Everyone knows where they were when Pluto stopped being a planet. Well, maybe not exactly where you were, but you remember the general conversation. There are still Facebook pages dedicated to remembering when Pluto was a planet, petitions to bring it back, disappointment over childhoods ruined.
But what about when the opposite happens?
I remember as a child, learning that the Brontosaurus wasn’t a dinosaur anymore. This surprised and confused me, as Brontosaurus was one of my favorite dinosaurs.
It turns out that at no point during my lifetime was Brontosaurus ever considered to be a real thing. Its history is a lot like that of Pluto: someone discovered it, got excited, declared it a thing, and later people said “no, this isn’t what you think it is and we should stop calling it that.”
Up until 2015. In June of this year, I read in Harper’s Findings that Bronosaurus was restored as a genus. Of course, in the typical style of Harper’s Findings, this was the only information I received, context-free.
A bit of time on the internet revealed to me that the story had failed to blow up a few months earlier, when Wired, Scientific American, and a few other sites and magazines wrote articles about it.
Here’s what is strange to me about the entire thing: where it the excitement? Where is the joy? Isn’t this great? We can say Brontosaurus again? At the very least, it’s a fun word which makes talking about these animals fun. Isn’t this great news for any ’90s kid who like The Land Before Time and Fantasia and Jurassic Park?
And so I started to wonder: does this resemble that quote that Mark Twain never said about how a lie spreads across the world before the truth has put its boots on? Does the same thing happen when it comes to nostalgia: only the bad is celebrated, and not the good? Does the bad news about twisted fan theories and childhoods ruined make good headlines and good Facebook posts and good tweets, but the fun stuff, the happy stuff, what’s the point?
But then I realized that maybe there was a different reason for the lack of celebration. I asked friends, co-workers, members of my book club: “Did you hear that the Brontosaurus is a dinosaur again Isn’t that cool?”
And the response?
“When did the Brontosaurus stop being a dinosaur?”
Sounds like no one ever realized it went anywhere. So maybe that’s why no one else is celebrating.