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"Brontosaurus" Name Resurrected Thanks To New Dino Family Tree
sciencehabit writes In, the U.S. Postal Service issued colorful dinosaur stamps, including one for Brontosaurus. Paleontologists and educators loudly protested that the correct scientific name for the iconic beast was Apatosaurus—a fact that even lay dino aficionados and many 8-year-olds took pride in knowing. But now, a dinosaur-sized study of the family tree of the Diplodocidae, the group that includes such monstrous beasts as Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, and Barosaurus, finds that USPS got it right: The fossils originally called Brontosaurus show enough skeletal differences from other specimens of Apatosaurus that they rightfully belong to a different genus. The study, published online this week in the journal PeerJ, brings the long-banished name back into scientific respectability as a genus coequal with Apatosaurus.
I learned a long time ago, the stuff I was taught in elementary school was nearly all wrong.
So when I hear that established fact has changed, it doesn't bug me so much. It is just part of the normal course.
Truth is the opposite of lying, Truth isn't absolute fact.
Scientific Truth, is the best guess on how things are based on evidence. As we get more evidence the nature of the scientific truth changes. The outdated scientific truth was truthful when it was new, as with the evidence it was the best case to follow. Then we find more and a better idea.... Sometimes we realize after we get even more the original idea was better.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Jack Horner put on an TEDx talk a while back discussing research that asks an interesting question: where are the babies?
Jack's research indicates many of these similar species may in fact be the same, but merely at different levels of development -- an adolescent thought to be a difference species from one fully developed.
The crux of it is that in the early days of our rediscovering dinosaurs, these guys would find a visual few differences in the dinos and name it as a new species, turning a blind eye to many similarities that might suggest otherwise.