New evidence suggests the Brontosaurus could be real after all.
Everything you learned in second grade is wrong.
Remember that kid from second grade? You know, that kid?
(Who actually WEARS their science fair ribbon??)
The one you ran up to on the playground that one day and said, "HEY! CHECK OUT MY AWESOME NEW BRONTOSAURUS ACTION FIGURE!"
(It's REAL plastic!)
And he was like...
"You moron. There's no such thing as a Brontosaurus. It's a made-up dinosaur that only little kids think is real. That's actually an Apatosaurus."
And, if he was really super that kid-ish, he probably went on to explain that in the late 1800s, paleontologist Othniel Charles March brought back basically the same huge herbivore skeleton on two different expeditions out west and named it two different things. And since the Apatosaurus came first, that's the name that scientists ultimately agreed on in 1903.
And you were like, "Uh, duh, I knew THAT."
But deep down, you were devastated beyond human comprehension.
Because the Brontosaurus was your favorite dinosaur. But according to science, it never even existed.
(What is left to live for?)
After that, you made do the best you could. You grew up. Made friends. Fell in love. Lost love. Got a job. Got married. Applied for a mortgage. Life ... went on. But it was never really the same.
Until now.
Because — brace yourselves — some big news just dropped.
The Brontosaurus might be real after all!
Charles Choi, Scientific American:
Some of the largest animals to ever walk on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods—and the most famous of these giants is probably Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard." Deeply rooted as this titan is in the popular imagination, however, for more than a century scientists thought it never existed...
Now a new study suggests resurrecting Brontosaurus. It turns out the original Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus fossils appear different enough to belong to separate groups after all. "Generally, Brontosaurus can be distinguished from Apatosaurus most easily by its neck, which is higher and less wide," says lead study author Emanuel Tschopp, a vertebrate paleontologist at the New University of Lisbon in Portugal. "So although both are very massive and robust animals, Apatosaurus is even more extreme than Brontosaurus."
Yep. That's right. Turns out a group of scientists now has cause to believe that the Brontosaurus is actually a distinct genus of dinosaur — similar to, but not completely the same as, you guessed it, the Apatosaurus.
(For maximum confusion, this is an Apatosaurus skeleton.)
And! There's enough evidence to suggest that there wasn't just one type of Brontosaurus, but three entirely separate species of them, known as Brontosaurus excelsus, B. parvus, and B. yahnahpin.
As with most scientific revelations, this probably won't completely end the controversy.
James Gorman, The New York Times:
"Dr. Tschopp and his colleagues Octávio Mateus at the New University and Roger B. J. Benson at the University of Oxford in England decided that although Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are similar, there are actually two different genera and the Yale specimen is really a Brontosaurus after all. So are several other museum specimens, they said, including one at the University of Wyoming, and a baby Apatosaurus at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
Their paper, released online on Tuesday in the journal PeerJ, with all of its nearly 300 pages freely available to anyone, will not be the last word on whether the Brontosaurus name should come back into scientific use. Names of species and genera are matters of expert opinion. There is no national or international board of official dinosaur names that decides who is right."
But this news is still really freaking cool.
The bottom line of all this?
There's a lot about our own history and the history of our planet that we still don't know. There's still a lot to learn. Which is pretty incredible, when you think about it.
(Oooooooooh).
The even bottomer line?
Isn't it cool that scientists are always trying to prove themselves wrong? Like, for 100 years, scientists thought they were certain that the Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were the same dinosaur. But still, a bunch of them were like, "Nope. Not good enough. Let's look into this again." Science is freaking fantastic.
The bottomest line?
Take that, that kid!
(And put away that smug little ribbon too.)
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.