the name "Apatosaurus" and reverting to the name "Brontosaurus," so I infered maybe they've decided to call the Apatosauri, Brontosauri, even if the original Brontosaurus has the wrong skull. (It's not like there were already Apatosauri known at the time.)

2. I said, "Brontosaur," referring to a class (actually, IIRC, a supergenus, to use proper phylogenic terms) of sauricians. While even the use of supergenera isn't universal in phylogeny, I did not believe that those that adopted the use of the term for the supergenera dropped the term, "Brontosaur." I only knew that the genus name was changed to Apatosaur. Or, are you only recognizing Diplodocidae as a subgrouping of Sauropodimorphae above the genus level?

[PS: Wikipedia refers to "Brontosaurus" only as being an errant identification of Apatosaurus, but also lists an "Eobrontosaurus." I'm not familiar with that. Is that what the Smithsonian is identifying as a Brontosaur? Have they passed the name onto a different species?]


66 posted on 12/06/2005 8:49:15 AM PST by dangus
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To: All

"The Age" from Australia has this artist concept.
The Age Article
viverrid is a good guess - look at a pix of the 'aquatic genet' from U of Michigan :

67 posted on 12/06/2005 9:30:42 AM PST by BigEdLB (BigEd)
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