Yahoo News! - This may be old news to dinosaur history experts around the world, but many of us have continued to be fascinated by the Brontosaurus, which never actually existed.
Still, as NPR reported Sunday, the story of how the Brontosaurus legend began is a fascinating tale that sheds light on the far-from-perfect origins of scientific discovery.
In 1877, two paleontologists were competing to see who could make the most discoveries of dinosaur remains. Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were bitter personal rivals who sometimes took extreme measures to show up one another. Their rivalry was so intense, it became known as the Bone Wars.
[Slideshow: Strange and unusual creatures]
"There are stories of either Cope or Marsh telling their fossil collectors to smash skeletons that were still in the ground, just so the other guy couldn't get them," Matt Lamanna, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, told NPR's "All Things Considered." "It was definitely a bitter, bitter rivalry."
At the height of their rivalry, Marsh discovered a partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur that was missing a head. To hurry along the process so he could claim the credit, he substituted the skull of another dinosaur and dubbed the finding Apatosaurus.
"Two years later, his fossil collectors that were working out West sent him a second skeleton that he thought belonged to a different dinosaur that he named Brontosaurus," Lamanna said.
However, the skeleton was actually another Apatosaurus. Much like with the earlier discovery of the first Apatosaurus, had Marsh waited for more evidence, the mistaken claim may have been avoided. But in a rush to top his rival, Marsh went for the quick victory of marking yet another "discovery." And thus the history of the Brontosaurus began.
As it turns out, Marsh's mistake was called out by scientists long before the public was willing to let the Brontosaurus go, with the record being set straight over a century ago in 1903. And as NPR notes, even the Carnegie Museum itself placed the wrong head on an Apatosaurus skeleton in 1932, calling it a Brontosaurus.
Finally, in 1979, two Carnegie researchers matched the skeleton with an actual Apatosaurus skull that was discovered in Utah in 1910.
[Slideshow: World's tiniest creatures]
Nonetheless, the Brontosaurus has remained a fixture in popular culture. Is it simple ignorance, or something deeper? As the Discovery Channel notes, "When music star Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph, everyone still called him 'Prince.' Similar confusion surrounds the dinosaur Apatosaurus, which many still refer to as 'Brontosaurus.'"
"Brontosaurus means 'thunder lizard,'" Lamanna said. "It's a big, evocative name, whereas Apatosaurus means 'deceptive lizard.' It's quite a bit more boring."
Source http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/brontosaurus-never-existed-tale-bone-wars-185524946.html
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I think it was Hitler's propaganda minister who said words to the effect that 'if you repeat a lie often enough they will believe it.'
ReplyDeleteFrom time immemorial those of us alive today have been taught that the oil reserves within the Earth originated in the decay of carbon based life forms, plants and animals such as extinct dinosaurs.
Dr. Jerome Corsi challenges that engrained teaching with evidence that the “Nazi scientists understood the fundamental chemical equations that explain how hydrocarbon fuels are produced without the assistance of any dead and decomposing living organism.” (‘The Great Oil Conspiracy – How the U.S. Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People,’ by Dr. Jerome Corsi.
‘…German scientists had cracked the chemical code unlocking the secrets of how petroleum products are formed. Starting in the early part of the twentieth century, German chemists developed the formulas necessary to produce synthetic oil. While the goal was to make gasoline, diesel fuel, and aviation fuel from Germany’s abundant coal supply, the equations in what came to be known as the “Fisher-Tropsch” process explained the origin of oil as a naturally occurring phenomenon in which hydrogen and carbon bond,…” (pg. 2-3.)
“The solution came in the 1920s in Berlin, when two German chemists, Franz Fischer (1877-1947) and Hans Tropsch (1889-1935), developed a series of equations that became known as the “Fischer-Tropsch Process,” defining a methodology for producing synthetic gasoline and diesel fuel from coal.” (Pg. 4.)
The scientific breakthrough which permitted the extraction of synthetic fuel from coal was more than mere theory. “When Hitler attacked Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Nazi Germany had fourteen synthetic fuel plants in full operation…” “…producing approximately 95 percent of the aviation fuel used by the Luftwaffe.” (Pg. 4.)
“In 1949, the Bureau of Mines opened a synthetic fuels demonstration plant in Louisiana, Missouri,….” (Pg. 15.) “From 1950 to 1952, Hydrocarbon Research Inc. built and operated a synthetic fuel plant in Brownsville, Texas.” (Pg. 15.) But at that time it was not economically practical to make the synthetic products because it was simply much less expensive to use the then readily available naturally produced crude oil and natural gas.
“By the 1960s, the US government interest in synthetic fuels was largely academic.” (Pg.16.) “As a result of the public policy emphasis on utilizing abundant “fossil fuel” resources, the Nazis’ petroleum secrets languished.” (Pg. 17.)
“…even today , countless thousands of pages of Fischer-Tropsch scientific studies confiscated from Germany at the end of World War II lie deteriorating, never translated, in aging and neglected paper and microfilm archives.” (Pg. 17.)
“Today, few Americans know anything about the World War II achievements of the Nazis in developing synthetic fuel.” (Pg. 18.)
“Decades after the end of World War II, US petro-scientists and petro-geologists remain locked in the vision that the only productive petroleum science and geology derives from an understanding that oil and natural gas are biologically produced “fossil fuels.” Rather than study the Fischer-Tropsch equations to unravel the code of how hydrocarbons are produced.” (Pg. 19.)
“Nazi synthetic oil secrets remain hidden from the public view because that’s exactly the way US oil companies and the US government want it. The true secret of Nazi synthetic oil has nothing to do with liquefying coal.” (Pg. 19.)