Selects: What Were the BONE WARS?

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 in this classic episode. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:39Speaker 03

  Hello, happy Saturday, everybody. What were the bone wars? Why am I asking you? Because I'm the one who knows. This episode was from August of 2019 and it was all about the bone wars, something I knew nothing about until we did this episode. One of the top three reasons why I love this job. I get just a little bit smarter every week and I hope you do too. Please enjoy.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:16Josh Clark?

  Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry over there and rah.

• 2:27Josh Clark?

  That was a limp, limp laugh Chuck. I've gotten way better laughs out of you than.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Are you a dinosaur?

• 2:36Josh Clark?

  A little bit. I got a little dinosaur in me. Got a little Neanderthal in me. I learned from 23andMe.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44Josh Clark?

  But despite my dinosaur heritage, I was never big time into dinosaurs as a kid. Were you?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:50Josh Clark?

  Not like, it's astounding Chuck, how similar we were as children.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  I know.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  The only difference is I didn't smoke when I was seven years old.

• 3:01Josh Clark?

  14. I was ripe old age of 14 when I started smoking. So it wasn't like, I don't know if it was the same with you. It's not like I had anything against dinosaurs or kids who like dinosaurs. I thought they were kind of cool and I had some like, like figurines here or there, but it wasn't anything like I was nerdy about in any way, shape or form.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I mean, I think there was, there's a certain movie that really, really got kids into dinosaurs.

• 3:30Josh Clark?

  The Lost World.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  No, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  And that movie came out, you know, when I was older.

• 3:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, same here.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  I think I was, I don't even remember what year that was. I feel like I was in college though.

• 3:43Josh Clark?

  I wouldn't say it was like 92 to 94, one of those years. That's what I would guess.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  But kids these days are, and it's not just my kid, but I see lots of kids in her age group that are obsessed with dinosaurs.

• 3:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And I think that's cool. Like what a cool thing to be obsessed with. It teaches you so much stuff, you know, about the deep past, about evolution,

• 4:08Josh Clark?

  about, you know, walking lizard, bird creatures. You know, there's a lot, there's a lot to learn from like being interested in dinosaurs. That's a very cool thing to be interested in.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  About death and extinction?

• 4:18Josh Clark?

  Sure, rotting, fossilization.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, all the good stuff.

• 4:22Josh Clark?

  Right. 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 of Michael Crichton even writing Jurassic Park, and then Steven Spielberg even making it into a movie. That interest in dinosaurs in America, you can actually trace back to almost a specific winter in a specific place in the 19th century, in the winter of 1877 in particular. And it was the result of a vicious, mean-spirited, petty rivalry

• 5:03Josh Clark?

  between two paleontologists that really kind of sparked America's interest in dinosaurs.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it feels very Tesla. Who's the other guy?

• 5:15Josh Clark?

  Oh, what was his name, Marconi maybe, or Ferris Bueller?

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it really reminded me of the Tesla-Ferris Bueller rivalry.

• 5:25Josh Clark?

  Ferris won that one fair and square.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  And the Current Wars, which, by the way, that movie's coming out. Have you seen the trailer? About the Current Wars?

• 5:31Josh Clark?

  No, who plays who?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  You know, I can't remember now, but I saw it the other day, and it looks, it looks pretty good.

• 5:37Josh Clark?

  Nicolas Cage plays both roles.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Oh, God, how great would that be?

• 5:41Josh Clark?

  It would be pretty great.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  AC, DC!

• 5:44Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Just like, that's two hours, right there.

• 5:46Josh Clark?

  Right. 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?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  No, I kind of wondered, though.

• 5:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was scheduled for production. Steve Carell was gonna play Cope.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 6:02Josh Clark?

  And James Gandolfini was gonna play Marsh. And James Gandolfini died unexpectedly, and the production just got kiboshed.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  And they also found out that the title, The Bone Wars, had already been taken by a adult.

• 6:15Josh Clark?

  Pornography. Yep.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  We're so on the same page.

• 6:21Josh Clark?

  We totally are.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Children.

• 6:22Josh Clark?

  No interest in Jurassic Park or any dinosaurs, but we think the names of porno films is hilarious. That's our, our big interest.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  So, uh, I, I thought it was funny, you know, we, we commissioned this piece for, uh, for the Grabster and he's a big dinosaur guy. And he was somewhat shamed. He was like, I, I just, and he said it two or three times. Like, I can't believe I didn't know about these guys.

• 6:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah. We were like, it's okay, Grabster. It's all right.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  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 paleo, uh, paleontology came about.

• 6:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Um, and that had, you know, I think since people just started stumbling upon bones, even by accident, before it was even a discipline, people were like, oh, man, look at that thing. I'm going to pick that up and take it with me.

• 7:13Josh Clark?

  Right. I think they used to get classified also as mythological creatures or dead gods or something like that. But the first documented paleontological expedition in North America was carried out by none other than Lewis and Clark.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:30Josh Clark?

  Did you know that before? Did we mention that in the episode, do you think?

