Owen was highly piqued by Melville's and Mantell's attempts to "suppress" his "Cetiosaurus brevis". By a publication in 1853 he tried to set matters straight, as he saw it, while avoiding having to openly admit his original mistake. First he suggested that Melville's main motivation for the name change was the presumed inaccuracy of the epithet "brevis", "short", because the total length of the animal could not be deduced from such limited remains. Owen pointed out that anyone being acquainted with taxonomy would have understood that "short" referred to the vertebrae themselves, not to the animal as a whole. On a subsequent page, apparently separate from this issue, Owen in covert terms implied that his 1842 publication was not descriptive enough, thus merely having resulted in a "nomen nudum", to which he now assigned the sauropod material, making "Cetiosaurus brevis" a valid name. This still left the problem of it having been named a new genus by Mantell. Owen resolved it by simply presenting the humerus as the sole holotype of "Pelorosaurus conybeari". Remarkably, in 1859 he repeated his mistake by again referring iguanodontid vertebrae, specimens BMNH R1010 and R28635, to "C. brevis". The last of these he had in 1853 proposed to belong to "Pelorosaurus" together with a number of other iguanodontid vertebrae because Mantell had once labelled them as such in his collection; Owen suggested it had been by a mere mistake that the name "Pelorosaurus" had been connected with the "C. brevis" material instead of with these finds.