#thunderlizard

I designed this project solely around wanting to wear this on a Tshirt. 

Work in progress underpainting for Brontosaurus excelsus! First named in 1879 by O.C. Marsh, Brontosaurus (meaning "Thunder Lizard") was a mainstay of the public's vision of prehistoric life for more than 100 years, and is the archetype for what most people think of when they conjure up images of sauropod dinosaurs. The history of it's discovery and classification is somewhat complicated. The original remains were discovered at Como Bluff in Wyoming, in 1903 a paleontologist named Elmer Riggs posed an argument that Marsh's Brontosaurus was not significantly distinguishable from another sauropod described by Marsh just 2 years prior which had been dubbed Apatosaurus, this started a debate as to whether the two animals were really the same animal or not. 

Despite the possibility that it wasn't a new animal the American Museum of Natural History chose to mount its skeleton and reveal it to the world as Brontosaurus in 1905. The initial mounted specimen was incomplete and was mounted with a sculpted skull based on Camarasaurus, giving it a head that was very large a thick compared to the much more slender, Diplodicocus-like skulls we now know they had, in 1909 a skull for Apatosaurus was discovered that showed the more slender skull to be more accurate for this type of animal, this did not spark change right away as most museum mountings still used the Camarasaurus skull for many decades. 

In the 1970s John Stanton McIntosh and David Berman re-described the skulls for Diplodicus and Apatosaurus, though it had been suspected that Brontosaurus and its relatives had thin skulls since the early 20th century, it wasn't until 1979 when the first mounting of a more correct Apatosaurus skull was mounted, and it wasn't until the 1990s when most other museums followed suit. In 1995 it was the American Museum of Natural History that finally corrected it's original mistake and not only fixed the skull and other parts of the anatomy, but also renamed the mounting from Brontosaurus excelsus to Apatosaurus excelsus.