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In 1879 Marsh thought he had found another species of dinosaur. In fact, he had found more apatosaurus bones but no head. He found a head that he thought belonged to a new dinosaur, but really it was the skull of a camarasaurus. He named this fake dinosaur brontosaurus! “Brontosaurus” means “thunder lizard” in Greek.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO: THE CORRECTION

In 1903 the scientists found out that the brontosaurus was a fake! They realized that the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus with the wrong head. However, although the scientists realized their mistake, most people didn't know about their new discovery. Many people thought that the brontosaurus still existed because museums kept using the name on their labels—and because the brontosaurus was really, really popular! So even though the scientists discovered their error, most of us didn't know.

This stamp shows how popular the brontosaurus was. Even in 1989, when this stamp was made, which was 86 years after scientists discovered the brontosaurus didn't exist, people were still using the name “brontosaurus” and imagining that dinosaur.

 

 

CHAPTER THREE: THE TRUE DINOSAUR

The apatosaurus lived in the Jurassic period, around 150 million years ago. The apatosaurus was one of the biggest animals that ever lived. It weighed more than 30 tons, was up to 90 feet long, and could be 15 feet tall at the hips. Its head was less than two feet long, which is small for such a big body. It had a long skull and a tiny brain. Its teeth were thin, like pencils. Its tail was up to fifty feet long. The apatosaurus was an herbivore, which means it ate only plants. It ate stones that helped it grind up and digest the plants.

One strange fact about the apatosaurus is that its nostrils were located on top of its head. Scientists don't know why. At first they thought this maybe helped the apatosaurus breathe in water, but since apatosaurus fossils have been found far away from any bodies of water, scientists no longer think this is true. It remains a mystery.

 

 

CONCLUSION: SCIENCE ON THE MOVE

The story of the apatosaurus shows how science always changes. It shows this because first Othniel Marsh discovered a dinosaur called the apatosaurus. Later he thought he found a new species of dinosaur. But it was just an apatosaurus with a different head. Then this false dinosaur got famous. Scientists corrected their mistake, but many museum labels didn't. People still think there is a dinosaur called the brontosaurus.

Scientists are learning that every day there is something new to discover. Many new discoveries change our thoughts about the past. So science is infinite and goes on forever. Science is always on the move with its face to the future.

THE END

*   *   *

Again we did the things one does: filled every suitable container we could find with water, unplugged various appliances, located some batteries for the radio and flashlights, drew the bath. Then we got into bed and projected
Back to the Future
onto the wall; it could be our tradition for once-in-a-generation weather, I'd suggested to Alex, the way some families watch the same movie every Christmas, except we weren't a family. Branches scraped against the windows, casting their shadows in the 1980s, the 1950s; a couple of plastic trash cans were blown down the street, and rain hit the skylight hard enough that it sounded like hail. By the time the storm made landfall, Marty was teaching Chuck Berry how to play rock and roll in the past, which meant that, when he got back to the future, white people would have invented, not appropriated, that musical form; I spent a few minutes describing this ideological mechanism to Alex before I realized she was asleep. I drifted off too, and when I woke, I walked to the window; it was still raining hard, but the yellow of the streetlamps revealed a mundane scene; a few large branches had fallen, but no trees. We never lost power. Another historic storm had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time.

Except it had arrived, just not for us. Subway and traffic tunnels in lower Manhattan had filled with water, drowning who knows how many rats; I couldn't help imagining their screams. Power and water were knocked out below Thirty-ninth Street and in Red Hook, Coney Island, the Rockaways, much of Staten Island. Hospitals were being evacuated after backup generators failed; newborn babies and patients recovering from heart surgery were carried gingerly down flights of stairs and placed in ambulances that rushed them uptown, where the storm had never happened. Houses up and down the coast had been obliterated, flooded, soon a neighborhood in Queens would burn. Emergency workers were fishing out the bodies of those who had drowned during the surge; who knew how many of the homeless had perished? Scores of Chelsea galleries had been inundated and soon the insurers would be welcoming the newly totaled art into their vast warehouses. Alena's work wasn't on a ground floor, I remembered; besides, she strategically damaged her paintings in advance; they were storm-proof.

