In the second month of the new Millennium, the American Museum of Natural History opened the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Centre for Earth and Space – a name designed to defy the human memory, and so called simply the ‘Rose Centre’. It contained the better-known Hayden Planetarium, where redesigned exhibits displayed the solar system in a new way. And it wasn’t long before its Director – one shy, retiring Neil deGrasse Tyson – had become the bad guy of astronomy for millions of American eight-year-olds.
The exhibit displayed the components of the solar system in groups with like properties – rocky planets, gas giants, and so on. This left one of the best-known planets – Pluto, the only one to be discovered by an American (Clyde Tombaugh in 1930) – out in the cold among other icy, trans-Neptunian objects, un-named.
Every child’s question - ‘Mommy, where’s Pluto? ’- eventually reached the pages of the New York Times. Neil deGrasse Tyson began a gruelling five years of self-defence - until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union formally downgraded Pluto to the status of ‘dwarf planet’ at its triennial assembly in Prague. This may have taken pressure off AMNH, but outrage continued. Something that everyone thought they knew, was no longer true.
Much the same fate befell Brontosaurus. Everybody knew about Brontosaurus, from Fred Flintstone’s Brontoburgers, to the appealing fact that its name (given in 1879 by Othniel C Marsh himself) meant ‘Thunder Lizard’. And it came as a nasty shock to everyone to discover that poor old genus B. had been sunk since as early as 1903, when palaeontologist Elmer Riggs determined (or so he thought) that B. was merely a junior synonym of another Marsh genus, Apatosaurus (1877). Almost every generation since then has felt outrage that their favourite diplodocid never actually existed.
However, a monumental new taxonomic study (truly a Brontosaurus of the genre at 300 pages, published April 7 in PeerJ) has determined that no less than three species of the genus – excelsus (the first discovered) parvus and yahnahpin – were real, after all. There has already been media rejoicing, and the kiddies’ books that reluctantly had to deny themselves one of the best-known dinosaur names of all, can now be re-written.
With continued popular opposition to the demotion of Pluto, and even some scientists (also in April) urging a recasting of IAU’s rules to allow it back, perhaps we should remember that science has always had something in common with online journalism. Its motto, too, can sometimes be ‘Not wrong for long’.
DR TED NIELD, EDITOR
[email protected] , @TedNield @geoscientistmag