Skull and Bones at Yale

A New Haven dinosaur is finally fitted with the right head

A vendor was doing good business hawking T shirts with the inscription I LOST MY HEAD AT THE YALE PEABODY MUSEUM; and large crowds gathered outside as if waiting to see a popular sports event. What they were about to witness, though, was a drastic head transplant involving some 150 million-year-old bones. More than a century after the fossilized skeleton of a 65-ft.-long Brontosaurus was discovered, the Yale museum was replacing the skull of its prize exhibit, long a model for dinosaur displays the world over. Bronto, it appears, had been topped all these years with the wrong head.

Paleontologists, of course, tend to relish arguing about bones as much as digging them up. But after much debate, most now agree that a Brontosaurus head should not be the familiar, friendly snub-nosed skull of children's books and TV's Flintstones, but rather a much more elongated, toothy and reptilian-looking skull. Yale's correction, to be sure, is a little tardy. Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum and the Field Museum in Chicago have already changed their Brontosaurus heads. What makes the Peabody's fossil surgery so interesting is that the original foul-up was caused by one of the 19th century's most celebrated bone collectors, Yale's own Othniel Charles Marsh.

In 1879 Marsh uncovered Bronto's remains in a quarry in Como Bluff, Wyo. The bones were headless, as all Brontosaurus skeletons ever found have been, because of fragile connections between head and neck. Marsh did what paleontologists often do when they are missing pieces in a fossil puzzle: he capped the reassembled beast with skull fragments found elsewhere/Unfortunately, they came from another long-necked dinosaur called Camarasaurus. At least partly because of Marsh's prestige, his flat-nosed monster became the model for other museums as well as Brontosaurus representations in books, comic strips, even advertisements.

Many scientists, however, were suspicious of Marsh's Brontosaurus. As far back as 1909 a Carnegie expedition found two headless Brontosaurus skeletons in Utah with an elongated skull lying a few feet away. But by the time the bones had arrived back East, a smaller skull was found mixed with the larger dinosaur skeletons, making an improbable Mutt-and-Jeff match, so the discovery was ignored.

The argument was not settled until a few years ago, when a physicist and amateur paleontologist at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, John Mclntosh, and the Pittsburgh museum's David Berman sorted through tons of bones, re-examined the original site descriptions and discovered the 1909 skull switch. As a result, a longer head was retrieved from the dusty storage bins and mounted atop the Carnegie's Brontosaurus. Casts were also shipped of to other institutions, which, like the Pea body, are gradually making the change.

The rattling of Yale's skull and bone does not settle such lingering questions a what killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and whether they were warm blooded or cold. Yet even the most trivia news from the dinosaur world seems to hold everybody in thrall. Adds Yale Pale ontologist John Ostrom: ''It's good busines for the museum and for Yale."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.