Here’s my two cents on the subject:

A. Petition the ICZN to change the entire “Apatosaurus” genus to “Brontosaurus.” This could take a little getting used to, but ultimately I think more people would accept this than the present situation. However, the ICZN would probably never accept the proposal in the first place.

B. Make “Brontosaurus” the common name for the animal, while keeping “Apatosaurus” as the scientific name. I like this one better, as it’s basically what’s happened unofficially anyhow.

The scientific hypothesis is one thing. It’s the decision about what labels to put on each node of the tree that’s a semantic argument. As Matt Wedel stated above, whether or not the four different typoes of animal involved are named
1. Apatosaurus parvus
2. Apatosaurus ajax
3. Apatosaurus louisae
4. Apatosaurus excelsus

OR

1. “Proapatosaurus” parvus
2. Apatosaurus ajax
3. Brontosaurus louisae
4. Brontosaurus excelsus

OR

1. “Proapatosaurus” parvus
2. Apatosaurus ajax
3. “Parabrontosaurus” louisae
4. Brontosaurus excelsus

…makes no difference to the actual scientific hypothesis about how they are related. All that changes is the labels. And it doesn’t change the fact that “Brontosaurus” excelsus is still a different animal from Apatosaurus ajax.

Talking about “Apatosaurus” as if it’s an animal and not a (relatively large) group of animals is also incorrect.

Of course, there’s nothing necessarily scientific about the rule of prior use in names, so there’s no reason we couldn’t've jettisoned Apatasaurus and replaced it with Brontosaurus, that sort of stuff is semantics, I’ll agree.

http://archive.org/details/fieldmuseumnews04fiel

And thanks for the additional story, Mark! From what I have read, the excavations at Como Bluff sound like they were difficult and exciting.

This is nearly as ridiculous as the revisionist rule that Tyrannosaurs can never raise their bodies higher than a horizontal position.

These days, i know which dot is ‘Pluto’ in the discovery images. That’s because there are arrows. None of the stars in the field have arrows. I know i’ve never discovered anything new in my backyard telescope because i’ve never seen any arrows. I’d likely be pissed if Pluto’s name was change to something like ’134340′, not because i’m attached to the name, though it’s a pretty cool name, but because of the stupid new definition change forced down the public’s throat. It’s not science, it’s politics.

In that way, i can see how people could be upset. But it seems likely that they had this headless skeleton and didn’t have a viable scientific solution for a long time. So, they went with a political solution. Riggs didn’t get his way. Two things had to happen to fix it. 1) come up with a scientific explanation and solution, and 2) wait for the politicians to die.

The Apatosaurus ajax holotype YPM 1860 is not a smaller animal than the Brontosaurus excelsus holotype YPM 1980. Although it is much less mature, it’s the same size — as you can see in the second illustration of this recent SV-POW! post. The Brontosaurus sacrum is much longer, but that’s because, being matture, all five true sacrals and a dorsosacral are co-ossified, whereas in the Apatosarus its only the three primary sacrals; but they are the same width, and the three primary sacrals taken together are the same length.

So the conclusion has to be that the Apatosaurus type specimen would have grown much larger than the Brontosaurus type had it lived on.

If they were sister taxa, I would agree more fully. But according to Upchurch et al. (2005), A. excelsus is deeply nested within Apatosaurus, with A. parvus, A. ajax, and A. louisae as successive outgroups. Given that topology (which, we should all realize, is a hypothesis, not a fact), putting A. excelsus into a separate genus would require raising separate genera for A. parvus and A. louisae as well. That would also depend on the subjective settings of different researchers’ Genericometers, I’m just pointing out that we can’t resurrect Brontosaurus without some other taxonomic fallout.

Looks like you answered the question right there: Osborn and Matthew allowed it to live on because they had a narrower setting on their patented Genericometer. There’s no provision in the ICZN that says the word of Elmer Riggs is law, and “genera” are totally subjective concepts. You could continue to use Brontosaurus as a valid genus today and you wouldn’t be wrong, just unorthodox.

The idea that “Brontosaurus never existed” IMO has done more harm than good for the understanding of how science works. Whether or not Brontosaurus is a synonym of Apatosaurus is a taxonomic and therefore semantic, not scientific, argument. Whether or not Brontosaurus excelsus and Apatosaurus ajax are synonyms is a different issue, but I don’t think anybody has really argued that case.

“Men came back with report of discovery of very big bones at a spot between Quarries 8 and 9. Heavy thunderstorms hailstones fell the size of hens eggs. Telegraph wires broken.“ – Arthur Lakes’ journal entry for July 26, 1879.

The men were William H. Reed and his assistant Edward Ashley,the bonebed would be designated Quarry 10, and the “very big bones” were those of what Marsh would later christen Brontosaurus. How cool and appropriate that a very nasty thunderstorm ushered the great sauropod into our collective conscious.

http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/first-brontosaurus-bones-discovered