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What were the bone wars? Why am I asking you?
Because I'm the one who knows. This episode was from August of 2019.
And it was all about the bone wars, something I knew nothing about until we did this episode.
One of the top three reasons why I love this job.
I get just a little bit smarter every week, and I hope you do too.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and rawr!
That was a limp, limp laugh, Chuck. I've gotten way better laughs out of you than that.
Are you a dinosaur? A little bit. I got a little dinosaur in me.
Got a little Neanderthal in me. Sure. I learned from 23andMe.
Yeah. But despite my dinosaur heritage, I was never big time into dinosaurs as a kid, were you?
No. No. It's astounding, Chuck, how similar we were as children.
I know. The only difference is I didn't smoke when I was seven years old.
Fourteen. I was the ripe old age of fourteen when I started smoking.
So it wasn't like – I don't know if it was the same with you.
It's not like I had anything against dinosaurs. or kids who like dinosaurs.
I thought they were kind of cool, and I had some, like, figurines here or there, but it wasn't anything like I was nerdy about in any way, shape, or form.
Yeah, and I mean, I think there's a certain movie that really, really got kids into dinosaurs.
The lost world. No, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Right. And that movie came out when I was older.
Yeah, same here. I don't even remember what year that was.
I feel like I was in college, though. I want to say it was like 92 to 94, one of those years.
That's what I would guess. But kids these days are, and it's not just my kid, but I see lots of kids. in her age group that are obsessed with dinosaurs.
Yeah, and I think that's cool. cool thing to be obsessed with it teaches you so much stuff you know about the deep past about evolution about you know walking lizard bird creatures you know there's a lot there's a lot to learn from like being interested in dinosaurs that's a very cool thing to be interested in about death and extinction Sure.
Rotting, fossilization. Yeah, all the good stuff.
Right. But the whole interest... including the interest that was around when we were kids that just kind of passed us by, but definitely the interest in dinosaurs that gave rise to the idea of Michael Crichton even writing Jurassic Park and then Steven Spielberg even making it into a movie, that interest in dinosaurs in America, you can actually trace back to... almost a specific winter in a specific place in the 19th century, the winter of 1877 in particular.
And it was the result of a vicious, mean-spirited... petty rivalry between two paleontologists that really kind of sparked America's interest in dinosaurs.
Yeah, I mean, it feels very Tesla. Who's the other guy?
Oh, what was his name? Marconi, maybe? Or Ferris Bueller?
Yeah, it really reminded me of the Tesla-Ferris-Bueller rivalry.
Ferris won that one fair and square. And the current wars, which, by the way, that movie's coming out.
Have you seen the trailer? About the current wars?
No, who plays who? You know, I can't remember now, but I saw it the other day, and it looks pretty good.
Nicolas Cage plays both roles. Oh, God, how great would that be?
It would be pretty great. AC, DC. Right, yeah.
Just like that's two hours right there. Right.
Um, there's actually going to be a movie or there was going to be a movie about what we're about to talk about today.
Did you know that? No, I kind of wondered, though.
Yeah, it was scheduled for production. Steve Carell was going to play Cope Oh.
And James Gandolfini was going to play Marsh.
And James Gandolfini died unexpectedly, and the production just got kiboshed.
And they also found out that the title The Bone Wars had already been taken by an adult.
Pornography. Yep. We're still on the same page.
We totally are. Just children. No interest in Jurassic Park or any dinosaurs, but we think the names of porno films is hilarious.
That's our big interest. So I thought it was funny, you know, we commissioned this piece for the Grabster, and he's a big dinosaur guy, and he was somewhat shamed.
He was like a... And he said it two or three times.
Like, I can't believe I didn't know about these guys.
Yeah. We're like, it's okay, Grabster. It's all right.
Yeah, but so I feel like he learned something along the way.
And he starts out, and I think it's a good thing for us to talk a little bit about just before these dudes – how paleontology came about.
And that had, you know, I think since...
People just started stumbling upon bones, even by accident, before it was even a discipline.
People were like, oh, man, look at that thing.
I'm going to pick that up and take it with me.
Right. I think they used to get classified also as mythological creatures or dead gods or something like that.
But the first... documented paleontological expedition in North America was carried out by none other than Lewis and Clark.
Yeah. Did you know that before? Did we mention that in the episode, do you think?
I don't know, but I did know at some point from somewhere.
Maybe it was the... the Ken Burns piece, but that, you know, one of the things they did, I mean, they were logging everything, including bone deposits.
Sure. But they spent like a week around Salt Lake Flats or Salt Lake Gully or Salt Lake something. where there was a big old salt lake that used to attract dinosaurs and Pleistocene mammals.
From two different periods. Everybody put your emails away.
And the bones that would collect there were really significant.
So they spent a week like excavating. there, but that was the first one.
But that was even before the word paleontology was coined.
Yeah, that was in 1822 in the French journal De Physique.
