The Bone Wars was the name given to a bitter competition between two paleontologists, Yale's O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia. Their mutual dislike, paired with their scientific ambition, led them to race dinosaur names into publication, each trying to outdo the other.

In the heat of that competition Marsh discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed, leaf-eating dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus  in 1877. It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, he used the head of another dinosaur, thought to be a Camarasaurus, to complete the skeleton.

"Two years later," Matt Lamanna, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, told NPR's All Things Considered, "his fossil collectors that were working out West sent him a second skeleton that he thought belonged to a different dinosaur that he named Brontosaurus."

But it wasn't a different dinosaur, it was simply a more complete Apatosaurus — one that Marsh, in his rush to one-up Cope, carelessly and quickly mistook for something new. Although the mistake was spotted by scientists by 1903, the Brontosaurus lived on, in movies, books and children's imaginations. The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh even topped its Apatosaurus skeleton with the wrong head in 1932. 


The actual Brontosaurus - about as real as this one in The Flintstone. Link: Sodahead