COULD stegosaurus go the way of its beleaguered cousin, brontosaurus? Early last century, the big friendly giant of the Jurassic was stripped of its iconic name due to the obscure protocols of nomenclature. Now stegosaurs are in for a grilling.
Peter Galton, a curatorial affiliate at Yale University鈥檚 Peabody Museum, says the first stegosaur to be named, known as the 鈥渢ype鈥� specimen, is too incomplete to compare with other fossils (Swiss Journal of Geosciences, DOI: ). According to the rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), that invalidates the genus name.
Both dinosaurs owe the upheaval over their names to the so-called 鈥渂one wars鈥�, a bitter feud between two 19th-century palaeontologists. Arch-rivals Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Cope raced each other to find and describe the most fossils possible. In their haste, both dashed off hundreds of papers describing and naming fragmentary fossils.
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When their successors got round to cleaning up the mess, they found that Brontosaurus excelsus, described by Marsh in 1879, actually belonged to the same genus as Apatosaurus ajax, which had been named earlier. So the brontosaurs were struck from the record.
Fortunately for stegosaur fans, Galton believes its name can be saved by designating a new type specimen, the nearly complete Stegosaurus stenops. He is petitioning the ICZN to that end.
