I hate to break it to you, but there was no Brontosaurus

It may have been your favorite dinosaur growing up. Every time you saw a construction crane or the ladder on a fire truck, you imagined it to be the long neck of a Brontosaurus munching bog weeds in a misty swamp. But the truth is- there was no Brontosaurus.

I learned the truth in a college course about dinosaurs. The whole class gasped when the professor confirmed it. Most had heard the rumor, but hadn't believed it to be true. Here's what happened:

In 1879 after finding a similar shaped giant dinosaur called Apatosaurus, fossil hunter Othniel Charles Marsh published in American Journal of Science claimed he had found new dinosaur which he named Brontosaurus. According to unmuseum.org, Marsh based this new 70-80 foot dinosaur off a description of a vertebrae & pelvis. Marsh found a nearly complete skeleton (one without a skull), which was mounted in Yale's Peabody Museum.

Later on other scientists came to believe that Apatosaurus was just a younger version of Brontosaurus- not a totally seperate dinosaur! Not only that but it was mounted with the wrong head. It wasn't til the 70's that scientists discovered and proved that the head on the skeleton was not a Brontosaur/Apatosaur skull - it belonged to a Camarasaurus.

So essentially Brontosaurus is Apatosaurus and its head looks different than the images we all saw growing up. So your new favorite dinosaur could be Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus or Diplodocus, which is probably the closest looking to the Brontosaurus of your day dreams.