Brontosaurus

The brontosaur or brontosaurus has captured imaginations for generations. His name comes from Greek, bronte for thunder and saur for lizard, according to the AHD. Almost imponderably big, at 70 feet he is longer than a sperm whale. Like thunder, a brontosaur happens, and his surroundings can only endure the experience. Even his bare skeleton is a massive hulking thing, drawing children and adults alike to marvel at his size. You loved him. Your parents and grandparents loved him.

The brontosaur never existed.

He was, at best, a misclassification of juveniles of another genus, and at worst, an incorrect museum display brought on by museum politics. He is correctly called an apatosaurus today, from the Greek apate, meaning untruth or lie, according to the AHD. This is because the apatosaur is deceptively similar to several other dinosaur genus, not because its original name had been deceptive.

Meditate upon this for a moment. Through an etymological sleight-of-hand, our god-like thunder lizard had become a deceiving lizard. There is a bittersweet poetry to it, as scientific precision takes away some of the magic of the dinosaur - but then, we owe our knowledge and love of dinosaurs to science in the first place.

(The credits are on the photograph. I visited the wikipedia page on the apatosaurus to bone up on my paleontology.)