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LiveScience
LiveScience
Charles Q. Choi

Why was the name 'Brontosaurus' brought back from the dead?

Brontosaurus eating tree, illustration.

The biggest animals ever to have walked on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as sauropods, and the most famous of these giants was likely Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard." For more than a century, scientists stopped using the genus name Brontosaurus, but in 2015, researchers suggested it was time to "resurrect" it. So why was Brontosaurus brought back from the dead, so to speak?

The skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur was unearthed in Wyoming by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh in 1879, according to the Natural History Museum in London. At the time, scientists dubbed the giant plant eater, which lived during the Jurassic period about 150 million years ago, Brontosaurus excelsus, according to Yale University.

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