But not everyone is suffering the unprecedented deficit equally. Some, you might even go so far as to say, are winning.
This brings us to a fourth area impacting business dynamics, the growing divestment movement, the main focal point where moral arguments enter the equation. The divestment movement is commonly marked as begining only in 2010, when Swarthmore College called on its endowment fund to sell all shares in fossil fuel companies. It received a major visibility boost in a 2012 Rolling Stone story by 350.org founder Bill McKibben, and 350.org quickly devoted a major effort to promoting the movement.
By October 2013, a study from the University of Oxford took note of its rapid development. The study identified a common development pattern in divestment campaigns, involving three waves: the first focused on “religious groups and industry-related public organizations,” the second focused on “universities, cities and select public institutions,” and the third on the “wider market” such as public pension funds. The report noted that, “From the perspective of the three waves of divestment the fossil fuel campaign has achieved a lot in the relatively short time since its inception in 2010: six colleges and universities have committed to divest, along with 17 cities, two counties, 11 religious institutions, three foundations and two other institutions.” A year and a half later, that list has grown significantly, with more than 2 dozen institutions of higher education, most prominently, Stanford University, scores of cities, topped by the three most prominent cities in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, a long list of religious institutions, and a growing number of foundations. 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 probablyBrontosaurus, the “thunder lizard.” Deeply rooted as this titan is in the popular imagination, however, for more than a century scientists thought it never existed.
The first of the Brontosaurus genus was named in 1879 by famed paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The specimen still stands on display in the Great Hall of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 1903, however, paleontologist Elmer Riggs found that Brontosaurus was apparently the same as the genus Apatosaurus, which Marsh had first described in 1877. In such cases the rules of scientific nomenclature state that the oldest name has priority, dooming Brontosaurus to another extinction.
Now a new study suggests resurrecting Brontosaurus. It turns out the originalApatosaurus and Brontosaurus fossils appear different enough to belong to separate groups after all. “Generally, Brontosaurus can be distinguished from Apatosaurusmost 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.”
The nearly 300-page study analyzed 477 different physical features of 81 sauropod specimens, involving five years of research and numerous visits to museum collections in Europe and the U.S. The initial goal of the research was to clarify the relationships among the species making up the family of sauropods known as the diplodocids, which includes Diplodocus, Apatosaurus and now Brontosaurus.
The scientists conclude that three known species of Brontosaurus exist: Brontosaurus excelsus, the first discovered, as well as B. parvus and B. yahnahpin. Tschopp and his colleagues Octávio Mateus and Roger Benson detailed their findings online April 7 inPeerJ. “We’re delighted that Brontosaurus is back,” says Jacques Gauthier, curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology at Peabody, who did not participate in this study. “I grew up knowing about Brontosaurus—what a great name, ‘thunder lizard’—and never did like that it sank into Apatosaurus.”
For vertebrate paleontologist Mike Taylor at the University of Bristol in England, who did not take part in this research, the most exciting thing about this study is “the magnificent comprehensiveness of the work this group has done, the beautifully detailed and informative illustrations and the degree of care taken to make all their work reproducible and verifiable. It really sets a new standard. I am in awe of the authors,” he says. Vertebrate paleontologist Mathew Wedel at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, Calif., who also did not collaborate on this paper, agrees, saying “the incredible amount of work here is what other research is going to be building on for decades.”
Tschopp notes their research would have been impossible at this level of detail 15 or more years ago. It was only with many recent findings of dinosaurs similar toApatosaurus and Brontosaurus that it became possible to reexamine how different they actually were and breathe new life into Brontosaurus, he says.
Although while Kenneth Carpenter, director and curator of paleontology at Utah State University Eastern’s Prehistoric Museum, finds this study impressive, he notes the fossil on which Apatosaurus is based has never been described in detail, and suggests the researchers should have done so if they wanted to compare it with Brontosaurus. “So is Brontosaurus valid after all?” he asks. “Maybe. But I think the verdict is still out.”
All in all, these findings emphasize “that sauropods were much more diverse and fascinating than we’ve realized,” Taylor says. Indeed, the recognition of Brontosaurusas separate from Apatosaurus is “only the tip of the iceberg,” he adds. “The big mounted apatosaur at the American Museum of Natural History is probably something different again, yet to be named. Yet another nice complete apatosaur, which is in a museum in Tokyo, is probably yet another new and distinct dinosaur.”
This sauropod diversity emphasizes “that the Late Jurassic [period] of North America in which they lived may have been a weird time,” Wedel says. “You basically had an explosion of these things in what could be harsh environments, which raises the question of how they could have found enough food to have supported them all.” In other words, research that helped resurrect Brontosaurus may have birthed new mysteries as well.
Even the heirs of America’s first family of oil, the Rockefellers, joined the divestment movement in September 2014.