# Brontosaurus excelsus

> The "thunder lizard", a long-necked diplodocid from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of the western United States. Sunk into Apatosaurus in 1903, it was restored as a separate genus in 2015 after a specimen-by-specimen study.

- Classification: Dinosauria (clade) > Saurischia (clade) > Sauropodomorpha (clade) > Sauropoda (clade) > Diplodocoidea (superfamily) > Diplodocidae (family) > Apatosaurinae (subfamily) > Brontosaurus (genus) > Brontosaurus excelsus (species)
- Length: 21–23 m
- Hip height: 3.4–4 m
- Mass: 15–20 t
- Age: 154.8–143.1 million years ago (Late Jurassic)
- Fossils found in: Morrison Formation (Colorado); United States
- Diet: herbivore
- Described: Othniel Charles Marsh, 1879

Canonical page: https://dinodex.club/dinosaurs/brontosaurus-excelsus
Last updated: 2026-09-27

## Overview

Brontosaurus excelsus lived in western North America in the Late Jurassic, in the Morrison Formation. Othniel Charles Marsh named it in 1879 from a large skeleton collected at Como Bluff, Wyoming (YPM 1980). That skeleton became the first sauropod ever shown as a complete reconstruction, and made the name famous.

In 1903 Elmer Riggs concluded that Brontosaurus was the same animal as Apatosaurus, named by Marsh two years earlier, and the older name took priority. For more than a century scientists used Apatosaurus while the public kept saying Brontosaurus.

In 2015 Emmanuel Tschopp, Octávio Mateus and Roger Benson compared hundreds of features across diplodocid specimens and found Brontosaurus distinct enough to be a genus again, with three species: B. excelsus, B. parvus and B. yahnahpin. Like its relatives it had a long neck, a massive body and a long, whip-like tail.

## Name meaning

From Greek brontē ("thunder") and sauros ("lizard"); excelsus, Latin for "high" or "noble" (Marsh 1879).

## Sources

1. (2026). Paleobiology Database: Brontosaurus occurrences. The Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org), data service 1.2, accessed 2026-09-23. https://paleobiodb.org/data1.2/occs/list.txt?base_name=Brontosaurus&show=coords,paleoloc,strat,loc,ref&pgm=gplates
2. (2026). Wikipedia: Brontosaurus. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026-09-23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus
3. Conti, S., Tschopp, E., Mateus, O., Zanoni, A., Masarati, P. & Sala, G. (2022). Multibody analysis and soft tissue strength refute supersonic dinosaur tail. Scientific Reports 12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21633-2
4. Marsh, O. C. (1879). Notice of new Jurassic reptiles. American Journal of Science, series 3, 18: 501-505.
5. Myhrvold, N. P. & Currie, P. J. (1997). Supersonic sauropods? Tail dynamics in the diplodocids. Paleobiology 23: 393-409. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0094837300019801
6. Paul, G. S. (2016). The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (2nd edition). Princeton University Press.
7. Tschopp, E., Mateus, O. & Benson, R. B. J. (2015). A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). PeerJ 3: e857. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.857

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Cite as: "Brontosaurus excelsus". DinoDex. https://dinodex.club/dinosaurs/brontosaurus-excelsus (updated 2026-09-27).