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bron-to-SORE-us                BRONTOSAURUS                   [Thunder Lizard]
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a-pat-o-SORE-us                APATOSAURUS                     [Unreal Lizard]
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    Why does this dinosaur have two names?  Everybody knows what a 
Brontosaurus looks like -- but what's an Apatosaurus?
	The confusion started in 1877 when Professor Othniel Charles Marsh
of Yale University discovered the first giant fossils in Wyoming.  The first 
skeleton he found was a large dinosaur which he named Apatosaurus.  Later, 
during the same expedition, he found the bones of an even larger creature.  
He named it Brontosaurus.  It wasn't until two years later that 
paleontologists realized that the Brontosaurus and the Apatosaurus were
just different sized specimens of the same giant dinosaur.  By then everybody 
called this dinosaur Brontosaurus, although the creature's correct scientific 
name is Apatosaurus because that was the first name given to it.
	The Brontosaurus grew to a length of 58-1/2 feet.  It had a tiny head 
at the end of a long neck.  The peg-shaped teeth were well-suited to eating 
water plants.  Many paleontologists believe that the Brontosaurus lived in or 
near water to relieve the stress on its bones, however new evidence shows that this might not be the case.  In the
Ojo Alamo Mountains of New Mexico, a very large Brontosaurus, called the 
Alamosaurus was found.  The fossil was buried in rock from the Late Cretaceous 
Period.  We know that this area was not swampy but rather a dry floodplain 120 
million years ago.
     This confused many scientists who believed the Brontosaurus had to eat 
soft water plants constantly while it was awake just to consume enough 
calories to stay alive.
	If Dr. Robert Bakker's theory is correct, the Brontosaurus had more
"chewing power" than four elephants and may have been able to eat more than
scientists had originally thought.  Dr. Bakker believes the Brontosaurus had 
gizzard stones like modern crocodiles and ostriches.  These animals swallow 
small smooth rocks which are used to crush food when the animal squeezes its 
powerful stomach muscles.  This is a very efficient method of digestion.
     One thing that we are certain of is that the Brontosaurus traveled in 
herds of bulls, cows and their young.  This is known from the many footprints 
of these traveling herds that have been found.

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