• 7:33Speaker 03

  I don't know, but I, I did know at some point from somewhere, maybe it was the, uh, the Ken Burns piece, but that, you know, one of the things they did, I mean, they were, they were logging everything, including bone deposits.

• 7:47Josh Clark?

  But they spent like a week, um, around salt lick flats or salt lick gully or salt lick something. Where there was a big old salt lick that used to attract dinosaurs and, um, uh, Pleistocene mammals.

• 8:04Josh Clark?

  From two different periods, everybody put your emails away. And the bones that would collect there were really significant. So they spent a week like excavating there, but that was the first one. But that was even before the world, the word paleontology was coined.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was in 1822 in the French journal De Physique. And, um, there were a couple of people that preceded, uh, and in fact, um, one of whom went on to be a sort of a mentor to cope, but a guy named Edward Hitchcock and another guy named Joseph, uh, is it Leidy or Leedy?

• 8:38Josh Clark?

  I think Leidy is what I've seen the most.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, L E I D Y. And he's the one that went on to work with Cope later on. But just put a pin in this, but in 1858, a pretty important find, basically the only big dinosaur find on the East Coast were the fossilized bones of a herbivore named Hadrosaurus folki 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 at the time. And you get a lot of footprints on the East Coast, but not a lot of finds like this.

• 9:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was an enormous find. And Leidy was called in to help excavate it and put it together because he was America's first vertebrate paleontologist.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 9:24Josh Clark?

  He was the first guy and was really prolific and really good at what he did. And like you said, would eventually become a mentor to one of the guys we should probably introduce now. Because Leidy was working in, I think his first real burst of energy came in the 1850s, the early 1850s. And within about 15, maybe 20 years, there were a pair of guys who would come along and just completely change the field of paleontology. It started out very normally, just another scientific field, very exciting, lots of discoveries to be made.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 10:00Josh Clark?

  I mean, that's the point of all this, right? Is that like if you have a brand-new scientific field, everything you come across is worth writing about, describing, you get to name everything.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:11Josh Clark?

  So it was a really exciting, like, dynamic time for the field of paleontology. But a field of science is, the character of it is based on its earliest practitioners. And Leidy was a very steady, 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. 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 was because of the tone that these guys set.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:59Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  So we're talking about two dudes. One is Marsh and one is Cope. Othneel? I've never heard that name before.

• 11:11Josh Clark?

  I think his parents made it up.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Maybe. O-T-H-N-I-E-L. Othneel Charles Marsh, born in October 1831 in New York. And he was, they didn't have a lot of money in his family. They were farmers. He would have been a farmer, but he had, and this kind of really changed his life. He had a very rich uncle named George Peabody, who would go on to really kind of fund his education and early parts of his career later on.

• 11:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he just plucked him out of the farm field, basically, and said, and I have no idea why he did this, but he said, "You, I like the look of you and your brain nephew."

• 11:49Speaker 03

  I think he was super smart, would be my guess.

• 11:52Josh Clark?

  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"?

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, smarts are always evident.

• 12:00Josh Clark?

  Okay, well, he plucked him out, sent him to boarding school, then sent him to Yale, and eventually sent him off to grad school in Germany. So Marsh, we're just gonna call him Marsh because his name is just too ugly and horrible to say out loud.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:15Josh Clark?

  He was basically set. He was fine. He had a benefactor in his extraordinarily wealthy philanthropist uncle.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Cope, on the other hand, similarly had money, but his was like in his family. He wasn't like poor with a rich uncle. He had a wealthy family.

• 12:33Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Very prominent family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was born in July 1840, and he went to, you know, all the, I was gonna say trappings, but I guess all the benefits of being born into money. He went to a very nice, expensive boarding school, and that wasn't so much up his alley. So he dropped out when he was 16. And because he had a rich dad, it allowed him a lot of opportunities that other people wouldn't have, including, you know, going to college later on, even though he never graduated high school.

• 13:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, well, so it was definitely in part because of his dad, but also, this was a time in like, say, the 1850s.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  A little more lax?

• 13:18Josh Clark?

  It was lax, but also like, even if you wanted to go on and become like a, 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, something called gentleman naturalists, who were amateur self-taught.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:41Josh Clark?

  Scientists.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 13:42Josh Clark?

  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 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. 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.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:11Josh Clark?

  He was like, part of that last generation that could become a scientist without having to go through formal training at a university.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Right, like, if you have a tweed suit with a stiff collar and a pencil and a pad, you can, and lots of time on your hands.

• 14:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that's, that's, I mean, to Cope's credit, I think that that really kind of demonstrates like, he's like, no, I'm gonna go learn from experience.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 14:34Josh Clark?

  And he did.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, not knocking it.

• 14:35Josh Clark?

  But he did get entree into places like the University of Pennsylvania or the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, because of his family's contacts. But I get the impression that he worked his way into those places. And once he got in, he, he didn't just loaf. He learned what he needed to learn.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, because if there's one thing we're gonna learn about Cope here over the next 30 minutes or so, is he worked hard.

• 14:59Josh Clark?

  Yes. He's my pick of the Bone Wars. He's who I put my money behind.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Is he your guy?