And there were a couple of people that preceded.
And in fact, one of whom went on to be a sort of a mentor to Cope, but a guy named Edward Hitchcock and another guy named Joseph, is it Leidy or Leedy?
I think Lighty is what I've seen the most.
Yeah, L-E-I-D-Y. And he's the one that went on to work with Cope later on.
Just put a pin in this, but in 1858, a pretty important find, basically the only big dinosaur find on the East Coast. were the fossilized bones of a herbivore named Hadrosaurus fulci in New Jersey.
And It was a big deal because it was on the East Coast, and this is where this stuff was going on at the time.
And you get a lot of footprints on the East Coast, but not a lot of finds like this.
Yeah, it was an enormous find, and Lighty was called in to help excavate it and put it together. because he was America's first vertebrate paleontologist.
He was the first guy and was really prolific and really good at what he did. and like you said would eventually become a mentor to one of the guys we should probably introduce now because Lighty was working in I think his first real burst of energy came in the 1850s, the early 1850s.
And within... about 15, maybe 20 years, there were a pair of guys who had come along and just completely changed the field of paleontology.
It started out... Very normally, just another scientific field.
Very exciting. Lots of discoveries to be made.
Sure. That's the point of all this, right, is that like if you have a brand new scientific field, everything you come across is worth writing about, describing.
You get to name everything. Yeah. So it was a really exciting, like, dynamic time for the field of paleontology.
But a field... of science is the character of it is based on its earliest practitioners, and Leidy was a very steady... scientist who is very reliable.
So he kind of set paleontology up like that.
But then along came a couple of guys who would form this rivalry and they would change all of that.
I don't think necessarily to this day, but there was a lot of sniping that used to go on in the field of paleontology that was because of the tone that these guys set.
Yeah, and both of them would end up basically bankrupt at the end of each of their lives because of all their efforts to outdo... undermine one another's work right so we're talking about two dudes one is Marsh and one is cope on Othniel.
I've never heard that name before. I think his parents made it up.
Maybe. O-T-H-N-I-E-L. Othniel Charles March.
Born in October 1831 in New York and he was They didn't have a lot of money in his family.
They were farmers. He would have been a farmer, but he...
And this kind of really changed his life.
He had a very rich uncle named George Peabody who would go on to really kind of fund his – education in early parts of his career later on.
Yeah, he just plucked him out of the farm field basically and said, and I have no idea why he did this, but he said, you, I like the look of you and your brain, nephew.
I think he was super smart would be my guess.
Was that it? Okay. Well, I don't know how he demonstrated it, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Like, how did his uncle say, yes, you're the one?
Oh, you know, smarts are always evident.
Okay, well, he plucked him out, sent him to boarding school, then sent him to Yale, and eventually sent him off to grad school in Germany.
So... Marsh we're just going to call him Marsh because his name is just too ugly and horrible to say out loud yeah he was basically set.
He was fine. He had a benefactor in his extraordinarily wealthy philanthropist uncle.
Yeah, so Cope, on the other hand, similarly had money, but his was like in his family.
He wasn't like poor with a rich uncle. He had a wealthy family.
Very prominent family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He was born in July 1840. And he went to, you know, all the – I was going to say trappings, but I guess all the benefits of being born into money.
He went to – Very nice, expensive boarding school.
And that wasn't so much up his alley. So he dropped out when he was 16.
And because he had a rich dad, it allowed him a lot of opportunities that other people wouldn't have. including going to college later on even though he never graduated high school.
Yeah, well, so it was definitely in part because of his dad, but also this was a time in, like, say, the 1850s.
A little more lax. It was lax, but also like, even if you wanted to go on and become like a, get a PhD.
American universities weren't – they didn't offer many PhD programs in sciences, right?
So there was a whole – something called gentleman naturalists who were amateur self-taught.
Right. scientists who just did the work.
They knew what they were doing. They figured it out as they went along and they actually developed some of these fields.
And so he kind of subscribed to that school where – that old school of gentleman naturalists where there was – you could go figure it out yourself without needing to go through the university.
But he did that just on the cusp. Like our parents' generation was just on the cusp of of the last group who could get away without knowing how to use email.
Right. He was like... part of that last generation that could become a scientist without having to go through formal training at a university.
Right, like if you have a tweed suit with a stiff collar and a pencil and a pad, you can—and lots of time on your hands—
Yeah, and that's, I mean, to Cope's credit, I think that that really kind of demonstrates, like, he's like, no, I'm going to go learn from experience.
And he did. Yeah, not knocking it. But he did get entree into places like the University of Pennsylvania or the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia because of his family's contacts.
But I get the impression that he worked his way into those places.
And once he got in, he didn't just loaf.
He learned what he needed to learn. Yeah, I mean, because if there's one thing we're going to learn about Copier over the next 30 minutes or so is...
He worked hard. Yes. He's my pick of the Bone Wars.
