Re: Question concerning Brachiosaurus and Ultrasaurus

[Amado Narvaez <anarvaez@umd5.umd.edu>]

On Sat, 13 Jan 1996, Klaus Richter wrote:

> 
> I'm recently reading the book "Dinosaur Rediscovered" by Don Lessem -
> once again, it's a quite book .
> There he tells about Jim Jensen and his Ultrasaurus, and their is a
> picture painted by John Sibbick the most of youi probably know - it
> shows Ultrasaurus, Supersaurus and Gillettes Seismosaurus.
> Ultrasaurus looks like a huge Brachiosaurus.
> And if I take a look to the leg reconstructed by Jensen, it looks like
> a huge leg of Brachiosaurus, there's almost no difference between Jensen's
> leg and the leg of the Berlin Brachiosaurus.

Jensen's discovery is often set off with quotation marks because of the 
uncertainty over whether it is really a new genus or just a large 
Brachiosaurus. The spelling has been changed, too, to Ultrasauros because 
there was already a saurpod named Ultrasaurus from the Early Cretaceous 
of South Korea. (A similar identification problem was responsible, as you 
probably are aware, for the naming of Brontosaurus when it was 
discovered. Apatosaurus had been discovered a couple of years before 
that, and it was later discovered that the Apatosaurus discovered in 1877 
was a juvenile version of the Brontosaurus discovered in 1879.) It is 
also premature to tack a superlative onto the naming of a dinosaur, 
because you never know what the next fossil hunter will turn up.

----- Amado Narvaez
      anarvaez@umd5.umd.edu