About a month ago I was talking to my son and I mentioned the Brontosaurus and I mentioned that it was no longer considered a dinosaur, because that is what I had been taught. But my 8 year old son who is very knowledgeable about dinosaurs said that Brontosauruses were in fact a real dinosaur, so I looked it up.
Back in the 1870 there were a couple of paleontologists who were in a war to see who could find and name more dinosaurs. One found a large sauropod skeleton and named it apatosaurus. The other found a large sauropod a year or two latter and named it the Brontosaurus, but it was determined in 1903 that the Brontosaurus was just a more complete skeleton, of the Apatosaurus. So it kept its original name and officially there was no Brontosaurus. Even though the Brontosaurus name was more entrenched and more famous.
That all changed in 2015, when researchers took another look at that Brontosaurus skeleton and found enough differences that they said it justified its own genus. Now I guess the Brontosaurus is back. Yeah.
This is the nature of science. It drives me crazy when people talk about settled science. There is no such thing. As new facts come into evidence we are required to adjust our thinking and change our perceptions. Science can only be settled if we know all of the facts about any given thing that could possibly be known. I think we are a long way from that. The great thing about science is the possibility of finding out new and life changing things. If we have settled science then we are saying there is nothing left to learn, that is sad and arrogant.
Let's keep on learning and growing. Also let's welcome the Brontosaurus back into the family of animals that once existed on this great and wonderful planet we call home.