Digging Dinosaurs” presents those aspects of dinosaur exploration and discovery that really interest people:

From my 10 years of field experience, I tell you how it actually feels:

  • to spend weeks in the blistering heat and dust of the Badlands.
  • to meet that rattlesnake or scorpion you really weren’t expecting.
  • to look for (and find!) exciting fossil remains of dinosaurs and other animals that are over 70 million years old.
  • to spend hours — or days — carefully extracting these bones from the surrounding rock and transporting them to the museum.
  • to spend days — or weeks — gently cleaning and preparing them for storage or display.

If time and numbers permit, I wind up the program by inviting audience members to handle real dinosaur fossils and discover how easy it is to tell the difference between bone and rocks. How do you know it’s really dinosaur bone? Find out for yourself!

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Randy Lyons Presents

Dino Fun Facts
What ever happened to Brontosaurus?

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Oh horrors!!

Everyone's second-favorite dinosaur has been relegated to the scrap heap of history.

The story goes something like this: a paleontologist discovered the remains of a long-necked dinosaur with a body that looked sort of like an Apatosaurus (which had been discovered and named previously) but was much larger. It was given a new name: Brontosaurus. As often happens with such findings, there was no skull for the animal.

Ooops.

Later, it was determined that the earlier Apatosaurus was simply a juvenile version of the later find. But the rules of animal nomenclature are very clear on this subject: the earlier name take precedence and the latter name is abandoned. And the name that has been discarded can never be used again for any other animal.

Ooops again!

Much later, it was discovered that the paleontologist had mounted the skull of a different animal (a Camarasaurus) to complete the skeleton for museum exhibition.

So why does the name Brontosaurus linger on? I think it's because of folks who know that the name translates from Latin as "thunder lizard."

Sigh. What a waste of a great name!!



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