brontosaurus
noun
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genus brontosaurus.
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brontosaurus
American
[bron-tuh-sawr-uhs]
/ ˌbrɒn təˈsɔr əs /
noun
brontosauruses,
plural
brontosauri
plural
brontosaurus
British
/ ˌbrɒntəˈsɔːrəs, ˈbrɒntəˌsɔː /
noun
brontosaurus
Scientific
/ brŏn′tə-sôr′əs /
Brontosaurus
Cultural
Word History
Take a little deception, add a little excitement, stir them with a century-long mistake, and you have the mystery of the brontosaurus. Specifically, you have the mystery of its name. For 100 years this 70-foot-long, 30-ton vegetarian giant had two names. This case of double identity began in 1877, when bones of a large dinosaur were discovered. The creature was dubbed apatosaurus, a name that meant “deceptive lizard” or “unreal lizard.” Two years later, bones of a larger dinosaur were found, and in all the excitement, scientists named it brontosaurus or “thunder lizard.” This name stuck until scientists decided it was all a mistake—the two sets of bones actually belonged to the same type of dinosaur. Since it is a rule in taxonomy that the first name given to a newly discovered organism is the one that must be used, scientists have had to use the term apatosaurus. But “thunder lizard” had found a lot of popular appeal, and many people still prefer to call the beast brontosaurus.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of brontosaurus
< New Latin (1879), equivalent to Greek bronto- (combining form of brontḗ thunder) + saûros -saurus
Compare meaning
How does brontosaurus compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
The brontosaurus was a giant dinosaur. Despite its huge body, the brontosaurus was an herbivore and had a small head and jaw set on a very long neck that was balanced by a long, thin tail. For over a century, paleontologists thought the brontosaurus was actually just another apatosaurus, a similar dinosaur that had already been discovered. But in 2015, scientists took another look, and now the brontosaurus is back! The brontosaurus lived in North America in the Jurassic period. Its scientific name comes from Greek roots bronte and saurus, meaning "thunder lizard," which is more fun than apato plus saurus, which means “deceptive lizard.”
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
There are vitrines throughout, filled with fine jewelry, asteroid chunks and a brontosaurus tooth; some of them have drink rails, where a martini can rest beside an artifact that’s hundreds of millions of years old.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 14, 2026
Onstage in Lincoln Center Theater’s maximalist revival of “The Skin of Our Teeth” last spring were a giant brontosaurus puppet, a full-scale amusement park slide and a stage-spanning verdant field in full bloom.
From New York Times ● Sep. 28, 2022
However, the heft of modern harvesters is outweighed by long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs such as brontosaurus, which once roamed the Earth.
From BBC ● May 17, 2022
And, of course, I asked him if he could make a burger that tasted like a brontosaurus.
From The Verge ● Dec. 22, 2020
Nearly every dinosaur that the average person can name– stegosaurus, brontosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops–was found by one or the other of them.*
From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
Burton pulls out his mobile phone and proudly shows us a picture of a 50-foot Brontosaurus.
From BBC ● Oct. 24, 2024
In contrast, sauropods, the other main grouping which includes the Brontosaurus and the Diplodocus, kept to warmer areas of the planet.
From Science Daily ● May 15, 2024
This can lead to headaches, like scientists assigning multiple names to the same animal — as with Brontosaurus, which was junked for more than a century before the name was revived in 2015.
From New York Times ● Feb. 28, 2022
The Kindly Brontosaurus once shepherded me past a power-crazed downtown Manhattan bouncer into a Go-Betweens concert, a feat that was all the more remarkable considering I didn’t have a ticket.
From Slate ● Dec. 29, 2017
Up came the smiling head and extremely longneck of a life-size Apatosaurus—what everybody used to call a Brontosaurus, thanks to The Flintstones.
From "Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics" by Chris Grabenstein
He does not even agree with some scientists that tales of them arose from our forefathers' reminiscences of brontosauri and kindred fauna.
From Time Magazine Archive
In the present years of Titanic Business it is the Morgan hand in a velvet glove which directs a fiscal juggernaut capable of thun dering over mere business brontosauri.
From Time Magazine Archive
One lineage gave rise to all other animals on Earth, from brontosauruses to badgers.
From Science Magazine ● May 17, 2023
This means that a wide range of iconic dinosaurs were warm-blooded: Velociraptors and tyrannosaurus rexes were theropods, pterodactyls and so-called "monkeydactyls" were pterosaurs, triceratopses and stegosauruses were ornithischia, and brontosauruses and brachiosauruses were sauropods.
From Salon ● May 29, 2022
He also knew that brontosauruses are vegetarians and that construction trucks make a noise like this when they back up: “Beep, beep, beep, shhh.”
From Slate ● Nov. 27, 2017
An adorable clutch of baby tricerotopses hatches from eggs; sloe-eyed brontosauruses wade in marshes; a bony-backed stegosaurus struggles for its life against the meat-eating Tyrannosaurus rex.
From Time Magazine Archive
But they turned out to be helpless on a land they could not really understand, clumsy brontosauruses bogged down in rigid procedures.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
