Brontosaurus (; meaning "thunder lizard" from Greek , "thunder" and , "lizard") is a genus of gigantic quadruped sauropod dinosaurs. Although the type species, B. excelsus, had long been considered a species of the closely related Apatosaurus and therefore invalid, researchers proposed in 2015 that Brontosaurus is a genus separate from Apatosaurus and that it contains three species: B. excelsus, B. yahnahpin, and B. parvus. Brontosaurus had a long, thin neck and a small head adapted for a herbivorous lifestyle, a bulky, heavy torso, and a long, whip-like tail. The various species lived during the Late Jurassic epoch, in the Morrison Formation of what is now North America, and were extinct by the end of the Jurassic. Adult individuals of Brontosaurus are estimated to have measured up to long and weighed up to . As the archetypal sauropod, Brontosaurus is one of the best-known dinosaurs and has been featured in film, advertising, and postage stamps, as well as many other types of media. History of discovery Initial discovery and the Felch Quarry skull In 1879, Othniel Charles Marsh, a professor of paleontology at Yale University, announced the discovery of a large and fairly complete sauropod skeleton collected from Morrison Formation rocks at Como Bluff, Wyoming by William Harlow Reed. He identified it as belonging to an entirely new genus and species, which he named Brontosaurus excelsus, meaning "thunder lizard", from the Greek / meaning "thunder" and / meaning "lizard", and from the Latin excelsus, "noble" or "high". By this time, the Morrison Formation had become the center of the Bone Wars, a fossil-collecting rivalry between Marsh and another early paleontologist, Edward Drinker Cope. Because of this, the publications and descriptions of taxa by Marsh and Cope were rushed at the time. Brontosaurus excelsus type specimen (YPM 1980) was one of the most complete sauropod skeletons known at the time, preserving many of the characteristic but fragile cervical vertebrae. Marsh believed that Brontosaurus was a member of the Atlantosauridae, a clade of sauropod dinosaurs named by him in 1877 that also comprised Atlantosaurus and Apatosaurus. A year later in 1880, another partial postcranial Brontosaurus skeleton was collected in Como Bluff by Reed, including well preserved limb elements. Marsh named this second skeleton Brontosaurus amplus ("large thunder lizard") in 1881, but it was considered a synonym of B. excelsus in 2015. Further south in Felch Quarry at Garden Park, Colorado, Marshall P.