Science AMA Series: We are a group of three paleontologists who recently published the article announcing that Brontosaurus is back! We study dinosaur fossils to determine evolutionary history. Ask us anything!

In our study, we analysed in detail the anatomy of dozens of skeletons of diplodocid sauropods, a group of long-necked dinosaurs. Based on these observations and earlier studies, we recognized nearly 500 features in the skeleton, which we compared among all skeletons included in the study. Thereby we were able to recreate the family tree of Diplodocidae from scratch, which led us to three main conclusions that differ from previous studies:

1) Brontosaurus is a distinct genus from Apatosaurus, 2) the Portuguese Dinheirosaurus lourinhanensis is actually a species of Supersaurus, and should thus be called Supersaurus lourinhanensis, and 3) there is a new, previously unrecognized genus, which we called Galeamopus.

We are:

Emanuel Tschopp (/u/Emanuel_Tschopp) Octávio Mateus(/u/Octavio_Mateus), from Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal and Roger Benson (/u/Roger_Benson) from Oxford in the UK.

We will be back at 11 am EDT, (4 pm UTC, 8 am PDT) to answer your questions, ask us anything!

submitted by Emanuel_Tschopp to science

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