Brontosaurus- Was it a great dinosaur hoax?

In 1874, Othniel Charles Marsh discovered a huge sauropod dinosaur which he declared as a new species. It's name was Brontosaurus. The discovery came during the "bone wars", a period of intense fossil hunting marked by a  heated rivalry between Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. Cope, among others, was not convinced that Bronotosaurus was a new species, but was actually Apatosaurus. Marsh died in 1899 having discovered around 80 new species of dinosaur, far more species than Cope had unearthed.

However, in 1903, scientists announced that Brontosaurus was not a new species at all. It seems that this news did not reach the general public, nor did it reach the U.S. Post office who issued four dinosaur stamps, including one for Brontosaurus. Even museums continued to use the label Brontosaurus on their exhibits. Many saw this as  promoting scientific illiteracy, and the media enjoyed the scientific scandal. It wasn't until 1974, however, that the name of Brontosaurus was formally removed from paleontology. It is unclear whether Marsh made a deliberate mistake due to his intense rivalry with Cope, or whether it was an accident.

Yet to this day, people still use the word Brontosaurus despite the fact that it is scientifically obsolete. But does it really matter?

Elmer Riggs, the scientist who discovered the  mistake, certainly didn't think so:

"As the term 'Apatosaurus' has priority, 'Brontosaurus' will be regarded as a synonym."

Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay Bully for Brontosaurus, didn't think it mattered much either:

"If you . . . [claim] that our postal service has mocked the deepest truth of paleontology, I will know that you have only skimmed the surface of my field." 

Basically, it's good to know that Brontosaurus is actually Apatosaurus, but it's also good to know that it doesn't actually matter.

Can we bring the Dinosaurs back?

This weekend I spotted some Dinosaurs by the Blackpool lights. Unfortunately they're not real since the only living descendants of Dinosaurs today are Birds. But the worlds most famous Dino-hunter, Jack Horner, is helping the man who he thinks has the potential to change all this. His name is Hans Larsson. His work involves merging paleontology and molecular biology in order to understand major evolutionary changes. One of his goals it to 'switch on' dormant genes or change the regulation of currently active genes so that ancient traits, lost through evolution, will be expressed. Hans Larsson believes that although birds have lost many dinosaurian traits, it may be possible have them expressed once again.

So far, Larsson and his postdoctoral assistant have began working on chicken embryos. Traits such as a long tail have been lost in birds, and we can see the gradual reduction in tail length in the fossil record. Larsson found that although the tail grows very well in early development, "at a particular stage in development everything comes crashing to a halt". They found that retinoic acid, which stimulates the release of an protein called sonic hedgehog, “pushed tail growth to the upper range of normal development. It had some effect, but it didn’t break it out of the cycle.” This gave an Larsson an idea of how complex the growth of the tail is. Unfortunately there isn't much research on how to sustain growth in a tail, so Larsson and his assistant have had to do everything from scratch.

“The experiment I’m envisioning is that you have a single embryo developing in the egg with multiple injection sites and multiple kinds of molecules to be really fine-tuning the regulation of genes,” says Larsson. “We’ll be able to inject different parts of the embryo at different times of development with different things. If we do that, if the timing and position are correct, we should be able to manipulate lots of different kinds of morphologies—feathers, wings, teeth, tails.

“It would take just a little bit of time to work out each one of those systems in very great detail, which we’re now doing for the tail. Other people are doing it for the limbs for clinical work. And teeth are being worked out by other people for mammals and such, and then we can just sit down and play with all these in concert, which has never been done before.”

This'Chickenosaur' may resemble something from the coelurosaurs, a clade of theropod dinosaurs which resemble birds more than carnosaurs.“Birds are dinosaurs, so technically we're making a dinosaur out of a dinosaur. The only reason we're using chickens, instead of some other bird, is that the chicken genome has been mapped, and chickens have already been exhaustively studied. A number of people in a number of different places are moving forward with the project slowly and carefully,” says Horner.

Below is a video by Hans Larsson about the work he does.