Well that makes a little more sense!

Ultimately, a classic example of how fast an authoritatively stated best guess becomes “everyone is saying,” which becomes “It Is Known.”

There are a few other twists that I glossed over. Check out this blog post for more details: extinctmonsters.net/2014/10/30/b...

Importantly, nobody ever "mixed up" the skulls. Nobody ever mistakenly put the wrong skull on the wrong body. A multi-decade delay caused by ugly academic politics notwithstanding, science worked as it should. An incorrect assumption was corrected when new evidence came to light.

Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were very similar animals (roughly comparable to African and Asian elephants) and there's no reason to think they had substantially different heads.

About 65 years later, John McIntosh and David Berman rediscovered the suppressed skull in the Carnegie collections. Within the decade, most of the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus skeletons in North America were sporting casts of the correct head.

Here's the fun part. The Carnegie Museum team found a new Apatosaurus at Dinosaur Nat'l Monument in 1909. It had a skull, which was low, flat, and unlike the speculative stand-ins. But Henry Osborn of AMNH basically bullied William Holland at the Carnegie not to contradict his reconstruction.

When AMNH built their composite apatosaur skeleton in 1905, they still didn't have a skull. Adam Hermann sculpted a stand-in, roughly based on Marsh's illustration. This was the model for the classic round-headed Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus that was illustrated through much of the 20th century.

Again, the Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus types didn't include skulls. However, Marsh published this illustration in 1891. The head is a best-guess composite of bits and pieces of sauropod skulls found elsewhere (no complete sauropod skulls were known at the time).

The name issue is just a classic lumping vs splitting debate. Marsh named Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus for partial (and headless) skeletons found in the 1870s. Riggs synonymized them in 1903. More recently, Tschopp et al. argued for separate genera in 2015, which most specialists support today.

We couldn’t figure out how to illustrate it fleshed out with the upside down wings but I think you got it, lol

Going with volcanic tuff for ease of fossil prep

I like how they had like six polygons to work with and they made one of them a huge 1st toe

unfortunately this is pretty typical of 20th century anthropology!

The anthropology side of that expedition was typically monstrous.