You may have felt rumblings reverberating through the Internet this week, like the roll of distant thunder. That’s because Brontosaurus might be a valid name againmight be a valid name again. A new analysis of numerous sauropod specimens suggests that the classic dinosaur possibly had enough unique traits to be distinguished from Apatosaurus, after all.

The longer a dinosaur lives in our imagination, though, the more history the old bones pick up. Stories get tangled up into a new mythology of what the dinosaur means to us. In the case of Brontosaurus, much of it comes down on the sauropod’s head. The “thunder lizard” is sometimes miscast as a chimera – the body