All in the FamilyLet me express my gratitude for your June cover story ("Dinosaur Family Values"). I was beginning to fear paleontology had fallen off the face of the mass-media world. Let me also express the feelings of shock and dismay I had when I saw the caption title "Bringing Home the Brontosaur." At that point I keeled over in pain; the debate pertaining to the correct name of this large lizard plays a massive role in my life. But Bob Bakker has been one of my favorite paleontologists ever since the days when I used to watch Dinosaur! I assume he has a good reason for calling it a brontosaur. Now I come to the crux of my scathing letter. You refer to the dinosaur in question as both an apatosaur and a brontosaur. This is completely inexcusable. If you must call it a brontosaur, at least stick with your error for the entire article. An apatosaur and a brontosaur are the same creature, kind of like how Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same person.
Brennan RileyNashua, New Hampshire
Corey S. Powell, senior editor, responds: By general agreement, there is no such genus as Brontosaurus—it was an Apatosaurus body with the wrong head attached (kind of like Batman wearing Superman's head, to extend your analogy). We knew that. Bakker likes to use the nonstandard term brontosaur, which is colorful and familiar to nonspecialists, to refer to a variety of sauropod dinosaurs. We allowed the article to convey some of his language. We could not go into the whole story behind the misnamed Apatosaurus fossil excavated by Othniel Marsh in the 1870s, so one of our sources suggested we call it "the first named
