"Over the years, belief in the brontosaurus became a badge of melancholy quixotism."

"'We brontophiles have been defeated,' Stephen Jay Gould wrote mournfully, in 1991. 'They have won."

But the tables have turned:

Researchers from Portugal and the United Kingdom have evaluated eighty-one diplodocid fossils�including specimens of Apatosaurus ajax (the first described apatosaurus) and Apatosaurus excelsus (the dinosaur formerly known as brontosaurus)�for a total of four hundred and seventy-seven morphological characteristics. �The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species,� Roger Benson, a professor of paleobiology at Oxford University, said....