He's who I put my money behind. Is he your guy?
Yep. Interesting. Did we ever say his name, Edward Drinker Cope?
Yeah. That's a weird middle name. It is.
He was a drinker, literally. He really was.
He was also a Quaker and a pacifist, too.
That's right. So at college at University of Pennsylvania, that's where he met Joseph Leidy.
He was one of his professors. That just kind of kick-started their relationship.
During the Civil War, he went to Europe, the American Civil War, because he didn't want to be –
He didn't want to go to war. He didn't want to go fight.
He wanted to go dig up bones. Yeah, and he was a Quaker pacifist too.
That's right. So he went to Germany, and in 1863 he met Marsh, and they really liked each other at first.
They had a lot in common, obviously. And I get the feeling that in Germany in 1863, there were probably not a ton of Americans who were super interested in dinosaur hunting.
And so they locked up, became really good pals.
They came back to the U.S. after the Civil War.
And we're both like, all right, we're going to go do our thing independently, but we're going to keep in touch.
We're going to swap info early on here. And it was all very friendly at first.
Right, and I think you can make a pretty good case that they probably cut their own palms and clasped hands and became blood brothers during that German meeting, okay?
Probably so. That's what we're going with because they really did like each other.
And things were going along just fine. Two kindred spirits with a common interest in paleontology.
And they may have continued on that way, although I sincerely doubt that that's the case, which means I just undermined my own statement.
But after the Civil War, they both went back to the United States to start careers, their own careers.
And Marsh, or Cope, I'm sorry, he had connected with Joseph Lighty, who he had met through the University of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Natural Sciences.
They worked together there. And so he went off with Leidy to study bones that were found at Haddonfield in New Jersey where Leidy found that first skeleton, right?
Yeah. And so being friends with Mars, she naturally, Cope naturally extended an invitation.
Hey, come visit me in the field. You got to see this place.
It's amazing. There's fossils everywhere.
You're going to love it. And so Marsh came out for a visit.
And this was Mark 1. in the turning point of their relationship.
There were two distinct marks. Each of them point to one as the end of their friendship.
This was... the end of their friendship starting with Cope.
That's right. So both of these guys had privilege, like we've been talking about.
For Marsh's part, his uncle, his rich uncle, donated 150 grand to Yale. basically to sort of get Marsh a job.
They created the Peabody Museum of Natural History.
And then they were like, well, hey, we need a professor to chair this new department.
And so why not your nephew? And they said, bully, that's a great idea.
So it basically cost 150 grand to get Marsh this job as the chair of Department of Paleontology. at this new Peabody Museum at Yale University.
Right. And so they said, yes, we want to make you the first professor of paleontology in America.
And Marsh said, yes, that's a great idea.
I like where you're going, Yale. I'm going to spend a lot of time here, I can tell.
So that's Marsh setting off on his little trajectory, basically ensconcing himself in Yale, right?
That's right. Cope, remember he was basically a high school dropout and he had to kind of make his own way.
He had trouble at first finding a job. position until he struck upon a place called Haverford College.
And he got a position as a professor of zoology there.
And they said, well, You're a high school dropout, so we'll just give you an honorary master's of arts degree.
Bing! Now you're a professor. Yeah, and it's working out for both of these guys.
Yeah, although Cope didn't really like Haverford that much.
He ends up quitting. And it actually kind of...
It kind of describes his personality a little bit, that incident, that he would get a good job having kind of been... carried into that position and then says this job is BS I'm quitting that he was apparently prone to kind of a quick temper here or there Yeah, I mean, Ed does make the point.
It's kind of hard to piece together a personality from someone way back then.
But by most accounts, Cope was a bit mercurial.
A little more outgoing. Marsh was a little quieter and kind of known as a bit of a flake, you know, but considering their backgrounds. it sort of makes sense where they ended up.
Marsh, you know, they went about their work in very different ways.
Marsh didn't publish his first paper until he was 30 years old.
He was a lifelong bachelor. Cope married when he was 25.
And Cope, even the way they wrote, Cope wrote these very sort of flowery, descriptions of things while Marsh was much more sort of rigid and sort of dry and scientific.
Yeah, like if you read Cope's stuff, he's trying to like set the scene for you.
There's one paper where he was describing pterodactyls.
It's a scientific paper, so all you have to do is describe the bones and the measurements and extrapolate and that kind of stuff.
But he's like painting the picture of what it must have been like on a cliffside by the ocean as a troop of these things were dangling by their claws, you know?
That's great. Yeah, it's super cool. It would definitely transport the reader there.
And it was a little extra dollop of something that you didn't have to put on, but Cope definitely did put on.
Which is surprising that he put anything extra into his work because he published... at an extraordinary pace, so much so that Marsh in particular was like, this man is obviously fraudulent.
Nobody can publish this much. Yeah, for sure.
