Apatosaurus – Lee Duigon

Marx Prehistoric Playsets

The Marx Toy Co. Brontosaurus. Looks like he might have a touch of indigestion.

I don’t have it today, just don’t have it. Today’s nooze isn’t even worth satirizing. Maybe I need a longer Christmas week.

But at least I can report that Science is reconsidering its not-so-long-ago decision to toss the Brontosaurus into the dumpster of “never really was.” So I don’t have to discard the toy Brontosaurs I acquired in the 1950s and early 60s. Calloo, callay, o frabjous day! Brontosaurus is back!

For a while there they were saying there was no such thing, it’s really just an Apatosaurus with the wrong head stuck onto the rest of the skeleton. But now they are increasingly okay with Brontosaurus–it was real, after all. Well, probably.

You might ask, “So who cares?” Well, I do. I kind of hoped I’d see some of these awesome creatures when I got to Heaven. (That goes for the Baluchitherium, too–another one they’re trying to drum out of the corps.) Maybe even touch one. As world-famous paleontologist Bob Bakker once said to me, “God must have really had a blast, creating these!” They just about swept him off the stage for saying things like that. But I say “God bless you, Bob, wherever you are.”

The classic Marx Brontosaurus–hooray!

After years and years of lonely exile, reputation shot into disrepute, the Brontosaurus has returned as an official and bona fide dinosaur genus.

Studying the bones with new technologies, scientists have concluded that Brontosaurus was a real dinosaur, after all. A minority remain rather angrily unconvinced, and accuse the others of playing to the gallery.

For the past 20 years or so, they were rather adamant about calling the beast Apatosaurus. I’m afraid that for them, the word “Brontosaurus” conjured up distasteful images of the Flintstones, Sinclair gas stations, Alley Oop, and the beloved Marx Toy Co. Brontosaurus with the Camarasaurus head–which was not the toy company’s fault, but a conjecture by Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the world-famous head honcho at the American Museum of Natural History, 100 years ago. He once identified a pig’s tooth as prehistoric “Nebraska Man.” That science didn’t stay settled very long.

The Apatosaurus crowd is still cheesed off, big-time, but their numbers are shrinking. As for me, I’m glad my Marx Brontosaurs, which I held onto through all the years of exile, obloquy, and shame, may now come back out from the shadows and once again hold high their Camarasaurus heads. They should probably have something more like a Diplodocus head, but no sure-enough skull of Brontosaurus has been found yet. It could be worse: they could’ve put a Smiley Face up there.