• 15:05Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 15:07Josh Clark?

  Did we ever say his name, Edward Drinker Cope?

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:11Josh Clark?

  That's a weird middle name.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  It is. He was a drinker, literally.

• 15:15Josh Clark?

  He really was. He was also, he was also a Quaker and a pacifist, too.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  That's right. So, at college, at University of Pennsylvania, that's where he met Joseph Leidy. He was one of his professors. So, that just, you know, kind of kickstarted their relationship.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  During the Civil War, he went to Europe, 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 wanted to go dig up bones.

• 15:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and he was a Quaker pacifist, too.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  That's right. So, he went to Germany, and in 1863, he met Marsh. And they really liked each other at first. They had a lot in common, obviously. And I get the feeling that in Germany in 1863, there were probably not a ton of Americans who were super interested in dinosaur hunting. And so, they locked up, became really good pals. They came back to the US after the Civil War, and friends. And we're both like, alright, we're gonna go do our thing independently, but we're gonna keep in touch. We're gonna swap info early on here. And it was all very friendly at first.

• 16:20Josh Clark?

  Right. And I think you can make a pretty good case that they probably cut their own palms and clasped hands and became blood brothers during that German meeting, okay?

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Probably so.

• 16:30Josh Clark?

  That's what we're going with, because they really did like each other. And things were going along just fine, two kindred spirits with a common interest in paleontology. And they may have continued on that way, although I sincerely doubt that that's the case, which means I just undermined my own statement. But after the Civil War, they both went back to the United States to start careers, their own careers. And Marsh, or Koep, I'm sorry, he had connected with Joseph Leidy, who he had met through the University of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Natural Sciences. They worked together there. And so, he went off with Leidy to study bones that were found at Haddon Field in New Jersey,

• 17:14Josh Clark?

  where Leidy found that first skeleton, right?

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:17Josh Clark?

  And so, being friends with Marsh, he naturally, Koep naturally extended an invitation, "Hey, come visit me in the field. You gotta 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. Each of them point to one is the the end of their friendship. This was the the end of their friendship, starting with Kope.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  That's right. So both of these guys had a privilege like we've been talking about. For Marsh's part, his uncle, his rich uncle, donated 150 grand to Yale, basically to sort of get Marsh a job. They created the Peabody Museum of Natural History. And then they were like, well, hey, we need a professor to chair this new department. And so why not your nephew? And they said, bully, that's a great idea. So it basically cost 150 grand to get Marsh this this job as the Chair of Department of Paleontology at this new Peabody Museum at Yale University.

• 18:25Josh Clark?

  Right, and so they said, yes, we want to make you the first professor of paleontology in America. And Marsh said, yes, that's a great idea. I like where you're going, Yale. I'm going to spend a lot of time here, I can tell. So that's that's Marsh setting off on his little trajectory, basically ensconcing himself in Yale.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 18:46Josh Clark?

  Kope, remember, he was basically a high school dropout, and he had to kind of make his own way. He had trouble at first finding a a position until he struck upon a place called Havreford College. And he got a position as a professor of zoology there. And they said, well, you're a high school dropout, so we'll just give you an honorary Masters of Arts degree. Bing, now you're a professor.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's working out for both of these guys.

• 19:15Josh Clark?

  Yep, although Kope didn't really like Havreford that much. He ends up quitting. And it actually kind of, it kind of describes his personality a little bit, that incident, that he would get a good job, having kind of been carried into that position, and then says, "This job is BS, I'm quitting." That, he was apparently prone to kind of a quick temper here or there.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Ed does make the point, it's kind of hard to piece together a personality from someone way back then, but by most accounts, Cope was a bit mercurial, a little more outgoing. Marsh was a little quieter, and kind of known as a bit of a flake, you know, but considering their backgrounds, it sort of makes sense where they ended up. Marsh, you know, they went about their work in very different ways. Marsh didn't publish his first paper until he was 30 years old. He was a lifelong bachelor. Cope married when he was 25. And Cope, you know, even the way they wrote, Cope wrote these very sort of flowery descriptions of

• 20:26Speaker 03

  things, while Marsh was much more sort of rigid, and sort of dry and scientific.

• 20:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like, if you, if you read Cope's stuff, he's trying to like, set the scene for you. You know, there's one paper where he was describing pterodactyls, 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 cliffside by the ocean, as a troop of these things were dangling by their claws, you know?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 20:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's super cool, it would definitely transport the reader there. And it was a little extra dollop of something that you didn't have to put on, but Cope definitely did put on. Which is surprising that he put anything extra into his work, because he published at an extraordinary pace, so much so that Marsh, in particular, was like, "This man is obviously fraudulent, nobody can publish this much."

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And we'll touch on that a bit later. The big difference in their earlier careers was, when it came to religion, like you said earlier, Cope was a Quaker, and was a religious man. Marsh was not, he was not very into religion. And he was fully down with evolution, and natural selection, and Darwin, whereas Cope, kind of had to...

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Make it all fit within his religious beliefs. So it's not like he outright like called Darwin a fraud or anything like that.

• 21:50Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  He worked in like the actions of God into his theories and sort of make the, made it all work according to his, you know, religious beliefs, which is, I mean, back then, a little, a little bit different, but even back then, for a scientist, sort of an odd thing.

• 22:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure, but he, he's, 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 changes in a population take place on the individual level. Like, an example I saw was if you're a blacksmith and you use your arm a bunch to hammer, you're 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 to make it more likely for you to,

• 22:53Josh Clark?

  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 Kope throughout his lifetime, rectifying the two, especially considering Chuck, that the body of work that he produced really helped prove Darwin's point more than anything.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. When it comes to like where things went wrong, because they were still buddies up until this point. It seemingly looks like Marsh drew first blood.

• 23:24Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  We mentioned that Haddonfield dig earlier, so it's 1868. Kope has left his job at Haversford. He's not very happy there, so he leaves. He's really kind of feet on the ground, doing the work, publishing papers, which we'll see later at an alarming rate. And Working with Lydie, who we talked about. And he invited Marsh, because they're buddies. And he was like, dude, you gotta come check this out. We found a legit dinosaur fossil on the East Coast. 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.

• 24:01Josh Clark?

  Pat on the back.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Then he sneaks back later on by himself.

• 24:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  And bribes the workers there, Cope's workers and Lydie's workers, and says, hey, man, if you find any more good specimens, send them to this address. And here's a little dough for your effort.

• 24:18Josh Clark?

  Can you believe that?

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, just straight up sold him out.

• 24:22Josh Clark?

  Right, so Marsh has just outed himself as a very wormy type of fellow, not to be trusted. And the way that I saw it, there was a really great American Experience episode called Dinosaur Wars that really kind of described it like, to Cope, he subscribed to that gentleman scholar type of mentality, which was, there's unwritten rules, you know? Like, I came and showed you my quarry, and you went behind my back to steal my fossils from my quarry. Not cool. That was Cope's take. From Marsh's point of view, he was kind of from the business-like American school of just conquer at all costs. And he owed no allegiance, really, to Cope in that sense, that he saw an opportunity and he took it.

• 25:06Josh Clark?

  And that was Marsh's view of the whole thing. But to Cope, that was like, that was not very cool, and I'm going to remember that. But I'm still going to tentatively remain friends with you.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  All right, well, let's take a break. And we'll come back right after this. And we'll talk about what Marsh always said was the reason they were no longer friends, right after this.

• 25:42Josh Clark?

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• 27:35Josh Clark?

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• 28:55Speaker 03

  All right, so Marsh has really screwed his friend over.

• 29:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Right behind his back, paid off dudes to send him stuff. But according to Marsh, he's like, "That's not why we weren't friends anymore. That was not what really killed our friendship at all." Here's what happened. Later on that year, Kope published a paper establishing this new species, Elas mosaris platerius.

• 29:23Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Thank you. Marsh goes to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philly to check this thing out, because they're still sort of friends at this point.

• 29:31Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  And Kope's showing off his things, like, "Look at this thing. I put this thing back together, and look at this skeleton. It's amazing." And said, "My friend, it appears you have fallen into the classic paleontology trap," and mounted the head on the butt.

• 29:49Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  And this was a humiliating thing for Kope.

• 29:55Josh Clark?

  Sure, so much so that he realized, "Oh God, I just wrote a paper describing this thing with its head on the wrong end in the American Philosophical Society's journal." And ran out and tried to buy as many of these copies as he could, just to cover up his mistake. And the way that Marsh put it later, because he ran around telling everybody he could about this gap.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  He was very glib about it.

• 30:21Josh Clark?

  Oh, very, very. Like, he just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that Cope had screwed up, right? Whereas, he characterized the story, he characterized himself in the story as just having gently pointed this out. He basically said that Cope's vanity was wounded, or his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered. Basically saying, like, "Not only did he get it wrong, when I gently pointed this out, this guy just flipped out and he still hasn't forgiven me. So that's what happened to our friendship. Never mind the whole going behind his back thing at Haddonfield. This is really what happened." But the thing is, that story isn't even correct. It's just like a sliver of the fuller picture.

• 31:02Josh Clark?

  Because the fuller picture involves Joseph Leidy, who, again, remember, was working at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia where this skeleton was in the first place.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  That's right. So what apparently really happened is, is Marsh comes in and just says, "Oh, actually, the neck vertebrae is in the wrong position." That got everyone over there looking, and Leidy is the one who actually said, "Oh, no. You have the head in the wrong place where the tail is." And to fully paint a picture here, this wasn't like some huge big deal. Like, mistakes, it was very early on in paleontology. Everyone was doing their best. There was a lot of trial and error going on, a lot of guesswork. And it wasn't like, "Oh, my gosh, he, you know." It's not like someone today drawing the head of a bear mounted on his butt. They were doing the best they could, and it wasn't like some huge error.

• 31:58Josh Clark?

  Right, no. And it is true, from what I understand, that Cope did run around trying to buy the copies of the American Philosophical Society journal that had the incorrect part in it. And he was... Humiliated, especially the fact that Marsh was involved. But it definitely wasn't Marsh running to the rescue to save paleontology and cope just being a wuss overall. It was definitely an incorrect picture that Marsh painted. But regardless of how it's painted, or what actually happened, that two-pronged attack on the friendship, both of them perpetrated by Marsh frankly, if you ask me, that ended their friendship. Like, their friendliness was basically out the door.

• 32:40Josh Clark?

  There's some evidence that in the following couple of years, when they wrote to one another, they would kind of jokingly reference some of the stuff in the past. But that, even that eventually dried up. And they genuinely became bitter, bitter rivals, made all the more pronounced when the West was opened up by the Transcontinental Railroad. Because all of a sudden, you had said earlier that the fossil fields in the East, well, the conditions of climate and geology in the East were not conducive to preserving dinosaur bones. The exact opposite is true of the Western United States. And when the West opened up, it was like, "Come on in, paleontology." The timing of the two is just astoundingly perfect.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we're talking about the Dakotas, Kansas. Just bones everywhere, and not even too hard to find a lot of times.

• 33:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  I mean, if you were a paleontologist and you headed west, if you had some protection, because this is, despite all our efforts, it was still sort of a dangerous area for a white man from the East to be traveling around. The Native American tribes there and the Western tribes did not take kindly to a lot of it.

• 33:54Josh Clark?

  No, because think about it, like, they went from wagon trains of settlers coming through periodically to trains daily moving people in and out. So it was a big deal to the Western tribes, who were fighting back and pushing back against this encroachment and wave that was coming much more strongly than it had been before the railroad, too.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. So, from this point on, the guys took very sort of different, I guess were forced to take different approaches to their careers. Cope basically spent the rest of his life as a working paleontologist, like feet on the ground for the most part. He didn't work at a college, he didn't work at a museum until much, much later. He was not like taken care of or funded by the government. So he paid for all the, you know, he came from a wealthy family, so he paid for most of this stuff himself. 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

• 34:57Speaker 03

  his, which was a really big deal because since no one was contributing to his financial burdens, he, I guess technically owned this stuff.

• 35:08Josh Clark?

  Right. He owned it fair and square. I mean, he financed his own expeditions, he paid for the shipping and transportation of these things, which is another thing the railroad helped. It not only opened the west, it helped ship enormous bones back east to the museums. But he was paying for this. So yeah, that, his collection was his own. Marsh, on the other hand, being ensconced in Yale, he was able to rely on Yale, Yale families, government contacts that Yale had to finance the expeditions that he went on. So in his mind, it was his collection, but technically it really wasn't because he hadn't financed any of it himself. It had all been financed by others. The thing, the

• 35:49Josh Clark?

  thing about Marsh though Chuck is that he was the first one to make it out west. And because he was the first one there, he basically considered the entire western United States his turf. And everyone else was encroaching on it, which is awfully rich if you can remember what he did to Cope back at Haddonfield. And so, you know, back then, there wasn't any kind of ownership on any fossils. But now that he's the first one out west, there is such a thing and they all belong to him.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  For sure. So Cope, then, you know, when it comes to academics, they also were really, really different in how they approached things. We kind of teased earlier about how much Cope wrote and published, and boy, it's astounding. It seems like he published throughout his career about 1,400 academic papers. In the 1870s, he was doing about 25 papers a year, and in one winter alone of 1879 and 1880, he published 76 papers. Very prolific, to the point where- It was pretty easy for someone like Marsh to poke holes and kind of say that he was either

• 36:57Speaker 03

  copying people, or plagiarizing people, or just outright fraudulent, and that no one can write this much stuff.

• 37:03Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  It also presented a problem in that Cope, he was publishing so much that he had a hard time getting stuff published after a while, because there weren't a ton of scientific journals, and they can't be like, "Listen, man, we can't publish like, 10 things a month from you, or a quarter, because we'll just call this thing the Cope Journal." And he said, "That's a great idea."

• 37:26Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  So in 1877, he bought the American Naturalist Journal for himself to publish all his own works, which ended up being a really, I don't know about bad choice, but financially, it is what really put the biggest dent in his future fortunes, was sinking a ton of his own money into this American Naturalist Journal.

• 37:49Josh Clark?

  Oh, is that right? I thought it was the silver mine. The journals set him up for it?

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. The silver mine was a last-ditch effort to try and make a little bit of money.

• 37:57Josh Clark?

  Uh-huh.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Because he was almost broke by that point.

• 38:00Josh Clark?

  So, but he does have this forum now, whether it was a good business opportunity or not, he has a forum to publish in. And like you were saying, he wrote just so many papers. Not only was it just too many for the journals to keep up with, there were also a lot of questions from these journals, like, "Wait a minute, if you're like a deliberate, thoughtful scientist, you shouldn't be able to publish this much." And one of the problems of the Bone Wars, the rivalry between Cope and Marsh, that really kind of got both of them to be the first to rush to name a species, or make some new discovery, so that the other one couldn't, is that there was a lot of sloppy work that came out of it.

• 38:43Josh Clark?

  And when there's a lot of sloppy taxonomical work, where the same species is getting different names from different people at the same time, that takes a lot to entangle. And apparently, it took paleontology many decades to kind of undo some of the sloppy work that was kind of laid at the foundation of the field in the 1870s.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, and especially at Cope's feet. Because for his part, Marsh was very much more methodical, did not publish nearly as many papers. But along with that comes a lot more prestige. No one was gonna- No one's going to talk about Marsh and say that he's publishing too much, he's doing sloppy work. So, as a result, they were published in some really prestigious journals over the years, kind of almost exclusively. And he had, like you said, Yale behind him, so he would take students, a lot of times make them pay their own way. Because this is all a very expensive endeavor for the time. You know, Cope was sort of creative in how he would fund some of this. Like, he would latch on to other Western expeditions that

• 39:49Speaker 03

  had nothing to do with paleontology. There was one called the Wheeler Survey, which was a mapping expedition that he was able to hook up with. So, he would cut corners and save where he could. But with the power of Yale University behind him and these students who would pay their own way, Marsh had a real advantage when it came to staking his claim out west.

• 40:07Josh Clark?

  Right. And also, there was, one of the first expeditions he went on was funded by the families of some Yale students. So, it was some, you know, Yale students and Marsh, basically playing cowboy out west. And the first, I guess, the first day, once they arrived out west where they were going to dig, Buffalo Bill Cody shows up, basically kind of like as a guest star to appear and just delight and thrill the Yale boys, one of whom wrote about the whole expedition and the whole thing got published in Harper's. So, the whole thing kind of demonstrates that Marsh, as much as he's kind of seen as like this meek, deliberate scientist, was also really good at self-promotion, too.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. He would wear a gun. I think he sort of fashioned himself as a Teddy Roosevelt type, or maybe a Buffalo Bill type. And, yeah, he would toot his own horn, for sure. For his part, Cope, after his father passed away, spent less and less time out west in the actual field, more time in Philadelphia, and he would hire guys out. And in fact, Marsh would later go on to do a very similar thing, where they would have their diggers out there excavating and then sending bones back to the East Coast where they could do their, dig in and do their studying there.

• 41:28Josh Clark?

  And it's out west that this, the famous bone wars really started to take place. But like you were saying, neither Martian or Cope were there. But what was going on out west, all the dirty deeds and all that stuff were at the, at the direction and behest of these two. So you want to take another break and then get into what the bone wars are really all about? Yeah. Okay, we'll be right back.

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• 43:08Josh Clark?

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• 44:25Josh Clark?

  All right, Chuck. So the 1870s roll around. The West has opened up from the transcontinental railroad. It's giving up its fossils. It's just crazy how well preserved fossils are out there because of heat and dryness and wind erosion exposes them. And there was a part of that American Experience documentary where they showed a picture of like just this landscape that you could see from the train. And 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. It wasn't rocks, it was bones. That's how many bones there were out West.

• 45:10Josh Clark?

  So the West is starting to yield this stuff. And just one place would become like a treasure trove and another place would become a treasure trove. And each of these places, some prospector would find a big bone and the first thing they would think of was, I need to either get in touch with Cope or Marsh because these guys are going to want to know about this and they'll probably pay big bucks for it. And that's really, once they stopped mounting their own expeditions, that's how they got most of their bones was from amateurs getting in touch with them.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this, you know, this would open the door for these guys to really kind of get underhanded. They would hire guys away from each other. They would pay for information about the other person's digs and the bones that they were getting. They would outbid one another and like, you know, eventually, like I said, both of these guys would end up pretty much financially ruined in the end. There were reports of sabotage, of theft. There were reports of dynamiting the other person's, like, digs and their camps.

• 46:11Josh Clark?

  Well, one thing I saw, listen to this, Marsh ordered that if his men couldn't get bones out of like a find, like they just couldn't get it out, he said, "Smash them. Do not leave them, because I don't want Kope to possibly be able to get them himself."

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Not only that, but the bones that they would, like, smaller finds that they would dig up, that they didn't think were as important, they would smash, so the other person wouldn't have anything to do with them.

• 46:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so they were smashing the fossils that they saw for science because of their rivalry. That's the insane degree that it reached.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know, it's easy now to, and I'm wondering if this, like, how much they had to trump this up for a movie script, because it seems like some of this is exaggerated. I don't know if they found actual evidence that they would dynamite each other's camps. It seems like the most they would do is like, you know, push dirt back onto the things that they had dug up, and not, you know, again, they're lackeys out there doing this stuff.

• 47:11Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  And, you know, these guys, this was all kind of perpetrated by Marsh and Kope themselves. They would kind of trump up these stories in the press and things to kind of make the other one look bad. So while there were bone wars going on, I'm not sure it was quite as like, exciting as they're made out to be.

• 47:30Josh Clark?

  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?

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and it could have, you know, the fact that these guys were driving each other. It's like, this is the lens we look at it through now. It's like, did this hurt the field of paleontology or help it? And you can kind of look at it from two angles. On one hand, what if they would have worked together and pooled their resources? Maybe they could have found a lot more and gotten a lot more things straight that they didn't have to untangle later. Or maybe because they were so competitive and drove each other to work harder, maybe they were uncovering things because of that, because they uncovered a lot of stuff. Like, they were both super prolific together. I think between the two of them, they accounted for 126 new species of dinosaur, and that's just dinosaur.

• 48:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and again, this is at a time where you could like stub your toe and look down and you just discovered a new species of dinosaur because so little work had been done in the field. But, yeah, they definitely did drive one another to to work harder and faster and try to outdo one another. And one of the big benefits that the field saw that you can point to in retrospect and even at the time was that winter of 1877 that I was talking about. This is like winter in Wyoming. It's not a very welcoming climate. And yet, both Marsh and Cope hired their prospectors, their bone diggers, to continue working through the winter rather than taking a break like you traditionally would.

• 49:08Josh Clark?

  You dug in the summer, wrote papers in the winter. They said, no, keep going. This is just too, the bones that are coming out of this place are too good, and I don't want my rival to be the one to take them all out. So both kept working through the winter, and out of that one winter, we got Triceratops.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:24Josh Clark?

  We got Apatosaurus.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Stegosaurus.

• 49:27Josh Clark?

  Stegosaurus.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:28Josh Clark?

  All from that one winter of 1877. And if you can't- Can't look back and say, yes, these guys drove one another to this level of discovery. I don't know what you can say. I just throw my hands up in disgust otherwise. Does that make sense?

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 49:45Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  I mean, as a paleontologist, you could literally just say, you know, the Triceratops? I discovered it.

• 49:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  And that could be it. That could be your career right there.

• 49:56Josh Clark?

  Let alone the Stegosaurus on top of the Triceratops. Come on.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 50:01Josh Clark?

  And then a Patosaurus, that may sound vaguely familiar, but here, let me drop one on you that you'll say, oh. You ready? Bronosaurus. Same thing, apparently.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't, I didn't even fully get, I mean, this gets into the weeds with like, serious paleontology pedantry and nerding out. But yeah, I say Bronosaurus.

• 50:25Josh Clark?

  Allow me to nerd out for just a second. The point of the Patosaurus, Bronosaurus being the same thing with different names is one of those things that's frequently laid at the feet of Marsh, saying, this was sloppy work on Marsh's part. And maybe if he hadn't been competing with cope, he would have done better work. That's probably not the case, but he named the same species, two different things, because he thought they were two different species. And a later paleontologist, about 20, 30 years later, came along and said, I think this is the same thing. Since they were called the Patosaurus first, that's what we're going to call this from now on. And so scientifically, Bronosaurus should have gone, I can't believe I'm about to say this, the way of the dinosaur.

• 51:06Josh Clark?

  But somehow, it got into the cultural zeitgeist and everybody said, no, we like saying Bronosaurus more. I blame the Simpson or the Flintstones because of the Bronosaurus burger thing.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:21Josh Clark?

  Who knows if that's the case or not, but that was, that was supposedly the Bronosaurus and the Patosaurus are the same thing. And really, you're supposed to call them a Patosaurus.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  There you have it, folks.

• 51:32Josh Clark?

  Nerding out.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  So, in the 1880s, this is after the big rush of the late 70s. Things started to change a bit. So Marsh has got a couple of good jobs. He's the head, he's, he works at the US Geological Survey. And is the president of the National Academy of Sciences. But financially, they're not doing so great on either side because like we said earlier, they'd spend a lot of their own money trying to outdo one another.

• 51:58Josh Clark?

  Right, so Marsh is in a way, way better position than Cope. This is actually at a point when Cope is kind of against the ropes. But rather than both of them just kind of going their own way, the dinosaur wars have kind of ebbed a little bit. And they can just kind of go off and work as paleontologists for the rest of their life. Marsh decides to come after Cope and deal him the death blow. The moment Marsh had a position of power that he could use against Cope, he abused his position immediately. He was very high up at the USGS and he used that connection to freeze Cope out of any, any chance of getting any kind of government funding for any further expeditions.

• 52:40Josh Clark?

  So Cope was basically penniless, sorry Chuck, because he had invested in that silver mine that, that he used the rest of his money for, basically. The silver mine went bust, so he lost all of his money. And now, his greatest enemy and rival was in charge of the purse strings for government expeditions and had basically said, "You're not getting a dime, Cope." So Cope was left with his collection and nothing else. That's bad enough, but then Marsh decided to take it one step further. And he introduced some laws into the USGS, I guess bylaws, that said, if a government, if a government program or agency has funded an expedition, any fossils collected from

• 53:24Josh Clark?

  that expedition belonged to the government. And he sent the USGS after Cope's collection. He tried to take Cope's collection, the only thing Cope had left. He didn't have his Family anymore. He was living alone in like a tiny apartment surrounded by his collection. It was all he had left and Marsh tried to take it from him. And actually, Marsh failed because Cope could prove that he had paid for most of it.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  That's right. And it was that collection that kind of funded the rest of his life. He would sell off parts of it here and there when he needed to make rent and stuff like that. He did get a job. He, in 1889, he was hired as professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. So that's good. At least he had a little bit of an income.

• 54:05Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  And it was, they were dead to each other at this point, though. Spent a lifetime battling each other. Cope was just infuriated at the lengths Marsh would go. It was all just very petty at this point. And neither one of them come out looking great because of a career of sort of backstabbing each other. And they went to the press in the end. I think it was Cope, he had taken these copious notes over his life about all the grievances he had against Marsh over the years. And he went to the New York Herald. They published an article about this, but it ended up just making both of them look bad. It made Marsh look bad because of the things he did. Made Cope look kind of petty and angry about everything.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  And this is all kind of played out in public in the press.

• 54:53Josh Clark?

  Right. And in this, in this first article, when Cope went to the Herald, he accused not just Marsh of like wrongdoing, but also the USGS of corruption. And that actually got the interest of Congress who started investigating and ended up cutting the USGS's budget by like half. So Marsh ended up losing his job and his position as head paleontologist at the USGS. And in a beautiful ironic twist, that law that he himself had inserted in, through the USGS, that anybody whose collection had been financed by the US government could lose that collection. Meant that he actually lost his collection.

• 55:38Josh Clark?

  The government came after his collection and took a substantial chunk of it for itself because it had financed so much of his expeditions. So it ended up turning him and biting him in his own rear. And he lost a lot of his collection, which really burned.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  So Cope died first. He died in 1897 at the age of 56, but not before he would issue a challenge to Marsh, which is, "I'm leaving my body and my brain to science, and I bet you my brain's bigger than your brain." Marsh never took the bait. He died in 1889 of pneumonia at the age of 68, and by all accounts, did not take part in this brain-measuring competition. This posthumous competition in the grave, which I think is kind of funny. But that brain, I think Cope's brain, is still, still under the ownership of the University of Pennsylvania today.

• 56:33Josh Clark?

  It still wanders the halls at night.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 56:36Josh Clark?

  Ghostly brain. That's the surprise ending to this one.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  That's right. And I guess in the end, Marsh is credited with 80 species to Cope's 56.

• 56:48Josh Clark?

  Which is not bad. Plus, also, Cope has that 1,400 papers under his belt, too.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  It's a lot of papers.

• 56:55Josh Clark?

  You got anything else about the Bone Wars?

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 56:59Josh Clark?

  Well, that's it, everybody. There's a, I think there's a Drunk History episode about this. I never saw it, but it looks pretty good. I would recommend the American Experience episode on it. And just go read up more on it, because it's pretty interesting stuff. And since I said "it" a bunch of times just now, it's time for Listener Mail.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  All right, I'm gonna call this Civil Air Patrol. This is from Jackson Sherbalati.

• 57:26Josh Clark?

  Can I ask you a question?

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 57:27Josh Clark?

  There was a big influx of Civil Air Patrol emails out of nowhere. Did you notice?

• 57:33Speaker 03

  I did not.

• 57:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we got like a handful of them just out of the blue, and I didn't know if something happened or what, but I guess it's making the round somehow.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  Who knows? Maybe we're on the Civil Air Patrol...

• 57:44Josh Clark?

  Watch list?

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Web blog.

• 57:47Josh Clark?

  There you go.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  So, uh, from Jackson, he says, "I have been a listener for about seven years since I was 10 years old. Anyway, I'm a senior master sergeant in the Civil Air Patrol, and I've been in it for about two and a half years. I was really excited you guys finally did a podcast on us. As not a ton of people even know we exist. Uh, some say we are the Air Force's best-kept secret." I don't know about that. I think Area 51.

• 58:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  Might have something on you guys.

• 58:15Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Uh, "It is nice to get some publicity like that, though. You guys totally nailed it. Did an awesome job like always. Being a cadet in the program, I'd like to hear more about that part. Uh, maybe you could do a short stuff on it someday. Cadet life is more of a training life than an actually doing the stuff, uh, like learning how to lead effectively and all that jazz. Uh, we also have a lot of mini boot camp things that we go to further our learning. Uh, 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."

• 58:49Josh Clark?

  That's not bad. Not a bad name. Green Mountain Composite Squadron sounds like a wholesale furniture material.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  I was gonna say it sounds like a, uh, sort of a modern bluegrass band.

• 59:04Josh Clark?

  Oh, that's a good one, too. Yeah, like, there's a lot of synth involved?

• 59:08Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 59:08Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Synth and mandolin.

• 59:10Josh Clark?

  Okay, and that was, uh, from Jackson?

• 59:12Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 59:13Josh Clark?

  Jackson. Is he the frontman for this, uh, bluegrass band?

• 59:17Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 59:18Josh Clark?

  All right. Well, thanks a lot for, uh, for writing in, Jackson. Hopefully, we've fulfilled all of your, um, requests. Uh, and if we didn't, TS for you. If you want to get in touch with us like Jackson did, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.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 [email protected].

• 59:44Speaker 04

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 1:00:00Josh Clark?

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  Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of Vivgard. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of Vivgard on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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