And we'll touch on that a bit later. The big difference in their earlier careers was When it came to religion, like you said earlier, Cope was a Quaker and was a religious man.
Marsh was not. He was not very into religion. and he was fully down with evolution and natural selection and Darwin, whereas Cope kind of had to... make it all fit within his religious beliefs.
So it's not like he outright like called Darwin a fraud or anything like that, but he worked in like... the actions of God into his theories and sort of made it all work according to his, you know, religious beliefs, which is, I mean, back then a little...
A little bit different, but even back then for a scientist, sort of an odd thing.
Yeah, for sure. But he tried to rectify science in his religious belief.
And the way that a lot of people did that back then was to subscribe to neo-Lamarckism. which is this idea that changes in a population take place on the individual level.
Like an example I saw was if you're a blacksmith, and you use your arm a bunch to hammer, you're going to get a big old bulky arm, right?
Well, when you have kids, you're going to pass that bulky arm that you developed in your lifetime off to them and that's how evolution happens.
And it's much more directed by God than what Darwin was saying, which is you're just born with a random mutation.
And if that mutation happens to make it more likely for you to survive, to pass along your genes, then that mutation will get selected by nature, which basically has nothing to do with God.
So there was a real struggle for Cope throughout his lifetime rectifying the two, especially considering, Chuck, that...
The body of work that he produced really helped prove Darwin's point more than anything.
Yeah, for sure. When it comes to like where things went wrong, because they were still buddies up until this point.
It seemingly looks like Marsh drew First Blood.
Yes. We mentioned that Haddonfield dig earlier.
So it's 1868. Cope has left his job at Haversford.
He's not very happy there, so he leaves.
He's really kind of feet on the ground doing the work. publishing papers, which we'll see later at an alarming rate.
And working with Lighty, who we talked about, and he invited Marsh, because they're buddies, and he was like, dude, you got to come check this out.
We found a legit dinosaur fossil on the East Coast.
Marshall's like, great, I'll go check it out.
He loves what he sees. and says, this is wonderful, friend.
You're doing such great work here. Pat on the back.
Then he sneaks back later on. By himself.
Yeah. And bribes the workers there, copes workers, enlighties workers, and says, hey, man, if you find any more good specimens, Send them to this address, and here's a little dough for your effort.
Can you believe that? Yeah, I mean, just straight up sold them out.
Right, so Marsh has just outed himself as a very wormy type of fellow, not to be trusted.
And the way that I saw it, there was a really great American Experience episode called Dinosaur Wars that really kind of described it like, to cope, he subscribed to that gentleman scholar type of mentality, which was there's unwritten rules, you know, like...
I came and showed you my quarry and you went behind my back to steal my fossils from my quarry.
Not cool. That was Cope's take. From Marsh's point of view, he was kind of from the business-like...
American school of just conquer at all costs.
And he owed no allegiance really to to cope in that sense that he saw an opportunity and he took it.
And that was Marsh's view of the whole thing.
But to Cope, that was like, that was not very cool, and I'm going to remember that.
But I'm still going to tentatively remain friends with you.
All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back right after this and we'll talk about what Marsh always said was the reason they were no longer friends right after this.
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All right, so Marsh has really screwed his friend over.
Yeah. Right behind his back. paid off dudes to send him stuff.
But according to Marsh, he's like, that's not why we weren't friends anymore.
That was not what really killed our friendship at all.
Here's what happened. Later on that year, Cope published a paper establishing this new species, Elasmosaurus Platerius.
Thank you. Marsh goes to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philly to check this thing out.
Because they're still sort of friends at this point.
Right. And Cope's showing off his things.
Like, look at this thing. I put this thing back together.
And look at this skeleton. It's amazing.
And said... My friend, it appears you have fallen into the classic paleontology trap and mounted the head on the butt.
Yep. And this was a humiliating thing for Cope.
Sure, so much so that he realized, oh God, I just wrote a paper describing this thing with its head on the wrong end. in the American Philosophical Society's journal and ran out and tried to buy as many of these copies as he could just to cover up his mistake.
And the way that Marsh put it later, because he ran around telling everybody he could about this gap.
He was very glib about it. Oh, very, very.
He just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that Cope had screwed up, right?
Whereas he characterized the story, he characterized himself in the story as just having gently pointed this out.
He basically said that Cope's vanity was wounded. or his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered.
Basically saying like, not only did he get it wrong, when I gently pointed this out, this guy just flipped out and he still hasn't forgiven me.
So that's what happened to our friendship.
Never mind the whole going behind his back thing at Haddonfield.
This is really what happened. But the thing is, that story isn't even correct.
It's just like a sliver of the fuller picture.
Because the fuller picture involves Joseph Leidy, who, again, remember, was working at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia where this skeleton was in the first place.
That's right. So what apparently really happened is Marsh comes in and just says, oh, actually, the neck vertebrae is in the wrong position.
That got everyone over there looking, and Leidy is the one who actually said, oh no, you have the head in the wrong place where the tail is.
And to fully paint a picture here, this wasn't like some huge big deal, like mistakes.
It was very early on in paleontology. Um, everyone was doing their best.
There was a lot of trial and error going on, a lot of guesswork, and it wasn't like, oh, my gosh, he, you know...
It's not like someone today drawing the head of a bear mounted on his butt.
They were doing the best they could, and it wasn't like some huge error.
Right, no. And it is true from what I understand that Cope did run around trying to buy the copies of the American Philosophical Society journal that had the incorrect part in it.
And he was... humiliated, especially the fact that Marsh was involved.
But it definitely wasn't Marsh running to the rescue to save paleontology. and Cope just being a wuss overall.
It was definitely an incorrect picture that Marsh painted.
But regardless of how it's painted, or what actually happened.
That two-prong attack on the friendship, both of them perpetrated by Marsh, frankly, if you ask me.
That ended... Their friendship, like their friendliness was basically out the door.
There's some evidence that... In the following couple of years, when they wrote to one another, they would kind of jokingly reference some of the stuff in the past.
But even that eventually dried up. And they genuinely became bitter, bitter rivals.
Made all the more pronounced... when the West was opened up by the Transcontinental Railroad.
Because all of a sudden, you had said earlier that the fossil fields in the East Well, the conditions of climate and geology in the East were not conducive to preserving dinosaur bones.
The exact opposite is true of the Western United States.
And when the West opened up, it was like, come on in paleontology.
The timing of the two is just astoundingly perfect.
Thank you. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about the Dakotas, Kansas, just bones everywhere and not even too hard to find a lot of times.
Yeah. I mean, if you were a paleontologist and you headed west, if you had some protection, because this is...
Despite all our efforts, it was still sort of a dangerous area for a white man from the East to be traveling around. the Native American tribes there and the Western tribes did not take kindly to a lot of it.
No, because think about it. They went from wagon trains of settlers coming through periodically to trains... daily moving people in and out.
So it was a big deal to the Western tribes who were fighting back and pushing back against this encroachment and wave of that was coming much more strongly than it had been before the railroad, too.
Yeah, for sure. So from this point on, the guys took very sort of different – I guess were forced to take different approaches to their careers.
Mm-hmm. Cope basically spent the rest of his life as a working paleontologist, like feet on the ground for the most part.
He didn't work at a college. He didn't work at a museum until much, much later.
He was not... like taken care of or funded by the government.
So he paid for all that, you know, he came from a wealthy family.
So he paid for most of this stuff himself. uh... sold his farm his you know family quaker farm and got a big fat inheritance and started going west and started amassing this big collection that was actually his, which was a really big deal because Since no one was contributing to his financial burdens, he, I guess, technically owned this stuff.
Right. He owned it fair and square. I mean, he'd financed his own expeditions.
He paid for the shipping and transportation of these things. which is another thing the railroad helped.
It not only opened the west, it helped ship enormous bones back east to the museums.
But he was paying for this, so yeah, his collection was his own.
Marsh, on the other hand... being ensconced in Yale, he was able to rely on Yale, Yale families, the government contacts that Yale had to finance the expeditions that he went on.
So in his mind, it was his collection, but technically it really wasn't because he hadn't financed any of it himself.
It had all been financed by others. The thing about Marsh, though, Chuck, is that he was the first one to make it out west.
And because he was the first one there, he basically considered the entire Western United States his turf.
And everyone else was encroaching on it, which is awfully rich if you can remember what he did to cope back at Haddonfield.
And so, you know, back then there wasn't any kind of ownership on any fossils.
But now that he's the first one out west, there is such a thing and they all belong to him.
For sure. Um, so, you know, when it comes to academics, they also were really, really different in how they approach things.
Um, We kind of teased earlier about how much Cope wrote and published, and boy, it's astounding.
It seems like he published throughout his career about 1,400 – academic papers.
In the 1870s, he was doing about 25 papers a year and in one winter alone, of 1879 and 1880, he published 76 papers.
Very prolific to the point where It was pretty easy for someone like Marsh to poke holes and kind of say that he was either copying people or plagiarizing people, or just outright fraudulent in that no one can write this much stuff.
It also presented a problem in that Cope He was publishing so much that he had a hard time getting stuff published after a while because there weren't a ton of scientific journals and they can't be like, listen, man.
We can't publish like 10 things a month from you or a quarter because we'll just call this thing the Cope Journal.
And he said, that's a great idea. Right.
So in 1877, he bought the American Naturalist Journal for himself to publish all his own works, which ended up being a really...
I don't know about bad choice, but financially it is what really put the biggest dent in his career. future fortunes, was sinking a ton of his own money into this American naturalist journal.
Oh, is that right? I thought it was the silver mine.
The journals set him up for it? Oh, yeah.
The silver mine was a last-ditch effort to try and make a little bit of money because he was almost broke by that point.
So so he but he does have this forum now, whether it's a good business opportunity or not.
He has a forum to publish in. And like you were saying, he wrote just so many papers.
Not only was it just too many for the journals to keep up with, there were also a lot of questions from these journals like, wait a minute, If you're like a deliberate, thoughtful scientist, you shouldn't be able to publish this much.
And one of the problems of the Bone Wars, the rivalry between Cope and Marsh, that really kind of got both of them to be the first to rush to name a species or make some new discovery so that the other one couldn't. is that there was a lot of sloppy work that came out of it.
And when there's a lot of sloppy taxonomical work where The same species is getting different names from different people at the same time.
That takes a lot to entangle. And apparently it took paleontology many decades to kind of undo some of the sloppy work that was kind of laid at the foundation of the field in the 1870s.
Yeah, and especially at Cope's feet. Because for his part, Marsh was very much more methodical, did not publish nearly as many papers, But along with that comes a lot more prestige.
No one was going to talk about Marsh and say that he's publishing too much, he's doing sloppy work.
So as a result, they were published in some really prestigious journals over the years, kind of almost exclusively.
And he had, like you said, Yale behind him.
So he would take students, a lot of times make them pay their own way.
Because this is all... a very expensive endeavor for the time.
You know, Cope was sort of creative in how he would fund some of this.
Like he would latch on to other Western expeditions that had nothing to do with paleontology.
There was one called the Wheeler Survey, which was a mapping expedition that he was able to hook up with.
So he would cut corners and save where he could.
But with the power of Yale University behind him and these students who would pay their own way, Marsh had a real advantage when it came to staking his claim out west.
Right. And also there was one of the first expeditions he went on was funded by the families of some Yale students.
So it was some Yale students and Marsh students. basically playing cowboy out west and the first i guess the first day once they arrived out west where they were gonna dig, Buffalo Bill Cody shows up, basically kind of like as a guest star to appear and just delight and thrill the Yale boys, one of whom wrote about the whole expedition and the whole thing got published in Harper's.
So the whole thing kind of demonstrates that Marsh, as much as he's kind of seen as like this meek, deliberate scientist, was also really good at self-promotion too.
Oh, for sure. He would wear a gun. I think he sort of fashioned himself as a Teddy Roosevelt type or maybe a Buffalo Bill type.
And yeah, he would toot his own horn for sure.
For his part, Cope, after his father passed away, spent less and less time out west in the actual field, more time in Philadelphia, and he would hire guys out.
And in fact, Marsh would later go on to do a very similar thing where they would have their diggers out there excavating and then sending bones back to the East Coast where they could do their, dig in and do their studying there.
Right. And it's out West that this, the famous bone wars really started to take place.
But like you were saying, neither Marsh nor Cope were there, but what was going on out West, all the dirty deeds and all that stuff were at the, at the direction and behest of these two.
So you want to take another break and then get into what the bone wars are really all about.
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Price varies by sheen. All right, Chuck, so the 1870s roll around.
The West has opened up from the Transcontinental Railroad.
It's giving up its fossils. It's just crazy how well-preserved fossils are out there because of heat and dryness and wind erosion exposes them.
And there was a part of that American Experience documentary where they showed a picture of like just this landscape that you could see from the train.
And And they said that some expedition was riding by and figured that they were riding by just a rock outcropping.
And they realized there was just a field covered in dinosaur bones.
It wasn't rocks, it was bones. That's how many bones there were out West.
So the West is starting to yield this stuff.
And just one place would become like a treasure trove and another place would become a treasure trove.
And each of these places... Some prospector would find a big bone, and the first thing they would think of was, I need to either get in touch with COPE, or Marsh, because these guys are going to want to know about this, and they'll probably pay big bucks for it.
And that's really, once they stopped... mounting their own expeditions, that's how they got most of their bonuses from amateurs getting in touch with them.
Yeah, so this would open the door for these guys to really kind of get underhanded.
They would hire guys away from each other.
They would pay for information about the other person's digs and the bones that they were getting.
They would outbid one another and eventually, like I said, both of these guys would end up pretty much financially ruined in the end.
There were reports of sabotage, of theft.
There were reports of dynamiting the other persons like Diggs in their camps.
Well, one thing I saw, listen to this. Marsh ordered that if his men couldn't get bones out of like a find, like they just couldn't get it out.
He said, smash them, do not leave them, because I don't want Cope to possibly be able to get them himself.
Not only that, but the bones that they would – like smaller finds that they would dig up that they didn't think were as important, they would smash.
So the other person wouldn't have anything to do with them.
Yeah, so they were smashing the fossils that they sought for science because of their rivalry.
That's the insane degree that it reached.
Yeah, and, you know, it's easy now to – and I'm wondering if this – like how much they had to trump this up for a movie script.
Because it seems like some of this is exaggerated.
I don't know if they found actual evidence that they would dynamite each other's camps.
It seems like the most they would do is like... you know, push dirt back onto things that they had dug up and not, you know, again, they're lackeys out there doing this stuff.
Right. And, you know, these guys, this was all kind of perpetrated by Marsh and Cope themselves. kind of trump up these stories in the press and things to kind of make the other one look bad.
So while there were bone wars going on, I'm not sure it was quite as like... as exciting as they're made out to be?
Well, there weren't, like, shootouts or anything like that, but, I mean, just the fact that these two paleontologists are trying to sabotage one another's career... is kind of hilarious in and of itself, you know?
Yeah, I mean, and it could have, you know, the fact that these guys were driving each other, it's like this is the lens we look at it through now.
It's like, did this hurt the field of paleontology or help it?
And you can kind of look at it from two angles.
On one hand, what if they would have worked together and pooled their resources maybe they could have found a lot more and gotten a lot more things straight.
They didn't have to untangle later. Or maybe because they were so competitive and drove each other to work harder, maybe they were uncovering things because of that, because they uncovered a lot of stuff.
Like, they were... both super prolific together.
I think between the two of them, they accounted for 126 new species of dinosaur, and that's just dinosaur.
Yeah, and again, this is at a time where you could like stub your toe and look down and you just discovered a new species of dinosaur because so little work had been done in the field.
But, yeah, they definitely did drive one another to work harder and faster and try to outdo one another.
And one of the big benefits that the field saw that you can point to in retrospect, and even at the time, was that winter of 1877 that I was talking about.
This is like winter in Wyoming. It's not a very welcoming climate.
And yet both Marsh and Cope hired their prospectors, their bone diggers, to continue working through the winter rather than... taking a break like you traditionally would.
You dug in the summer, wrote papers in the winter.
They said, no, keep going. This is just too...
The bones that are coming out of this place are too good, and I don't want my rival to be the one to take them all out.
So both kept working through the winter, and out of that one winter, we got Triceratops.
Yeah. We got Apatosaurus, we got Stegosaurus, all from that one winter of 1877.
And if you can't look back and say, yes, these guys drove one another to this level of discovery, I don't know what you can say.
I just throw my hands up in disgust. Otherwise.
Did that make sense? Sure. Okay. I mean, as a paleontologist, you could literally just say –
You know the triceratops? I discovered it.
Yeah. And that could be it. That could be your career right there.
Let alone the Stegosaurus on top of the Triceratops?
Come on. Sure. And then Apatosaurus... That may sound vaguely familiar, but here, let me drop one on you that you'll say, oh, you ready?
Brontosaurus. Same thing, apparently. Yeah, I didn't even fully get... I mean, this gets into the weeds with, like, serious paleontology pedantry and nerding out.
But, yeah. I say brontosaurus. Allow me to nerd out for just a second.
The point of the apatosaurus, brontosaurus being the same thing with different names is one of those things that's frequently laid at the feet of Marsh, saying this was sloppy work on Marsh's part, and maybe if he hadn't been competing with Cope. he would have done better work.
That's probably not the case, but he named the same species two different things because he thought they were two different species.
And a later paleontologist about 20, 30 years later came along and said, I think this is the same thing.
Since they were called Apatosaurus first, that's what we're going to call this from now on.
And so, scientifically, Brontosaurus should have gone, I can't believe I'm about to say this, the way of the dinosaur.
But somehow it got into the cultural zeitgeist and everybody said, no, we like saying brontosaurus more.
I blame the Simpsons or the Flintstones. because of the brontosaurus burger thing.
Oh, yeah? Who knows if that's the case or not, but that was...
That was supposedly the brontosaurus and the apatosaurus are the same thing, and really you're supposed to call them apatosaurs.
There you have it, folks. Nerding out. So in the 1880s, this is after the big rush of the late 70s. things started to change a bit.
So Marsh has got a couple of good jobs. He works at the US Geological Survey. and is the president of the National Academy of Sciences.
But financially, they're not doing so great on either side because, like we said earlier, they'd spent a lot of their own money trying to outdo one another.
Right. So Marsh is in a way, way better position than Cope.
This is actually at a point when Cope is kind of against the ropes.
But rather than both of them just kind of going their own way, the dinosaur wars have kind of ebbed. a little bit, and they can just kind of go off and work as paleontologists for the rest of their life.
Marsh decides to come after Cope and deal him the death blow.
The moment Marsh had a position of power that he could use against Cope, he abused his position immediately.
He was very high up at the USGS, and he used that connection to freeze Cope out of any chance of getting any kind of government funding for any further expeditions.
So Cope was basically penniless – sorry, Chuck – because he had invested in that silver mine that he used the rest of his money for basically –
The silver mine went bust, so he lost all of his money.
And now his greatest enemy and rival was in charge of the purse strings for government expeditions. and had basically said, you're not getting a dime, Cope.
