When you make a living studying 100-million-year-old dinosaurs, you're bound to get a few facts muddled now and then. Here's a list of the 10 most notable mistakes (and misunderstandings, and out-and-out frauds) in the history of paleontology, ranging from the early days of the discipline in the early 19th century to our supposedly more knowledgeable modern age.
1. The Stegosaurus with a Brain in its Butt
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When Stegosaurus was first discovered, experts weren't used to the idea of elephant-sized lizards with bird-sized brains. That's why, in the late 19th century, the famous paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh broached the idea of a second brain in Stegosaurus' rump, which presumably helped to control the rear part of its body. Today, no one believes that Stegosaurus (or any dinosaur) had two brains, but it may be that the cavity in this herbivore's tail was used to store extra food (in the form of glycogen).
2. The Dino-Chicken that Ate Washington
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The National Geographic Society doesn't put its institutional heft behind just any dinosaur find, which is why this august body was embarrassed to discover that the "Archaeoraptor" it prominently displayed in 1999 was actually cobbled together out of two separate fossils. It seems that a Chinese adventurer was eager to supply the long-sought "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds, and fabricated the evidence out of the body of a chicken and the tail of a lizard--which he said he'd found in 125-million-year-old rocks.
3. The Brachiosaurus that Lived Underwater
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When a dinosaur fossil features a 40-foot-neck and a skull with the nasal openings on top, it's natural to speculate about what kind of environment its owner could possibly have lived in. For years, 19th-century paleontologists thought Brachiosaurus lived underwater, and stuck its head out of the surface to breathe, like a human snorkeler. However, later research proved that a sauropod as massive as Brachiosaurus would have instantly suffocated from the water pressure, and it was relocated to the land, where it properly belongs.
4. The Caterpillars that Killed the Dinosaurs
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Caterpillars evolved in the late Cretaceous period, shortly before the dinosaurs went extinct. Coincidence, or something more sinister? A while back, scientists were semi-convinced by the theory that hordes of voracious caterpillars stripped ancient forests of their leaves, causing the starvation of herbivorous dinosaurs (and of the carnivorous dinosaurs that fed on them). Death-by-caterpillar still has its adherents, but today, most experts believe the dinosaurs were done in by a massive meteor impact--which somehow sounds more convincing!
5. The Elasmosaurus with a Head on its Tail
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In 1868, one of the longest-running feuds in modern science got off to a rousing start when paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope reconstructed an Elasmosaurus skeleton with its head on its tail, rather than its neck (to be fair, no one had ever seen such a long-necked reptile before). According to legend, the error was quickly pointed out (in a not-very-friendly way) by Cope's rival, Othniel C. Marsh, the first shot in what came to be known as the "Bone Wars" of the late 19th century.
6. Hydrarchos, the Ruler of the Sea
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The early 19th century was the "Gold Rush" of dinosaur paleontology, with biologists, anatomists, geologists, and just plain amateurs rushing to unearth the latest spectacular fossils. The culmination of this trend happened in 1845, when Albert Koch displayed a gigantic aquatic reptile he named Hydrarchos, which had actually been pieced together from the skeletal remains of five separate whales. After his hoax was exposed, one wag appended the species name "sillimani" to the fearsome "Hydrarchos" genus.
7. The Oviraptor that Kidnapped its Own Eggs
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When the fossil of this small Mongolian theropod was discovered in 1923, its skull was only four inches away from a clutch of Protoceratops eggs, prompting paleontologist Henry Osborn to assign it the name Oviraptor (Greek for "egg thief"). For years afterward, Oviraptor lingered in the popular imagination as a wily, hungry, none-too-nice gobbler of other dinosaurs' young. The trouble is, it was later shown that those "Protoceratops" eggs were really Oviraptor eggs, and the misunderstood reptile was simply guarding its own brood!
8. The Iguanodon with a Horn on its Snout
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Iguanodon was one of the first dinosaurs ever to be positively ID'd, so it's understandable that the baffled paleontologists of the early 19th century were unsure how to piece its bones together. The discoverer of Iguanodon, Gideon Mantell, placed its thumb spike on the end of its snout, like the horn of a reptilian rhinoceros--and it took decades for scientists to work out this ornithopod's posture. (For the record, Iguanodon is now believed to have been mostly quadrupedal, but capable of rearing up on its hind legs.)
9. The Plesiosaur that Lurks in Loch Ness
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The most famous "photo" of the Loch Ness Monster shows a reptilian creature with an unusually long neck, and the most famous reptilian creatures with unusually long necks were the aquatic lizards known as plesiosaurs, which went extinct tens of millions of years ago. Today, some fringe scientists (and many out-and-out pseudoscientists) continue to believe that a gigantic plesiosaur lives in Loch Ness, even though, for some odd reason, no one has ever been able to find convincing proof of the existence of this multi-ton behemoth.
10. The Hypsilophodon that Lived up a Tree
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When it was discovered in 1849, Hypsilophodon went against the grain of accepted dinosaur anatomy: this ancient ornithopod was small, sleek and bipedal, rather than huge, quadrupedal and lumbering. For this reason, paleontologists surmised that Hypsilophodon was able to climb trees, like the marsupial known as the tree kangaroo. However, in 1974, a detailed study of Hypsilophodon's anatomy showed that it was no more capable of climbing an oak tree than a comparably sized dog.