The next day we went to the co-op and bought food to donate—there was a relay set up between the co-op and the Rockaways, in part facilitated by “my” students. We talked constantly about the urgency of the situation, but were still unable to feel it, as the festive atmosphere in the higher-elevation areas of Brooklyn recalled a snow day: parents and kids staying home from work and school, playing in the park; the only visible damage within six blocks of us was a large tree that had crushed an empty car. There were no shortages of food or water in the local stores; the restaurants were full. Everyone we knew was okay; our friends in lower Manhattan had evacuated or, like Alena, were camping out with sufficient supplies. Friends of Alex's had an apartment flooded with the infinitely filthy water of the Gowanus Canal, but, within our immediate community, that was the upper limit of destruction.

On the second day after the storm I called Sinai to confirm that Alex's appointment had not been changed; they said nothing at the hospital had been disrupted. It was a sunny, unseasonably warm day. There were some buses going into Manhattan from downtown Brooklyn, but the lines were so long, and the routes so confusing, I convinced Alex to let us take a cab. The traffic was slow, but not intolerable; it flowed easily enough once we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into unelectrified lower Manhattan, although we had to treat every intersection as though it had a stop sign, since the traffic lights were out. Police were everywhere, but it seemed more like they were preparing for a parade than dealing with the aftermath of a disaster. Many businesses looked open, although I did see a few dumpsters overflowing with what I assumed were discarded perishables. The streets were relatively empty, as though it were an early Sunday morning. As we progressed north—past intermittent clusters of FEMA, Con Edison, and news trucks—Manhattan shaded rapidly back to normal. Our driver pointed out a crane in the distance above Midtown; it had come loose from a giant condo building during the hurricane and was now dangling precariously above an evacuated block. Other than that, with lower Manhattan behind us, it was a day like any other.

We arrived at the office nearly an hour early, having overestimated how long the journey from Brooklyn would take. We watched—there was no position in the waiting room from which you could avoid watching—the coverage of the storm we kept failing to experience. They spliced Doppler images of the swirling tentacular mass with footage of it reaching landfall, of houses being swept away, of emergency rescues of the elderly. Then the president was talking about the damage, projecting, as they say, leadership; the elections were rapidly approaching. For the first time, national politicians were speaking openly, if obliquely, about extreme weather's relation to climate change, about the need to storm-proof our cities. Then the governor of New Jersey was surveying damage from a helicopter. I reminded Alex that in 2010 Stephen Hawking claimed the survival of the species depended on moon colonization. She reminded me the Mayan calendar indicated the world would end this coming December 22. She found a
New Yorker
on the table among the parenting magazines; “I can't get away from this thing,” she said, moving her jaw around, probably unconsciously, as if it were sore. I thought of Calvin claiming his had thinned from radiation. At least one of the Indian Point reactors had been taken off-line as a result of the storm.

Say that, from a small swivel chair beside the plastic reclining one, I watch as the doctor covers Alex's stomach and the sonographic wand with clear gel. The GE Vivid 7 Dimension Ultrasound System is the Rolls-Royce of ultrasound machinery, offering 4-D imaging capabilities along with blood-flow imaging, tissue tracking, and color flow. Normally the sonogram is conducted by a tech, not the doctor herself, but the tech, the doctor explains, lives in the Rockaways—or at least she did before the hurricane. On the flat-screen hung high up on the wall, we see the image of the coming storm, its limbs moving in real time, the brain visible in its translucent skull. The doctor dwells on the rapidly beating heart, then lets us hear it at high volume. It has only been a couple of months since I heard mine on a similar machine. The heartbeat is strong, she says, perfect, which is welcome news; Alex has had some unexplained bleeding, even some clotting, which we've been warned increases the already high rate of miscarriage. Confirming a heartbeat lowers the risk, although the chances the creature will never make landfall remain significant. It will be months before we can look closely at the aorta. As the doctor measures the diameter of the child's head, I can't avoid thinking of the baby octopuses. Neither Alex nor I speak, have any questions for the doctor, or take each other's hand, but there is that intimacy of parallel gazes I feel when we stand before a canvas or walk across a bridge.

Then we were walking. We moved slowly south along the park in silence. Given the storm, the normality felt bizarre: a tourist asked me to take her and her friends' picture on the steps of the Met; I looked into the viewfinder and half expected to see inside their bodies. The pushcarts were out selling pretzels and hot dogs; there were joggers and dog walkers and nannies pushing multiples in thousand-dollar strollers. There was nothing in the speech or laughter or arguments I overheard to indicate crisis or emergency, no erratic behavior among the squirrels or
Columbidae.