Who said anything about legitimate? It’s Yahoo! Science.
What you’re referring to is called the gap theory. It’s the idea that there is an undefined period of time between the first two verses of the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, then there are billions of years in which the entire fossil record takes place. Then there is some kind of cataclysm (possibly associated with the fall of Lucifer) in which all life is killed off, and God essentially starts over with a planet that is without form and void, etc…
If you know who Scofield was, he felt that there was a fair amount of Biblical support for this view point.
I believe Brontosauruses weren’t so much a hoax as a mistake; someone mismatched an Ultrasaurus head to an Apatasaurus body or somesuch.
I really haven’t followed this very closely.
Its the last refuge of the flaky cryptozoologist. I dont know why we cant just accept the dinosaurs are long dead. I guess a lot of people still feel the need to believe in magic and impossible things.
Wait - you mean Jurasic Park WASN’T a documentary?!?!?1
Sure it was. It clearly documented the events described in Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, didn’t it? 
Not particularly…
If you want a person of note, how about God?!
He never mentions dinosaurs, so clearly they are the work of the Devil (as is evolution). :rolleyes:
The head was actually that of Camarasaurus, and the “someone” was the discoverer of both Apatosaurus and “Brontosaurus” (which was later reclassified as Apatosaurus, seeing as how it was essentially the same critter and all) – O. C. Marsh.
The story’s in several places, including a display at the American Museum of Natural History.
I was disappointed when I saw the “real” Apatosaurus head – it looks more like a Diplodocus head, with the teeth angled foward and meering at an angle, instead of the snub Camarasaurus head with the teeth meeting straight on. Virtually all the movie brontosaurs have that head – the original Lost World, the original King kong (and, as far as I can tell, Jackson’s version), The Animal World, One Million Years B.C., and all the Land Before Time movies. Not to mention Charles Knight’s paintings and the models at Sinclair Dinoland. The “real” head looks kinda dopey and ugly.
charles Knight’s Brontosaur:
Silent Lost World brontosaur
Apatosaurus skull. It looks in the picture as if it has a Mortimer Snerd overbite, but the bottom teeth protrude just as far:
I had this discussion years ago with a fundie who naturally placed dinosaur remains within the 6,000 year span (as determined by Archbishop Ussher back in the 16th century). When I asked the obvious questions about carbon dating and other means of determining age, he told me that God deliberately made all of these things “look old”. When I asked what the purpose of such a thing might be, he responded with the time-honored religious dodge: “It’s one of God’s mysteries”. :rolleyes: