August 1, 2019 • 53 mins
A pair of old timey fossil hunters had a rootin’ tootin’ rivalry that spilled from academic journals into the American Wild West - where fossils were dynamited and employees turned double agent. Learn about the two-fisted origins of American paleontology.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck and we're coming to
see you guys, some of you some cities. Just listen up.
That's right, because you know, we just did Chicago and
Toronto and it went great, and I think our topic
ofp went really well. Did everyone loved hearing about me?
That's right. So if you're in Boston, you can come
see us in August twenty nine at the Wilbur Portland, Maine, Maine,
(00:22):
at the State Theater on August thirty. If I can't wait,
I'm gonna Labor Day weekend. I'm gonna stay the whole weekend.
I'll be all over Maine. That's great, man. Where else,
We're gonna be in Orlando on October nine, and then
on October t we're going to be in New Orleans, Man.
And then later on that month we're doing a three
night stand at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn. That's right. Is
sold out. You can still get tickets for the and
(00:45):
we will see you then. Check it out at s
y s K live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you
should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles to Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there and
(01:07):
raw that was a limp limp. Laugh, Chuck, I've gotten
way better laughs out of either. Uh. Are you a
dinosaur A little bit? I got a little dinosaur in me,
a little Neander Tall in me. I learned from twenty
three and me. Um. But despite my dinosaur heritage, I
(01:31):
was never a big time into dinosaurs as a kid.
Were you not? Like it's astounding, Chuck, how similar we
were as children. Ums. I didn't smoke when I was
seven years old fourteen. I was the right bold asia
before started smoking. Um. So it wasn't like, I don't
(01:52):
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 like figurines here there, But it wasn't anything
like I was nerdy about in any way, shape or form. Yeah,
And I mean I think there was there's a certain
movie that really really got kids into dinosaurs, The Lost
(02:14):
World No Ferris Putler's Day Off. Uh, And that movie
came out you know when I was older. Yeah. Here,
I think I wasn't even remember what year that was.
I feel like I was in college, though I want
to say it was like ninety two to ninety four,
one of those years. That's what I would guess. But
kids these days are and it's not just my kid,
(02:36):
but I see lots of kids in her age group
that are obsessed with dinosaurs. Yeah, and I think that's cool, Like,
what a cool thing to be obsessed with that. It
teaches you so much stuff you know about the deep past,
about evolution, um, about you know, walking lizard, bird creatures.
You know, there's a lot, there's a lot to learn from,
(02:57):
like being interested in dinosaurs. That's very cool thing to
be interested in. About death and extinction, sure, rotting, fossilization,
all the good stuff, right, Um, But the whole interest,
including the interest that was around when we were kids
that just kind of passed us by, but definitely, you know,
the interest in dinosaurs that gave rise to the idea
(03:19):
of Michael Krecht and 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 um a specific winter in a specific place
in the nineteenth century. In the winter of eighteen seventy
seven in particular, and it was the result of a vicious,
(03:43):
mean spirited, petty rivalry between two paleontologists that really kind
of sparked America's interest in dinosaurs. Yeah, I mean it
feels very Tesla. Uh who's the other guy? What was
his name? Marconi? Maybe your Ferris Bueller. Yeah, that it's
(04:05):
really reminded me of the Tesla Ferris Bueller rivalry. Ferris
won that one fare in the Current Wars, which, by
the way, that movies coming out. Have you seen the trailer?
You know? Who plays who? You know? I can't remember now,
but I saw it the other day and it looks
it looks pretty good. Nicholas Cage plays both roles. O, God,
how great would that be? It would be pretty great?
(04:26):
Ce DC just like that's two hours right there. 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 now? I kind
of wondered though. Yeah, it was scheduled for production. Steve
Carrell was going to play Cope, Oh and James Gandelfini
(04:48):
was gonna play Marsh and James Gandolfini died unexpectedly and
the production just got kai boshed. And they also found
out that the title The Bone Wars had already been
taken by a adult pornography. Yep, we're so on the
same page. We totally children no interest in Jurassic Park
(05:09):
or any dinosaurs, but we think the names of porno
films is hilarious. That's our our big interest. So I
thought it was funny, you know. We we commissioned this
piece for for the Grabster, and he's a big dinosaur guy,
and he was somewhat shamed. He was like, I just
and he said it two or three times, like I
can't believe I didn't know about these guys. Yeah, We're like,
(05:29):
it's okay, grab sir, It's all right. Yeah. But so
I feel like he learned something along the way. UM.
And he starts out, and I think it's a good
thing for us to talk a little bit about just
um before these dudes, how paleot paleontology came about um
and that had you know, I think since people just
started stumbling upon bones, even by accident, before it was
(05:51):
even a discipline. People were like, oh man, look at
that thing. I'm gonna pick that up and take it
with me, right. I think they used to get classified
also is mythological creatures or dead gods or something like that. Um.
But the first documented paleontological expedition in North America was
(06:11):
carried out by none other than Lewis and Clark. 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
kin Burns Peace, but that you know one of the
things they did, I mean they were they were logging everything,
including bone deposits. But they spent like a week um
(06:33):
around salt lick flats or salt like gully or salt
like something, um where there was a big old salt
like that used to attract dinosaurs and um pli sustine
mammals um from two different periods. Everybody puts your emails away, um,
and the bones that would collect there were really significant.
(06:54):
So they spent a week like excavating there. But that
was the first one. But that was even before the
world the word paleontology was coined. Yeah, that was in
eighteen twenty two in the French journal de physique and Um.
There were a couple of people that proceeded Uh and
in in fact um, one of whom went on to
be a sort of a mentor to Cope. But I
(07:18):
got named Edward Hitchcock and another guy named Joseph. Is
it Lighty or Leady Um? I think Lighty is what
I've seen the most. Yeah, l I d y Um
and he's the one that went on to to work
with Cope later on. But just put a pin in this.
But in eighteen fifty eight, I'm pretty important find basically
the only big dinosaur find on the East Coast where
(07:41):
the fossil live bones of a herbivore name Hadrosaurus Folky
in New Jersey. And it was a big deal because
it was on the East Coast and this is where
the stuff was going on in 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 fine and Um Lighty Uh was called in to
(08:01):
excavate it and put it together because he was America's
first vertebrate paleontologists. He was the first guy and was
really prolific and really good at what he did. Um,
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
(08:24):
of energy came in the eighteen fifties, early eighteen fifties,
and Um, within about fifteen maybe twenty years, there were
a pair of guys who would 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. I mean, that's the point of all this, right,
(08:46):
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. So it was a really exciting,
like dynamic time for the field of paleontology. But but
a field of science is the character of it is
based on its earliest practitioners. And Lighty Um was a
(09:09):
very steady, normal scientist who was 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. Um No, I
don't think necessarily to this day, but there was a
a lot of sniping that used to go on in
the field of paleontology. That that was because of the
(09:31):
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
and undermine one another's work. Um, so we're talking about
two dudes. Uh, one is Marsh and one is Cope
(09:51):
on off. Neil. I've never heard that name before. I
I think his parents made it up. Maybe O T
H N I E I'll auth. Neil Charles March born
in October one in New York and he was Um.
They didn't have a lot of money in his family.
They were farmers. Um, he would have been a farmer,
(10:12):
but he had and this kind of really changed his life.
He had a very rich uncle named George Peabody, UM,
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 I like the look of
you and your brain, nephew, and you're gonna go to
(10:34):
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. You know, smarts are always evident. Okay,
Well he plucked him out, sent him to boring school,
then sent him to Yale, and eventually sent him off
to grad school in Germany. So um, Marsh. We're just
gonna call him Marsh because his name is just too
(10:56):
ugly and horrible to say out loud. Um. He was
basically set. He was fine. He had a benefactor in
his extraordinarily wealthy um philanthropist uncle. Yeah. So Cope. On
the other hand, Um 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
(11:19):
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was born in July eight forty,
and he went to you know all the Uh, I
was gonna say trappings, but I guess all the benefits
of being born into money. He went to very nice,
expensive boarding school. Uh, and that wasn't so much up
his alley. So he dropped out when he was sixteen,
(11:40):
and uh, because he had a rich rich dad. Um,
it allowed him a lot of opportunities that other people
wouldn't have, including you know, going to college later on,
even though he never graduated high school. Yeah, well so
there so it was definitely in part because of his dad.
But also this was a time and like say the
(12:00):
eighteen fifties, it was lax. But also like even if
you wanted to go on and become like a um,
get a PhD, American universities weren't you know, they didn't
offer many PhD programs in sciences, right, So there was
a there was a whole um something called gentleman naturalists
(12:22):
who were amateur self taught um scientists who just 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 um, that old school of
gentleman naturalists where there was you could you could go
figure it out yourself without needing to go through the university.
(12:44):
But he did that just on the cusp like our
parents generation was just on the cusp of the last
group who could get away without knowing how to use email.
He was like part of that last generation that could
become a scientist with out having to go through formal
training at a university. Right, Like if you have a
tweed suit with a stiff color and a pencil and
(13:07):
a pad, you can and lots of time on your hands. Yeah,
and that's that's I mean. To 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
keep 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 context. But I
(13:28):
get the impression that he worked his way uh into
those places. Once he got in, he he didn't just low.
He learned what he needed to learn. Yeah. I mean,
because if there's one thing we're gonna learn about Cope
here over the next thirty 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 your guy? Yep? Interesting?
(13:51):
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, 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 Lytey.
He was one of his professors. So that just you know,
(14:13):
kind of kick started their relationship. Um. During the Civil War,
he went to Europe um the American Civil War because
he didn't want to be you know, he didn't want
to go to war. He didn't want to go fight.
He want to go dig up bones. Yeah, and he
was a Quaker pacifist too, that's right. So he went
to Germany, uh In in eighteen sixty three, he met
marsh and they really liked each other at first. They
(14:35):
had a lot in common, obviously, and I get the
feeling that in Germany in eighteen sixty three there were
probably not a ton of Americans who were super interested
in dinosaur hunting, and so they they locked up, became
really good pals. Uh. They came back to the US
after the Civil War and friends, and we're both like,
(14:56):
all right, we're gonna go do our thing independently, but
we're gonna keep touch. We're gonna 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 brother brothers during the German meeting. Okay, so
that's what we're going with, because they really did like
each other, um, and things were going along just fine too,
(15:20):
kindred spirits with a common interest in paleontology, um. And
they may have continued on that way, although I sincerely
doubt that that's the case, um, which means I just
undermine my own statement. But Um, after the Civil War
they both went back to the United States to start careers,
their own careers, and marsh um or Cope, I'm sorry.
(15:44):
He had connected with Joseph Lydy, 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
Ldy to um study bones that were found at hadden
Field in New Jersey. Were light You found that first skeleton, right,
And so being friends with Mars, she naturally Cope naturally
(16:05):
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 gonna love it. And so Marsh came out for
a visit and this was this is mark one in
the turning point of their relationship. There were two distinct
marks um, each of them point to one is the
the end of their friendship. This was the the end
(16:25):
of their friendship starting with Cope. That's right. So both
of these guys had uh privilege, like we've been talking about. Um.
For Marsha's part, his uncle, his rich uncle, donated a
hundred and fifty grand to Yale basically to sort of
get March a job. They created the Peabody Museum of
(16:46):
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 based it cost a hundred and fifty
grand to get Marsh Uh this this job as the
chair of Department of Paleontology at this new Peabody Museum
(17:08):
at Yale University, right, And so they said, yes, Um,
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
that's Marsh setting off on his little trajectory, basically ensconcing
himself in Yale Cope. Um, remember he was basically a
(17:33):
high school dropout and he had to kind of make
his own way. Um. He had trouble at first finding
a position until he struck upon a place called Haverford
College and he got a position as a professor of
zoology there. Um, And they said, well, you're a high
school dropout, so we'll just give you an honorary Masters
(17:53):
of Arts degree. Being now you're a professor. It's pretty
working out for both of these guys. Yeah, although Cope
didn't really like have her for that much. Um, he
ends up quitting. Um. And it actually kind of its
kind of describes his personality a little bit that that
incident that he would get a good job, um, having
(18:17):
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 there. Yeah,
I mean it's it 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, Um,
(18:38):
a little more outgoing. Marsh was a little quieter and
kind of known as a bit of a flake. Uh.
You know, but considering their backgrounds, it sort of makes
sense where they ended up, Um Marsh, you know that
they went about their work in very different ways. Marsh
didn't publish his first paper until he was thirty years old. Um,
(19:00):
he was a lifelong bachelor. Cope married when he was
twenty five. And Cope, you know, even the way they
wrote co wrote these very sort of flowery um descriptions
of things. Well, Marsh was much more sort of rigid
and sort of dry and scientific. Yeah, Like if you
if you read Cope stuff, he's trying to like set
the scene for you. You know, there's one paper where
(19:22):
he was describing terrod actyls, and like 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 cliff side by the ocean
as a troop of these things were dangling by their claws.
You know. Yeah, it's super cool. It would definitely transport
the reader there, and it was a little extra doll
(19:45):
above something that 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
(20:05):
that a bit later. Um, the big difference in their
earlier careers was when when it came to religion. Um,
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 in Darwin, whereas Cope kind of had them
(20:27):
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 make it
made it all work according to his you know, religious beliefs,
which is I mean back then a little a little
(20:49):
bit different, but even back then for a scientist, sort
of an odd thing, yeah for sure. But he he
he tried to rectify science and 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 um changes in a population take place on
the individual level. Like an example I saw was if
(21:11):
you're a blacksmith and you UM use your arm a
bunch to hammer, you're gonna get a big old bulky arm. Right. Well,
when you have kids, you're gonna 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
(21:34):
to make it more likely for you to 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 like struggle for Cope throughout
his lifetime um rectifying the two, especially considering Chuck that
the body of work that he produced really helped prove
(21:55):
Darwin's point more than anything. Yeah, Um, when it comes
still like where things went wrong because they were still
buddies up until this point, Uh, it seemingly looks like
Marsh drew first blood. UM we mentioned that hadn't field
dig earlier. So it's UM eight sixty eight. Cope has
left his job at Haversford. UM. He's not very happy there,
(22:17):
so he leaves. He's really kind of feed on the
ground doing the work UM publishing papers which will see
later at an alarming rate, and working with Lightie, who
we talked about. And he invited Marsh because their buddies,
and he was like, dude, you gotta come check this out.
We found a legit dinosaur fossil on the east coast.
(22:39):
Marsh was 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. Then he sneaks back
later on by himself and bribes the workers there, Copes
workers and Lighties workers and says, hey, man, if you
find any more good specimens, send them to this address,
(23:00):
and here's some a little dough for your effort. Can
you believe that? Yeah? I mean just straight up sold
him out right. So Marsh has just outed himself as
a very wormy type of fellow not to be trusted
and the way that I thought there was a really
great American Experience episode called Dinosaur Wars that really kind
of described it. Like to to Cope, he subscribed to
(23:22):
that gentleman's 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 corey. Not cool, that was Cope's take. From
Marsha's point of view, he was kind of from the uh,
the business like American school of of um just conquer
(23:44):
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 Marsha'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 tell natively remained friends with you.
All Right, Well, let's take a break and we'll come
back right after this and we'll we'll talk about what
(24:08):
marsh always said was the reason they were no longer
friends right after this. All right, So Marsha has really
(24:37):
screwed his friend over, Yeah, I mean 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
that was not what really killed our friendship at all.
Here's what happened. Later on that year, Cope published a
paper um establishing this new species at Las most Saris plutarius. Nice,
(25:03):
thank you. Um. 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, and Cope showing
off his things, like look at this thing. I put
this thing back together and look at the 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.
(25:31):
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 his mistake.
(25:52):
And um, the way that the way that Marsh put
it later, because he ran around telling everybody he could
about this gap was very glib about oh, very very
um like he he went, he just wanted to make
sure that everybody knew that Cope had screwed up right. Um.
Whereas he characterized the story, he characterized himself in the
story is just having gently pointed this out. He basically
(26:14):
said that Cope's vanity um was wounded and 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 our friendship. Never mind the whole going
behind his back thing at hadden Field. This is really
(26:35):
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 Lydy, 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 is marsh comes in and
(26:55):
just says, oh, actually the neck vertebrae is in is
in the wrong position and that got everyone over there looking,
and Lighty is the one who actually said, oh no,
you have the head in the wrong place where the
tail is, and so fully paint a picture here. This
wasn't like some huge, big deal like mistakes. It was
(27:16):
very early on in paleontology. Everyone was doing their best. Uh.
There was a lot of trial and error going on,
a lot of guesswork. And it wasn't like, oh my gosh,
she you know it's 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 now. And and it is true
(27:40):
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
um humiliated, especially the fact that Marsh was involved. But
it definitely wasn't Marsh running to the rescue to save
paleontology um and and Coke just being a voice. Overall,
it was definitely an incorrect picture that Marsh painted. But
(28:03):
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 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
(28:26):
reference some of the stuff in the past, but that
even that eventually dried up and they genuinely became bitter
bitter rivals, made all the more pronounced um 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 were the well the the conditions
(28:47):
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, that the timing
of the two is just astoundingly perfect. Yeah, I mean,
we're talking about the Dakotas, Kansas, um just bones everywhere
(29:11):
and not even too hard to find a lot of times.
I mean, if you were a paleontologist and you headed west,
if you had some protection, because this is despite all
our efforts, that was still sort of a dangerous area
for a white man from the east to be traveling around. Um,
the Native American tribes there and the Western tribes did
not take kindly to a lot of it, No, because
(29:33):
think about it, like, they went from you know, wagon
trains of settlers coming through periodically, two trains daily moving
people in and out. So it was a big deal
to the Western tribes, um, who were fighting back and
pushing back against this encroachment and wave that was coming
much more strongly than it had been before. The railroad too, Yeah,
(29:54):
for sure. So from this point on, the guys took
very um sort of different I guess were forced to
take different approaches to their careers. Um cope. It basically
spent the rest of his life as a working paleontologist,
like feed 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. Um. He was not like
(30:17):
taking care of or funded by the government. So he
paid for all the you know, he came from a
wealthy family, so he paid for most of the 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
(30:40):
contributing to his um financial burdens, he I guess technically
owned this stuff, right. He he owned a 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 did not only open the West,
that helped ship enormous bones back east to the museums.
But he was paying for this, So yeah, that his
(31:01):
collection was his own. Um. Marsh, on the other hand,
being ensconsed 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 um, technically it really wasn't
(31:22):
because he hadn't financed any of it himself. It had
all been financed by others. The thing 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
(31:43):
rich if you can remember what he did to Cope
back at hadden Field, 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 belonged to him for sure. Um,
so Cope and you know, when it comes to academics,
they also were really really different and how they approached things. Um.
We kind of teased earlier about how much Cope wrote
(32:06):
and published, and boy, it's astounding. Um it seems like
he published throughout his career about fourteen hundred academic papers. Uh.
In the eighteen seventies he was doing about twenty five
papers a year, and in one winter alone of eighteen
seventy nine and eighteen eighty he published seventies six papers,
(32:26):
very prolific to the point where it was pretty easy
for someone like Marsh to poke holes and um kind
of say that he was either copying people, or plagiarizing people,
or just outright fraudulent, and that no one can write
this much stuff. It also presented a problem in that Cope, Um,
(32:46):
he was publishing so much that he had a hard
time getting stuff published as a while 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 ten
things a month from you or a chord or because
we'll just call this thing the Coke Journal. And he said,
that's a great idea. So in eighteen seventy seven he
(33:07):
bought the American Naturalist Journal for himself to publish all
his own works, which ended up being a really uh,
I don't know about bad choice, but financially it is
what really put the biggest dent in his uh future
fortunes was sinking a ton of his own money into
this American Naturalist Journal. Oh is that right? I thought
(33:29):
it was the silver mine. The journals set him up
for it. Oh yeah, the silver mine was the 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, um,
whether it was a good business opportunity or not, he
has a forum to publish in um. And And like
(33:49):
you're 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 of
these journals, like, wait a minute, if you're like a deliberate,
thoughtful scientists, 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 that really kind of
(34:09):
got both of them to be the first to rush
to name a species or make some new discovery um
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 slappy, sloppy taxonomical work
where the same species is getting different names from different
people at the same time, that takes a lot to entangle.
(34:32):
And apparently it took um paleontology many decades to kind
of undo some of the sloppy work that was kind
of late at the foundation of the field in the
eighteen seventies. Yeah, and especially at Cope's feet, because for
his part, Marsh was very, very much more methodical, did
not publish nearly as many papers, but along with that
(34:53):
comes a lot more prestige. No one was gonna, um,
no one's going to talk about Marsh and say that
he's publishing too much he's doing sloppy work. Uh 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 time to make them pay their
(35:15):
own way, because this is all a very expensive endeavor
for the time. Um you know, Cope was was sort
of creative and how he would fund some of this,
like he would latch onto other Western expeditions that had
nothing to do with paleontology. This was one called the
Wheeler Survey, which was a mapping expedition that he was
able to hook up with. So he would cut corners
(35:36):
and save where he could. But with the power of
Yale University behind him in the students who would pay
their own way, Marsh had a real advantage when it
came to uh staking his claim at West right. And
also there was one of the first expeditions he went
on um was funded by the families of some Yale students,
So it was some you know, Yale students and Marsh
(35:58):
basically playing cowboy out West and the first I guess
the first day once they arrived out West where they
were gonna dig Um, Buffalo Bill Cody shows up basically
kind of like as a guest star to appear and
just delight and thrill the Yale boys, Um, one of
whom wrote about the whole expedition, and the whole thing
(36:19):
up published in Harper's. So the whole thing kind of
demonstrates that Um 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.
(36:40):
And uh yeah, he would toot his own horn for sure. Um.
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, um excavating and then sending bones back to
(37:03):
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. We're at the at the
direction and behest of these two. So you want to
(37:23):
take another break and then get into what the bone
wars are really all about. Okay, we'll be right back,
(37:52):
all right, Chuck. So the seventies roll around the west
has opened up from the Transcontinental Railroad. The it's giving up.
It's fossils. It's just crazy how well preserved fossils are
out there because of um heat and dryness and wind
erosion exposes them. And there was a part of that
American Experience documentary where, um, they showed a picture of
(38:18):
like just this landscape that you could see from the train,
and um, they said that 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. That that's 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
(38:40):
just one place would become like a treasure trove, and
another place would become a treasure trove, and each of
these places, Um, 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 gonna want to know about this
and they'll probably pay big bucks for it. And that's
really once they stopped um mounting their own expeditions. That's
(39:04):
how they got most of their bones is from amateurs
getting in touch with them. Yeah, so this, you know,
this would open the door for these guys to really
kind of um 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 like you know, eventually,
(39:25):
like I said, both of these guys would end up
pretty much financially ruined in the end. Uh. There were
reports of sabotage of theft um. There were reports of
dynamiting the other person's like digs 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,
(39:48):
smash them, do not leave them, because I don't want
Cope to possibly be able to get him himself. Not
only that, but the bones that they would, like, smaller
fines that they would dig up that they didn't think
were as important. Uh, 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
(40:09):
because of their rivalry. That's the insane degree that it reached. Yeah,
and you know it's easy now to um. 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. Um, I don't know if
they found actual evidence that they would dynamite each other's camps. Um.
It seems like the most they would do is like,
(40:30):
you know, push dirt back onto the things that they
had dug up and not you know, again their their
lackeys out there are doing this stuff. Um. And you
know these guys, this was all kind of perpetrated by
Martian Cope themselves. They would kind of trump up these stories,
uh 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
(40:53):
like um 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
(41:14):
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, um and
one hand. What if they would have worked together and
pulled their resources, maybe they could have found a lot
more and gotten a lot of more things straight that
they didn't have to untangle later. Or maybe because they
were so competitive and drove each other to work harder,
(41:35):
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 a hundred and twenty six 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
(41:56):
of dinosaur because so little work had been done in
the field. But yeah, they definitely did drive one another
to um, to 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 winner of eighteen
(42:16):
seventy seven that I was talking about. Um, this is
like winter and wyoming. It's not a very welcoming climate. Um.
And yet both marsh and Cope hired their prospectors, their
bone diggers to um continue working through the winner. Rather
than taking a break like you traditionally when you dug
in the summer wrote papers in the winter, they said, no,
(42:39):
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 winner, we got Triceratops, we
got a Patasaurus vegas source all from that one winner
of eighteen seventy seven. And if you can't look back
(42:59):
and say, yes, these guys drove one another to 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? Okay? I mean as a paleontologist, you
could literally just say, uh, you know the Triceratops, I
discovered it. Yeah, and that could be it. That could
(43:22):
be your career right there. Let alone the Stegasaurus on
top of the triceratops come on, and then a Patosaurus. Um,
that may sound vaguely familiar, but here, let me drop
one on you that you'll say, Oh, you're ready, Braunosaurus,
same thing. Apparently, Yeah, I didn't. I didn't even fully
get I mean, this gets into the weeds with like
(43:44):
serious paleontology pedantry and nord ing out. But yeah, I
see Bronosaurus. Allow me to nerd out for just a second. Um.
The point of the Patosaurus Bronosaurus being the same thing
with different names as one of those things that's frequently
laid at the feet of Marsh is saying this was
sloppy work on Marsh's part, and maybe if he hadn't
(44:07):
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 paleontologists about twenty thirty years
later came along and said, I think this is the
same thing. Since they were called the patosaurs first, that's
what we're going to call this from now on. And
so scientifically, Bronosaurus should have gone. I can't believe about
(44:31):
to say is the way of the dinosaur, But somehow
it got into the cultural zeitgeist and everybody said, no,
we like saying bronosaurus more. I blame the Simpsons or
um the flint Stones because of the Brontosaurus burger thing.
Who knows if that's the case or not, but that
was that was supposedly the bronosaurs and the Patosaurus are
(44:54):
the same thing, and really you're supposed to call him
a patosaurs nerd ing out. So in the eighties, this
is after the big rush of the late seventies, Uh,
things started to change a bit. So marsh has got
a couple of good jobs. He's the he's uh he
works at the U S Geological Survey and as the
(45:14):
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 Um 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
(45:35):
own way, the dinosaur wars have kind of ebbed a
little bit and they can just kind of go off
and and work as paleontal just for the rest of
their life. Marsh decides to come after Cope um 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
(45:57):
the U. S g S, and he used that connection
to freeze Cope out of any 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 mind that that he used the rest
of his money for. Basically the silver mine went bust,
(46:17):
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
(46:39):
some laws into the U s g S. Um I
guess by laws had said if a government, if a
government program or agency has funded an expedition, any fossils
collected from that expedition belonged to the government. And he
sent the U s g S after Cope's collection. He
tried to take Cope's collection the own you think Cope
(47:00):
had left. He didn't have his family anymore. Um. 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. Uh. He
(47:22):
did get a job. He in eighty nine he was
hired as professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania.
So that's good. At least had a little bit of
an income, and UH it was they were dead to
each other at this point, though Um spent a lifetime
battling each other. Cope was just infuriated at the links
Marsh would go. It was all just very petty UM
(47:46):
at this point. And neither one of them come out
looking great because of a career of sort of backstabbing
each other. And Um they went to the press. UH.
In the end, I think it was Cope he had
taken these copious note 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
(48:07):
about this, but it ended up just making both of
them look bad. It made Marsha look bad because the
things he did made Cope look UM kind of petty
and angry about everything. And this is all kind of
played out in in public in the press, right and
in this in this first article UM. When Cope went
to the Herald, UH, he accused not just UM Marsh
(48:27):
of of UM like wrongdoing, but also the USGS of corruption.
And that actually got the interest of Congress, who started investigating,
and UH ended up cutting the U s G s
IS budget by like half, so Marsha ended up losing
his job in his position as head paleontologist at the U.
S g S. And in a beautiful ironic twist, that
(48:50):
law that he himself had inserted UH in through the
U s g S that anybody who's collection UM had
been financed by the US government it UM 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
(49:11):
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 eighteen ninety seven at the age of
fifty six, 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 is
(49:32):
bigger than your brain. Marsha never took the bait. He
died in eighteen eighty nine of pneumonia at the age
of sixty eight, and by all accounts, did not UH
take part in this brain measuring UH competition. This this
posthumous competition in the grave, which I think is kind
(49:52):
of funny. Um, But to that brain, I think Cope's
brain is still uh 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 eighty species to cops fifty six, which is
(50:16):
not bad. Plus also Cope has that papers under his
belt too. It's a lot of papers. Uh. You got
anything else about the bone Wars? Well, that's it, everybody.
There's 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
(50:36):
go bread up more on it because it's pretty interesting stuff.
And since I said um it a bunch of times,
just now it's time for listener mail. Alright, I'm gonna
call this Civil Air Patrol. This is from Jackson. Uh
share belati. Can I ask you a question? There was
a big influx of Civil Air Patrol emails out of nowhere?
(50:59):
Did you notice? I did not? Yeah, we got like
a handful of him just out of the blue and
I didn't know if if something happened or what, but
I guess it's making the round somehow. Who knows. Maybe
we're on the Civil Air Patrol watch list web blog.
So uh from Jackson, he says, I have been a
listener for about seven years, since I was ten years old. Anyway,
(51:22):
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. Is not a ton of people
even though he exists. Uh. Some say we are the
Air Force's best kept secret. I don't know about that. Yeah,
might have something on you guys. Uh, it is nice
(51:43):
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 you could do a short stuff on
it someday. Cadet life is more of a training life
than in actually doing the stuff, uh, like learning how
to eat effectively and all that jazz. We also have
a lot of mini bootcamp things that we go to
(52:05):
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. It's
not bad, not a bad night. Green Mountain Composite Squadron
sounds like a wholesale furniture material. I was gonna say
(52:28):
it sounds like a sort of a modern blue grass band.
Oh that's a good one too. Yeah, like there's a
lot of synth in ball Okay, synthon mandolin Okay. And
that was from Jackson. That's right, Jackson. Is he the
front man for this blue grass band? Of course? All right, Well,
thanks a lot for for writing in Jackson. Hopefully we'll
(52:48):
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(53:13):
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Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck and we're coming to
see you guys, some of you some cities. Just listen up.
That's right, because you know, we just did Chicago and
Toronto and it went great, and I think our topic
ofp went really well. Did everyone loved hearing about me?
That's right. So if you're in Boston, you can come
see us in August twenty nine at the Wilbur Portland, Maine, Maine,
(00:22):
at the State Theater on August thirty. If I can't wait,
I'm gonna Labor Day weekend. I'm gonna stay the whole weekend.
I'll be all over Maine. That's great, man. Where else,
We're gonna be in Orlando on October nine, and then
on October t we're going to be in New Orleans, Man.
And then later on that month we're doing a three
night stand at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn. That's right. Is
sold out. You can still get tickets for the and
(00:45):
we will see you then. Check it out at s
y s K live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you
should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles to Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there and
(01:07):
raw that was a limp limp. Laugh, Chuck, I've gotten
way better laughs out of either. Uh. Are you a
dinosaur A little bit? I got a little dinosaur in me,
a little Neander Tall in me. I learned from twenty
three and me. Um. But despite my dinosaur heritage, I
(01:31):
was never a big time into dinosaurs as a kid.
Were you not? Like it's astounding, Chuck, how similar we
were as children. Ums. I didn't smoke when I was
seven years old fourteen. I was the right bold asia
before started smoking. Um. So it wasn't like, I don't
(01:52):
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 like figurines here there, But it wasn't anything
like I was nerdy about in any way, shape or form. Yeah,
And I mean I think there was there's a certain
movie that really really got kids into dinosaurs, The Lost
(02:14):
World No Ferris Putler's Day Off. Uh, And that movie
came out you know when I was older. Yeah. Here,
I think I wasn't even remember what year that was.
I feel like I was in college, though I want
to say it was like ninety two to ninety four,
one of those years. That's what I would guess. But
kids these days are and it's not just my kid,
(02:36):
but I see lots of kids in her age group
that are obsessed with dinosaurs. Yeah, and I think that's cool, Like,
what a cool thing to be obsessed with that. It
teaches you so much stuff you know about the deep past,
about evolution, um, about you know, walking lizard, bird creatures.
You know, there's a lot, there's a lot to learn from,
(02:57):
like being interested in dinosaurs. That's very cool thing to
be interested in. About death and extinction, sure, rotting, fossilization,
all the good stuff, right, Um, But the whole interest,
including the interest that was around when we were kids
that just kind of passed us by, but definitely, you know,
the interest in dinosaurs that gave rise to the idea
(03:19):
of Michael Krecht and 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 um a specific winter in a specific place
in the nineteenth century. In the winter of eighteen seventy
seven in particular, and it was the result of a vicious,
(03:43):
mean spirited, petty rivalry between two paleontologists that really kind
of sparked America's interest in dinosaurs. Yeah, I mean it
feels very Tesla. Uh who's the other guy? What was
his name? Marconi? Maybe your Ferris Bueller. Yeah, that it's
(04:05):
really reminded me of the Tesla Ferris Bueller rivalry. Ferris
won that one fare in the Current Wars, which, by
the way, that movies coming out. Have you seen the trailer?
You know? Who plays who? You know? I can't remember now,
but I saw it the other day and it looks
it looks pretty good. Nicholas Cage plays both roles. O, God,
how great would that be? It would be pretty great?
(04:26):
Ce DC just like that's two hours right there. 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 now? I kind
of wondered though. Yeah, it was scheduled for production. Steve
Carrell was going to play Cope, Oh and James Gandelfini
(04:48):
was gonna play Marsh and James Gandolfini died unexpectedly and
the production just got kai boshed. And they also found
out that the title The Bone Wars had already been
taken by a adult pornography. Yep, we're so on the
same page. We totally children no interest in Jurassic Park
(05:09):
or any dinosaurs, but we think the names of porno
films is hilarious. That's our our big interest. So I
thought it was funny, you know. We we commissioned this
piece for for the Grabster, and he's a big dinosaur guy,
and he was somewhat shamed. He was like, I just
and he said it two or three times, like I
can't believe I didn't know about these guys. Yeah, We're like,
(05:29):
it's okay, grab sir, It's all right. Yeah. But so
I feel like he learned something along the way. UM.
And he starts out, and I think it's a good
thing for us to talk a little bit about just
um before these dudes, how paleot paleontology came about um
and that had you know, I think since people just
started stumbling upon bones, even by accident, before it was
(05:51):
even a discipline. People were like, oh man, look at
that thing. I'm gonna pick that up and take it
with me, right. I think they used to get classified
also is mythological creatures or dead gods or something like that. Um.
But the first documented paleontological expedition in North America was
(06:11):
carried out by none other than Lewis and Clark. 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
kin Burns Peace, but that you know one of the
things they did, I mean they were they were logging everything,
including bone deposits. But they spent like a week um
(06:33):
around salt lick flats or salt like gully or salt
like something, um where there was a big old salt
like that used to attract dinosaurs and um pli sustine
mammals um from two different periods. Everybody puts your emails away, um,
and the bones that would collect there were really significant.
(06:54):
So they spent a week like excavating there. But that
was the first one. But that was even before the
world the word paleontology was coined. Yeah, that was in
eighteen twenty two in the French journal de physique and Um.
There were a couple of people that proceeded Uh and
in in fact um, one of whom went on to
be a sort of a mentor to Cope. But I
(07:18):
got named Edward Hitchcock and another guy named Joseph. Is
it Lighty or Leady Um? I think Lighty is what
I've seen the most. Yeah, l I d y Um
and he's the one that went on to to work
with Cope later on. But just put a pin in this.
But in eighteen fifty eight, I'm pretty important find basically
the only big dinosaur find on the East Coast where
(07:41):
the fossil live bones of a herbivore name Hadrosaurus Folky
in New Jersey. And it was a big deal because
it was on the East Coast and this is where
the stuff was going on in 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 fine and Um Lighty Uh was called in to
(08:01):
excavate it and put it together because he was America's
first vertebrate paleontologists. He was the first guy and was
really prolific and really good at what he did. Um,
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
(08:24):
of energy came in the eighteen fifties, early eighteen fifties,
and Um, within about fifteen maybe twenty years, there were
a pair of guys who would 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. I mean, that's the point of all this, right,
(08:46):
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. So it was a really exciting,
like dynamic time for the field of paleontology. But but
a field of science is the character of it is
based on its earliest practitioners. And Lighty Um was a
(09:09):
very steady, normal scientist who was 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. Um No, I
don't think necessarily to this day, but there was a
a lot of sniping that used to go on in
the field of paleontology. That that was because of the
(09:31):
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
and undermine one another's work. Um, so we're talking about
two dudes. Uh, one is Marsh and one is Cope
(09:51):
on off. Neil. I've never heard that name before. I
I think his parents made it up. Maybe O T
H N I E I'll auth. Neil Charles March born
in October one in New York and he was Um.
They didn't have a lot of money in his family.
They were farmers. Um, he would have been a farmer,
(10:12):
but he had and this kind of really changed his life.
He had a very rich uncle named George Peabody, UM,
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 I like the look of
you and your brain, nephew, and you're gonna go to
(10:34):
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. You know, smarts are always evident. Okay,
Well he plucked him out, sent him to boring school,
then sent him to Yale, and eventually sent him off
to grad school in Germany. So um, Marsh. We're just
gonna call him Marsh because his name is just too
(10:56):
ugly and horrible to say out loud. Um. He was
basically set. He was fine. He had a benefactor in
his extraordinarily wealthy um philanthropist uncle. Yeah. So Cope. On
the other hand, Um 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
(11:19):
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was born in July eight forty,
and he went to you know all the Uh, I
was gonna say trappings, but I guess all the benefits
of being born into money. He went to very nice,
expensive boarding school. Uh, and that wasn't so much up
his alley. So he dropped out when he was sixteen,
(11:40):
and uh, because he had a rich rich dad. Um,
it allowed him a lot of opportunities that other people
wouldn't have, including you know, going to college later on,
even though he never graduated high school. Yeah, well so
there so it was definitely in part because of his dad.
But also this was a time and like say the
(12:00):
eighteen fifties, it was lax. But also like even if
you wanted to go on and become like a um,
get a PhD, American universities weren't you know, they didn't
offer many PhD programs in sciences, right, So there was
a there was a whole um something called gentleman naturalists
(12:22):
who were amateur self taught um scientists who just 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 um, that old school of
gentleman naturalists where there was you could you could go
figure it out yourself without needing to go through the university.
(12:44):
But he did that just on the cusp like our
parents generation was just on the cusp of the last
group who could get away without knowing how to use email.
He was like part of that last generation that could
become a scientist with out having to go through formal
training at a university. Right, Like if you have a
tweed suit with a stiff color and a pencil and
(13:07):
a pad, you can and lots of time on your hands. Yeah,
and that's that's I mean. To 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
keep 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 context. But I
(13:28):
get the impression that he worked his way uh into
those places. Once he got in, he he didn't just low.
He learned what he needed to learn. Yeah. I mean,
because if there's one thing we're gonna learn about Cope
here over the next thirty 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 your guy? Yep? Interesting?
(13:51):
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, 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 Lytey.
He was one of his professors. So that just you know,
(14:13):
kind of kick started their relationship. Um. During the Civil War,
he went to Europe um the American Civil War because
he didn't want to be you know, he didn't want
to go to war. He didn't want to go fight.
He want to go dig up bones. Yeah, and he
was a Quaker pacifist too, that's right. So he went
to Germany, uh In in eighteen sixty three, he met
marsh and they really liked each other at first. They
(14:35):
had a lot in common, obviously, and I get the
feeling that in Germany in eighteen sixty three there were
probably not a ton of Americans who were super interested
in dinosaur hunting, and so they they locked up, became
really good pals. Uh. They came back to the US
after the Civil War and friends, and we're both like,
(14:56):
all right, we're gonna go do our thing independently, but
we're gonna keep touch. We're gonna 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 brother brothers during the German meeting. Okay, so
that's what we're going with, because they really did like
each other, um, and things were going along just fine too,
(15:20):
kindred spirits with a common interest in paleontology, um. And
they may have continued on that way, although I sincerely
doubt that that's the case, um, which means I just
undermine my own statement. But Um, after the Civil War
they both went back to the United States to start careers,
their own careers, and marsh um or Cope, I'm sorry.
(15:44):
He had connected with Joseph Lydy, 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
Ldy to um study bones that were found at hadden
Field in New Jersey. Were light You found that first skeleton, right,
And so being friends with Mars, she naturally Cope naturally
(16:05):
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 gonna love it. And so Marsh came out for
a visit and this was this is mark one in
the turning point of their relationship. There were two distinct
marks um, each of them point to one is the
the end of their friendship. This was the the end
(16:25):
of their friendship starting with Cope. That's right. So both
of these guys had uh privilege, like we've been talking about. Um.
For Marsha's part, his uncle, his rich uncle, donated a
hundred and fifty grand to Yale basically to sort of
get March a job. They created the Peabody Museum of
(16:46):
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 based it cost a hundred and fifty
grand to get Marsh Uh this this job as the
chair of Department of Paleontology at this new Peabody Museum
(17:08):
at Yale University, right, And so they said, yes, Um,
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
that's Marsh setting off on his little trajectory, basically ensconcing
himself in Yale Cope. Um, remember he was basically a
(17:33):
high school dropout and he had to kind of make
his own way. Um. He had trouble at first finding
a position until he struck upon a place called Haverford
College and he got a position as a professor of
zoology there. Um, And they said, well, you're a high
school dropout, so we'll just give you an honorary Masters
(17:53):
of Arts degree. Being now you're a professor. It's pretty
working out for both of these guys. Yeah, although Cope
didn't really like have her for that much. Um, he
ends up quitting. Um. And it actually kind of its
kind of describes his personality a little bit that that
incident that he would get a good job, um, having
(18:17):
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 there. Yeah,
I mean it's it 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, Um,
(18:38):
a little more outgoing. Marsh was a little quieter and
kind of known as a bit of a flake. Uh.
You know, but considering their backgrounds, it sort of makes
sense where they ended up, Um Marsh, you know that
they went about their work in very different ways. Marsh
didn't publish his first paper until he was thirty years old. Um,
(19:00):
he was a lifelong bachelor. Cope married when he was
twenty five. And Cope, you know, even the way they
wrote co wrote these very sort of flowery um descriptions
of things. Well, Marsh was much more sort of rigid
and sort of dry and scientific. Yeah, Like if you
if you read Cope stuff, he's trying to like set
the scene for you. You know, there's one paper where
(19:22):
he was describing terrod actyls, and like 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 cliff side by the ocean
as a troop of these things were dangling by their claws.
You know. Yeah, it's super cool. It would definitely transport
the reader there, and it was a little extra doll
(19:45):
above something that 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
(20:05):
that a bit later. Um, the big difference in their
earlier careers was when when it came to religion. Um,
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 in Darwin, whereas Cope kind of had them
(20:27):
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 make it
made it all work according to his you know, religious beliefs,
which is I mean back then a little a little
(20:49):
bit different, but even back then for a scientist, sort
of an odd thing, yeah for sure. But he he
he tried to rectify science and 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 um changes in a population take place on
the individual level. Like an example I saw was if
(21:11):
you're a blacksmith and you UM use your arm a
bunch to hammer, you're gonna get a big old bulky arm. Right. Well,
when you have kids, you're gonna 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
(21:34):
to make it more likely for you to 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 like struggle for Cope throughout
his lifetime um rectifying the two, especially considering Chuck that
the body of work that he produced really helped prove
(21:55):
Darwin's point more than anything. Yeah, Um, when it comes
still like where things went wrong because they were still
buddies up until this point, Uh, it seemingly looks like
Marsh drew first blood. UM we mentioned that hadn't field
dig earlier. So it's UM eight sixty eight. Cope has
left his job at Haversford. UM. He's not very happy there,
(22:17):
so he leaves. He's really kind of feed on the
ground doing the work UM publishing papers which will see
later at an alarming rate, and working with Lightie, who
we talked about. And he invited Marsh because their buddies,
and he was like, dude, you gotta come check this out.
We found a legit dinosaur fossil on the east coast.
(22:39):
Marsh was 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. Then he sneaks back
later on by himself and bribes the workers there, Copes
workers and Lighties workers and says, hey, man, if you
find any more good specimens, send them to this address,
(23:00):
and here's some a little dough for your effort. Can
you believe that? Yeah? I mean just straight up sold
him out right. So Marsh has just outed himself as
a very wormy type of fellow not to be trusted
and the way that I thought there was a really
great American Experience episode called Dinosaur Wars that really kind
of described it. Like to to Cope, he subscribed to
(23:22):
that gentleman's 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 corey. Not cool, that was Cope's take. From
Marsha's point of view, he was kind of from the uh,
the business like American school of of um just conquer
(23:44):
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 Marsha'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 tell natively remained friends with you.
All Right, Well, let's take a break and we'll come
back right after this and we'll we'll talk about what
(24:08):
marsh always said was the reason they were no longer
friends right after this. All right, So Marsha has really
(24:37):
screwed his friend over, Yeah, I mean 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
that was not what really killed our friendship at all.
Here's what happened. Later on that year, Cope published a
paper um establishing this new species at Las most Saris plutarius. Nice,
(25:03):
thank you. Um. 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, and Cope showing
off his things, like look at this thing. I put
this thing back together and look at the 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.
(25:31):
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 his mistake.
(25:52):
And um, the way that the way that Marsh put
it later, because he ran around telling everybody he could
about this gap was very glib about oh, very very
um like he he went, he just wanted to make
sure that everybody knew that Cope had screwed up right. Um.
Whereas he characterized the story, he characterized himself in the
story is just having gently pointed this out. He basically
(26:14):
said that Cope's vanity um was wounded and 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 our friendship. Never mind the whole going
behind his back thing at hadden Field. This is really
(26:35):
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 Lydy, 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 is marsh comes in and
(26:55):
just says, oh, actually the neck vertebrae is in is
in the wrong position and that got everyone over there looking,
and Lighty is the one who actually said, oh no,
you have the head in the wrong place where the
tail is, and so fully paint a picture here. This
wasn't like some huge, big deal like mistakes. It was
(27:16):
very early on in paleontology. Everyone was doing their best. Uh.
There was a lot of trial and error going on,
a lot of guesswork. And it wasn't like, oh my gosh,
she you know it's 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 now. And and it is true
(27:40):
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
um humiliated, especially the fact that Marsh was involved. But
it definitely wasn't Marsh running to the rescue to save
paleontology um and and Coke just being a voice. Overall,
it was definitely an incorrect picture that Marsh painted. But
(28:03):
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 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
(28:26):
reference some of the stuff in the past, but that
even that eventually dried up and they genuinely became bitter
bitter rivals, made all the more pronounced um 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 were the well the the conditions
(28:47):
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, that the timing
of the two is just astoundingly perfect. Yeah, I mean,
we're talking about the Dakotas, Kansas, um just bones everywhere
(29:11):
and not even too hard to find a lot of times.
I mean, if you were a paleontologist and you headed west,
if you had some protection, because this is despite all
our efforts, that was still sort of a dangerous area
for a white man from the east to be traveling around. Um,
the Native American tribes there and the Western tribes did
not take kindly to a lot of it, No, because
(29:33):
think about it, like, they went from you know, wagon
trains of settlers coming through periodically, two trains daily moving
people in and out. So it was a big deal
to the Western tribes, um, who were fighting back and
pushing back against this encroachment and wave that was coming
much more strongly than it had been before. The railroad too, Yeah,
(29:54):
for sure. So from this point on, the guys took
very um sort of different I guess were forced to
take different approaches to their careers. Um cope. It basically
spent the rest of his life as a working paleontologist,
like feed 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. Um. He was not like
(30:17):
taking care of or funded by the government. So he
paid for all the you know, he came from a
wealthy family, so he paid for most of the 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
(30:40):
contributing to his um financial burdens, he I guess technically
owned this stuff, right. He he owned a 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 did not only open the West,
that helped ship enormous bones back east to the museums.
But he was paying for this, So yeah, that his
(31:01):
collection was his own. Um. Marsh, on the other hand,
being ensconsed 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 um, technically it really wasn't
(31:22):
because he hadn't financed any of it himself. It had
all been financed by others. The thing 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
(31:43):
rich if you can remember what he did to Cope
back at hadden Field, 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 belonged to him for sure. Um,
so Cope and you know, when it comes to academics,
they also were really really different and how they approached things. Um.
We kind of teased earlier about how much Cope wrote
(32:06):
and published, and boy, it's astounding. Um it seems like
he published throughout his career about fourteen hundred academic papers. Uh.
In the eighteen seventies he was doing about twenty five
papers a year, and in one winter alone of eighteen
seventy nine and eighteen eighty he published seventies six papers,
(32:26):
very prolific to the point where it was pretty easy
for someone like Marsh to poke holes and um kind
of say that he was either copying people, or plagiarizing people,
or just outright fraudulent, and that no one can write
this much stuff. It also presented a problem in that Cope, Um,
(32:46):
he was publishing so much that he had a hard
time getting stuff published as a while 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 ten
things a month from you or a chord or because
we'll just call this thing the Coke Journal. And he said,
that's a great idea. So in eighteen seventy seven he
(33:07):
bought the American Naturalist Journal for himself to publish all
his own works, which ended up being a really uh,
I don't know about bad choice, but financially it is
what really put the biggest dent in his uh future
fortunes was sinking a ton of his own money into
this American Naturalist Journal. Oh is that right? I thought
(33:29):
it was the silver mine. The journals set him up
for it. Oh yeah, the silver mine was the 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, um,
whether it was a good business opportunity or not, he
has a forum to publish in um. And And like
(33:49):
you're 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 of
these journals, like, wait a minute, if you're like a deliberate,
thoughtful scientists, 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 that really kind of
(34:09):
got both of them to be the first to rush
to name a species or make some new discovery um
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 slappy, sloppy taxonomical work
where the same species is getting different names from different
people at the same time, that takes a lot to entangle.
(34:32):
And apparently it took um paleontology many decades to kind
of undo some of the sloppy work that was kind
of late at the foundation of the field in the
eighteen seventies. Yeah, and especially at Cope's feet, because for
his part, Marsh was very, very much more methodical, did
not publish nearly as many papers, but along with that
(34:53):
comes a lot more prestige. No one was gonna, um,
no one's going to talk about Marsh and say that
he's publishing too much he's doing sloppy work. Uh 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 time to make them pay their
(35:15):
own way, because this is all a very expensive endeavor
for the time. Um you know, Cope was was sort
of creative and how he would fund some of this,
like he would latch onto other Western expeditions that had
nothing to do with paleontology. This was one called the
Wheeler Survey, which was a mapping expedition that he was
able to hook up with. So he would cut corners
(35:36):
and save where he could. But with the power of
Yale University behind him in the students who would pay
their own way, Marsh had a real advantage when it
came to uh staking his claim at West right. And
also there was one of the first expeditions he went
on um was funded by the families of some Yale students,
So it was some you know, Yale students and Marsh
(35:58):
basically playing cowboy out West and the first I guess
the first day once they arrived out West where they
were gonna dig Um, Buffalo Bill Cody shows up basically
kind of like as a guest star to appear and
just delight and thrill the Yale boys, Um, one of
whom wrote about the whole expedition, and the whole thing
(36:19):
up published in Harper's. So the whole thing kind of
demonstrates that Um 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.
(36:40):
And uh yeah, he would toot his own horn for sure. Um.
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, um excavating and then sending bones back to
(37:03):
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. We're at the at the
direction and behest of these two. So you want to
(37:23):
take another break and then get into what the bone
wars are really all about. Okay, we'll be right back,
(37:52):
all right, Chuck. So the seventies roll around the west
has opened up from the Transcontinental Railroad. The it's giving up.
It's fossils. It's just crazy how well preserved fossils are
out there because of um heat and dryness and wind
erosion exposes them. And there was a part of that
American Experience documentary where, um, they showed a picture of
(38:18):
like just this landscape that you could see from the train,
and um, they said that 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. That that's 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
(38:40):
just one place would become like a treasure trove, and
another place would become a treasure trove, and each of
these places, Um, 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 gonna want to know about this
and they'll probably pay big bucks for it. And that's
really once they stopped um mounting their own expeditions. That's
(39:04):
how they got most of their bones is from amateurs
getting in touch with them. Yeah, so this, you know,
this would open the door for these guys to really
kind of um 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 like you know, eventually,
(39:25):
like I said, both of these guys would end up
pretty much financially ruined in the end. Uh. There were
reports of sabotage of theft um. There were reports of
dynamiting the other person's like digs 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,
(39:48):
smash them, do not leave them, because I don't want
Cope to possibly be able to get him himself. Not
only that, but the bones that they would, like, smaller
fines that they would dig up that they didn't think
were as important. Uh, 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
(40:09):
because of their rivalry. That's the insane degree that it reached. Yeah,
and you know it's easy now to um. 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. Um, I don't know if
they found actual evidence that they would dynamite each other's camps. Um.
It seems like the most they would do is like,
(40:30):
you know, push dirt back onto the things that they
had dug up and not you know, again their their
lackeys out there are doing this stuff. Um. And you
know these guys, this was all kind of perpetrated by
Martian Cope themselves. They would kind of trump up these stories,
uh 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
(40:53):
like um 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
(41:14):
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, um and
one hand. What if they would have worked together and
pulled their resources, maybe they could have found a lot
more and gotten a lot of more things straight that
they didn't have to untangle later. Or maybe because they
were so competitive and drove each other to work harder,
(41:35):
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 a hundred and twenty six 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
(41:56):
of dinosaur because so little work had been done in
the field. But yeah, they definitely did drive one another
to um, to 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 winner of eighteen
(42:16):
seventy seven that I was talking about. Um, this is
like winter and wyoming. It's not a very welcoming climate. Um.
And yet both marsh and Cope hired their prospectors, their
bone diggers to um continue working through the winner. Rather
than taking a break like you traditionally when you dug
in the summer wrote papers in the winter, they said, no,
(42:39):
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 winner, we got Triceratops, we
got a Patasaurus vegas source all from that one winner
of eighteen seventy seven. And if you can't look back
(42:59):
and say, yes, these guys drove one another to 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? Okay? I mean as a paleontologist, you
could literally just say, uh, you know the Triceratops, I
discovered it. Yeah, and that could be it. That could
(43:22):
be your career right there. Let alone the Stegasaurus on
top of the triceratops come on, and then a Patosaurus. Um,
that may sound vaguely familiar, but here, let me drop
one on you that you'll say, Oh, you're ready, Braunosaurus,
same thing. Apparently, Yeah, I didn't. I didn't even fully
get I mean, this gets into the weeds with like
(43:44):
serious paleontology pedantry and nord ing out. But yeah, I
see Bronosaurus. Allow me to nerd out for just a second. Um.
The point of the Patosaurus Bronosaurus being the same thing
with different names as one of those things that's frequently
laid at the feet of Marsh is saying this was
sloppy work on Marsh's part, and maybe if he hadn't
(44:07):
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 paleontologists about twenty thirty years
later came along and said, I think this is the
same thing. Since they were called the patosaurs first, that's
what we're going to call this from now on. And
so scientifically, Bronosaurus should have gone. I can't believe about
(44:31):
to say is the way of the dinosaur, But somehow
it got into the cultural zeitgeist and everybody said, no,
we like saying bronosaurus more. I blame the Simpsons or
um the flint Stones because of the Brontosaurus burger thing.
Who knows if that's the case or not, but that
was that was supposedly the bronosaurs and the Patosaurus are
(44:54):
the same thing, and really you're supposed to call him
a patosaurs nerd ing out. So in the eighties, this
is after the big rush of the late seventies, Uh,
things started to change a bit. So marsh has got
a couple of good jobs. He's the he's uh he
works at the U S Geological Survey and as the
(45:14):
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 Um 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
(45:35):
own way, the dinosaur wars have kind of ebbed a
little bit and they can just kind of go off
and and work as paleontal just for the rest of
their life. Marsh decides to come after Cope um 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
(45:57):
the U. S g S, and he used that connection
to freeze Cope out of any 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 mind that that he used the rest
of his money for. Basically the silver mine went bust,
(46:17):
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
(46:39):
some laws into the U s g S. Um I
guess by laws had said if a government, if a
government program or agency has funded an expedition, any fossils
collected from that expedition belonged to the government. And he
sent the U s g S after Cope's collection. He
tried to take Cope's collection the own you think Cope
(47:00):
had left. He didn't have his family anymore. Um. 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. Uh. He
(47:22):
did get a job. He in eighty nine he was
hired as professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania.
So that's good. At least had a little bit of
an income, and UH it was they were dead to
each other at this point, though Um spent a lifetime
battling each other. Cope was just infuriated at the links
Marsh would go. It was all just very petty UM
(47:46):
at this point. And neither one of them come out
looking great because of a career of sort of backstabbing
each other. And Um they went to the press. UH.
In the end, I think it was Cope he had
taken these copious note 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
(48:07):
about this, but it ended up just making both of
them look bad. It made Marsha look bad because the
things he did made Cope look UM kind of petty
and angry about everything. And this is all kind of
played out in in public in the press, right and
in this in this first article UM. When Cope went
to the Herald, UH, he accused not just UM Marsh
(48:27):
of of UM like wrongdoing, but also the USGS of corruption.
And that actually got the interest of Congress, who started investigating,
and UH ended up cutting the U s G s
IS budget by like half, so Marsha ended up losing
his job in his position as head paleontologist at the U.
S g S. And in a beautiful ironic twist, that
(48:50):
law that he himself had inserted UH in through the
U s g S that anybody who's collection UM had
been financed by the US government it UM 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
(49:11):
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 eighteen ninety seven at the age of
fifty six, 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 is
(49:32):
bigger than your brain. Marsha never took the bait. He
died in eighteen eighty nine of pneumonia at the age
of sixty eight, and by all accounts, did not UH
take part in this brain measuring UH competition. This this
posthumous competition in the grave, which I think is kind
(49:52):
of funny. Um, But to that brain, I think Cope's
brain is still uh 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 eighty species to cops fifty six, which is
(50:16):
not bad. Plus also Cope has that papers under his
belt too. It's a lot of papers. Uh. You got
anything else about the bone Wars? Well, that's it, everybody.
There's 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
(50:36):
go bread up more on it because it's pretty interesting stuff.
And since I said um it a bunch of times,
just now it's time for listener mail. Alright, I'm gonna
call this Civil Air Patrol. This is from Jackson. Uh
share belati. Can I ask you a question? There was
a big influx of Civil Air Patrol emails out of nowhere?
(50:59):
Did you notice? I did not? Yeah, we got like
a handful of him just out of the blue and
I didn't know if if something happened or what, but
I guess it's making the round somehow. Who knows. Maybe
we're on the Civil Air Patrol watch list web blog.
So uh from Jackson, he says, I have been a
listener for about seven years, since I was ten years old. Anyway,
(51:22):
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. Is not a ton of people
even though he exists. Uh. Some say we are the
Air Force's best kept secret. I don't know about that. Yeah,
might have something on you guys. Uh, it is nice
(51:43):
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 you could do a short stuff on
it someday. Cadet life is more of a training life
than in actually doing the stuff, uh, like learning how
to eat effectively and all that jazz. We also have
a lot of mini bootcamp things that we go to
(52:05):
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. It's
not bad, not a bad night. Green Mountain Composite Squadron
sounds like a wholesale furniture material. I was gonna say
(52:28):
it sounds like a sort of a modern blue grass band.
Oh that's a good one too. Yeah, like there's a
lot of synth in ball Okay, synthon mandolin Okay. And
that was from Jackson. That's right, Jackson. Is he the
front man for this blue grass band? Of course? All right, Well,
thanks a lot for for writing in Jackson. Hopefully we'll
(52:48):
fulfilled all of your requests. Uh and if we didn't
t s for you, If you want to get in
touch with us like Jackson did, you can go on
to stuff you Should Know dot com and check out
our social links, or you can send us a good
old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off to stuff podcast at i Heart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(53:13):
of i Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio, app, Apple podcasts,
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