Horrible sauropod skulls of the Yale Peabody Museum, part 2: Brontosaurus; and no, I do not mean Apatosaurus
April 15, 2014
How can it be?
All credit to the Yale Peabody Museum for having the courage to display this historically important object in their public gallery instead of hiding it in a basement. It’s the skull from the original mount of the Brontosaurus (= Apatosaurus) excelsus holotype YPM 1980.
Needless to say, it bears no resemblance at all to the actual skull of Apatosaurus, and the one they now have on the mount is much, much better:
But how did the YPM people ever arrive at this double-plus-ugly skull above? We see a similar skull in Marsh’s (1891) second attempt at restoring the skeleton of Brontosaurus:
But even this is not as ugly and Just Plain Wrong as the physical model they made. (Marsh’s first restoration of the Brontosaurus skeleton, in 1893, had a much less clear skull.)
So how did the YPM come to make such a monstrosity? What was it based on? Tune in next time for the surprising details!
Bizarrely, we’ve never really featured the YPM 1980 mount here on SV-POW! — we’ve often shown individual bones, but the mounted skeleton appears only in the background of the much less impressive Morosaurus (= Camarasaurus) lentus mount. We’ll fix that real soon.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
April 18, 2014 at 8:45 pm
[…] after being subjected to the horror of the Yale Brontosaurus skull, I figured you all deserved a little […]
October 23, 2014 at 3:47 pm
“So how did the YPM come to make such a monstrosity? What was it based on? Tune in next time for the surprising details!”
But… but was it based on? I still want to know.
October 23, 2014 at 3:56 pm
I have a draft post, unfinished, on this subject. (Actually, it’s unstarted, too — it’s just a placeholder so I don’t forget to write the post.) It should be along fairly soon.
November 14, 2014 at 9:07 am
[…] while back, Ben Miller reminded me that when I posted about the old Yale “Brontosaurus” skull, I […]
March 13, 2015 at 11:55 am
[…] your lot for now. We’ve long promised a proper photo post of the Brontosaurus mount itself, and I’ll try to get that done soon. For […]
May 23, 2015 at 8:57 am
[…] we described in a previous post, this skull was also apparently the inspiration for the horrible, horrible sculpted skull that was originally used on the mounted Brontosaurus. (And let me reiterate my praise of the Yale […]
January 4, 2016 at 2:19 pm
[…] skull has never been found, only extrapolated from other sauropods (like the Apatosaurus) or extrapolated from completely the wrong animal. I was very upset when the people smarter than me decided that the brontosaurus wasn’t really […]