So Cope was left with his collection and nothing else.
That's bad enough. But then Marsh decided to take it one step further.
And he introduced some laws into the USGS, I guess, bylaws that said...
If a government program or agency has funded an expedition, any fossils collected from that expedition belong to the government. and he sent the USGS after Cope's collection.
He tried to take Cope's collection, the only thing Cope had left.
He didn't have his family anymore. He was living alone in like a tiny apartment surrounded by his collection.
It was all he had left and Marsh tried to take it from him.
And actually Marsh failed because Cope could prove that he had paid for most of it.
That's right, and it was that collection that kind of funded the rest of his life.
He would sell off parts of it here and there when he needed to make rent and stuff like that.
He did get a job. In 1889, he was hired as professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania.
So that's good. At least he had a little bit of an income.
Sure. And they were dead to each other at this point, though.
Spent a lifetime battling each other. Cope was just infuriated at the lengths Marsh would go.
It was all just very petty at this point.
And neither one of them come out looking great. because of a career of sort of backstabbing each other.
And they went to the press in the end. I think it was...
He had taken these copious notes over his life about all the grievances he had against Marsh over the years. and he went to the New York Herald.
They published an article about this, but it ended up just making both of them look bad.
It made Marsh look bad because of the things he did. made Cope look kind of petty and angry about everything.
And this is all kind of played out in public in the press.
Right, and in this first article, when Cope went to the Herald, he accused not just Marsh of... like wrongdoing, but also the USGS of corruption.
And that actually got the interest of Congress, who started investigating and ended up cutting the USGS's budget by like half.
So Marsh ended up losing his job and his position as head paleontologist at the USGS.
And in a beautiful, ironic twist, that law that he himself had inserted through the USGS that anybody whose collection... had been financed by the US government could lose that collection meant that he actually lost his collection.
The government came after his collection and took a substantial chunk of it for itself because it had financed so much of his expeditions.
So it ended up turning him and biting him in his own rear, and he lost a lot of his collection, which really burned.
So Cope died first. He died in 1897 at the age of 56, but not before – he would issue a challenge to Marsh, which is, I'm leaving my body and my brain to science, and I bet you my brain's bigger than your brain.
Marsh never took the bait. He died in 1889 of pneumonia at the age of 68. and by all accounts did not take part in this brain measuring. competition this posthumous competition in the grave which I think is kind of funny.
But that brain, I think Cope's brain is still under the ownership of the University of Pennsylvania today.
It still wanders the halls at night. Amazing.
Ghostly brain. That's the surprise ending to this one.
That's right, and I guess in the end, Marsh is credited with 80 species to Cope's 56.
Which is not bad. Plus also Cope has that 1,400 papers under his belt too.
That's a lot of papers. You got anything else about the Bone Wars?
Nope. Well, that's it, everybody. I think there's a Drunk History episode about this.
I never saw it, but it looks pretty good.
I would recommend the American Experience episode on it.
And just go read up more on it because it's pretty interesting stuff.
And since I said it a bunch of times just now, it's time for Listener Mail.
Listener Mail. All right, I'm gonna call this Civil Air Patrol.
This is from Jackson Sherbalati. Can I ask you a question?
Yes, sir. There was a big influx of Civil Air Patrol emails out of nowhere, did you notice?
I did not. Yeah, we got like a handful of them just out of the blue, and I didn't know if something happened or what, but I guess it's making the rounds somehow.
Who knows? Maybe we're on the Civil Air Patrol... Watch list?
Web blog. There you go. So from Jackson, he says, I have been a listener for about seven years since I was 10 years old.
Anyway, I'm a senior master sergeant in the Civil Air Patrol.
And I've been in it for about two and a half years.
I was really excited you guys finally did a podcast on us.
There's not a ton of people even know we exist.
Some say we are the Air Force's best kept secret.
I don't know about that. Gary51 might have something on you guys.
It is nice to get some publicity like that, though.
You guys totally nailed it. Did an awesome job, like always.
Being a cadet in the program, I'd like to hear more about that part. maybe could do a short stuff on it someday.
Cadet life is more of a training life than an actually doing the stuff like learning how to lead effectively and all that jazz.
We also have a lot of mini bootcamp things go to further our learning.
Anyway, you did an outstanding job, and I would appreciate it if you could give a shout out to my squadron. the Green Mountain Composite Squadron.
That's not bad. Not a bad name. Green Mountain Composite Squadron sounds like a wholesale furniture material.
I was going to say it sounds like a sort of a modern bluegrass band.
Oh, that's a good one, too. Yeah, like there's a lot of synth involved.
Sure. Okay. Synth and mandolin. Okay, and that was from Jackson?
That's right. Jackson. Is he the front man for this Bluegrass fan?
Of course. All right. Well, thanks a lot for writing in, Jackson.
Hopefully we've fulfilled all of your requests.
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