I want to start a cam­paign to restore the Wikipedia page for “bron­tosaurus,” which right now is a hard redi­rect to “apatosaurus” Check for your­self. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus.

That page is even the top search for “bron­tosaurus” on Google!

Depend­ing on how you inter­pret the facts, the bron­tosaurus (“thun­der lizard”) never really existed or it was a dupli­cated name cre­ated for the already known apatosaurus (“decep­tive lizard”). A lot of the con­fu­sion has to do with “miss­ing” skull from an apatosaurus fos­sil dis­cov­ery, and the sub­se­quent attempts to give the fos­sil skele­ton a head (var­i­ously skulls from Bra­chiosaurus, Cama­rasaurus and Diplodocus). Miss­ing skulls for sauropods (the long­necked dinos) were com­mon because while the large thick body bones were pre­seved in the fos­sil record, the more del­i­cate skull bones were not.

As Stephen J. Gould explains in his 1991 book Bully for Bron­tosaurus, the split was the result of a great pale­on­t­ogy rivalry between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh, which resulted in rushed and sloppy sci­en­tific work in the rush to pub­lish. By 1903, paleontologist Elmer Riggs rec­og­nized that Bron­tosaurus and Apatosaurus were the same, with the smaller apatosaurus being the juve­nile equiv­a­lent of the brontosaurus. But even so, bron­tosaurus was accepted enough that it even resulted in early twen­ti­eth Sci­ence mag­a­zine pub­lished papers about the “bron­tosaurus,” includ­ing its weight, its ver­te­brae.In 1979, the apatosaurus head was offi­cially dis­cov­ered. The bron­tosaurus nomen­cla­ture was offi­cially discarded.

The Wikipedia page for bron­tosaurus was merged into apatosaurus in 2008, accord­ing to the merger pro­posal (where there was no oppo­si­tion). How­ever, there is now sig­nif­i­cant oppo­si­tion now reg­is­tered on the apatosaurus dis­cus­sion page.

I would argue that you can’t sweep the bron­tosaurus Wikipedia entry into the apatosaurus Wikipedia entry, even if now they are some­what con­sid­ered syn­onyms for the same bio­log­i­cal entity. There are a few reasons:

• “Bron­tosaurus” as a term has had a dis­tinct cul­tural identy for decades (for exam­ple, “bron­to­burg­ers” on Flint­stones) that is inde­pen­dent of its actual pale­on­to­logic iden­tity. Peo­ple have a sen­ti­men­tal affec­tion for the bron­tosaurus, even if it was an apatosaurus. The U.S. Postal Ser­vice issued a bron­tosaurus postage stamp in 1989, push­ing back on pale­on­togic objec­tions by say­ing that despite the tax­o­nomic iden­ti­cal­ness with the apatosaurus, the bron­tosaurus was still the sen­ti­men­tal favorite. Arguably the sauropods resur­gence of late within pale­on­tol­ogy, is per­haps owned to this per­haps owed to pop­u­lar culture.

• The image of the bron­tosaurus with a rounded nose (see below), as first illus­trated by Charles Marsh in his book Dinosaurs of North Amer­ica, Vol­ume 16, in 1876, is dis­tinct from the more sharp snout of the apatosaurus.

The old skull of the bron­tosaurus at Yale’s Peabody Museum.

Apatosaurus skull below, much snoutier, different.

• The back­story of the brontosaurus’s myth and pub­lic con­fu­sion is actu­ally his­tor­i­cally rel­e­vant and inter­est­ing part of the bron­tosaurus exis­tence, an in and of itself would deserve a Wikipedia page. Below is an xkcd comic about the myth.

Btw, there are other bronto/apatosaurus myths, as pale­on­tol­o­gists have posited that sauropods may be ground feed­ers, with their necks out along the ground rather than upright in the air.