The Bone Wars

Two rival paleontologists turn a hunt for dinosaur bones into an all-out scientific war.

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

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:43Roman Mars?

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• 1:04Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel. That flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:49Roman Mars?

  Here at 99PI, we're in the business of making dreams come true. And boy, did we ever deliver this week.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Sorry, I'm in awe. We are in a back room and I am like, what am I looking at?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  This is hollowed ground.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yes. You guys.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  It's a cast of a T-Rex.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  It's a T-Rex.

• 2:09Roman Mars?

  That's actor, reporter, and our good buddy, Gillian Jacobs.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  As you could tell, I was crawling out of my skin with excitement. I recently got sent down into the deepest depths of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Dr. Michael Nowacek, curator of paleontology, was showing me a fossil vault aptly named "The Big Bone Room." Oh my gosh, so can you describe this room that we're in?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  This is a room full of big bones.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Oh my God, this is not open to the public.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Dinosaur storeroom. And you can see some of these bones are massive.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Dinosaurs and I go way back. My mother worked at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History when I was really little. My grandmother made me a T-Rex costume for Halloween. And when I got a little older, I was even a teen docent.

• 3:01Roman Mars?

  But as much as Gillian wanted to learn about all the dinosaurs themselves, we sent her to the American Museum of Natural History for a much different reason: some good old fashioned gossip.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  How resonant is that story with paleontologists today? Is it one that's still known, or is it kind of receding into the annals of history?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Oh, every paleontologist knows this story, just about, I would think. And it's well-known, it's famous, it's part of the lore, it's part of the history. It's not a very noble history. They weren't very noble people.

• 3:34Roman Mars?

  It's a scientific lore so unhinged that it has its own name: the bone wars. This story has everything: backstabbing, sabotage, congressional hearings, bankruptcy, and lots and lots of dinosaur bones.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  It was a feud that shook paleontology to its very core and took science out of the museums and lecture halls and onto the pages of tawdry newspapers. Out of this nasty battle, paleontology came to capture the public's imagination and would become foundational to natural history museums across the country. And without it, elementary school field trips today would look very different.

• 4:14Roman Mars?

  Although fossils are famously very, very old, paleontology as a formal science is actually pretty new.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  It's only around, I would say, in the 18th century that European scientists began to systematically study fossils and began using fossils as evidence for trying to understand the history of life on Earth, and eventually the evolution of life on Earth.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  That's Lucas Rappel, associate professor of history at Brown and author of "Assembling the Dinosaur." He says that Europeans dominated the field during paleontology's nascent years. And one of the most consequential and most overlooked was a British woman named Mary Anning. In 1812, at the age of 12, she discovered an ichthyosaurus skeleton along England's Jurassic coast.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Natural history was considered a respectable, pious leisure pursuit, which is to say that regular people, including working-class people, were encouraged in Victorian England to study natural history.

• 5:17Roman Mars?

  It would take a few more decades for paleontology to take off in the United States, despite North America being home to some of the most impressive prehistoric specimens in the world. And that's mostly because American scientists were seen as upstarts.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  So they were not taken very seriously by Europeans. And that was generally true, not just for science. So the United States had kind of, I would say, a cultural inferiority complex for much of the 19th century. A lot of Americans saw themselves as being less erudite, less learned, right? Kind of a younger culture, a less sophisticated culture. And science was no exception.

• 5:58Roman Mars?

  And in the middle of the 19th century, two men hoped to distinguish not just American paleontology, but themselves as scientifically worthy.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Edward Drinker Cope was born in 1840, two years before the word dinosaur was even coined. He came from a wealthy Quaker family in Pennsylvania and took an immediate liking to natural history as a child. He even published his first scholarly article at age 19.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  And he just started, you know, a force of personality to wage a career in science, much to his father's dismay.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  This is Mark Jaffe, author of "The Gilded Dinosaur." He says that Cope was a bit of a wunderkind. Despite attending some university courses, Cope had very little formal training and was mainly self-taught.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  Well, I think it always made him self-conscious. And you felt, you know, he had to prove himself more.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Cope was what you would call a gentleman scientist. He funded his work independently and was driven by his own personal curiosity.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  He was an exuberant theorist, is how I would put it. So he was someone who, he was kind of a dreamer in some ways. So he really enjoyed coming up with fantastic, often quite baroque, theories of evolution. He was a great opponent of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. So he had all these, like, very elaborate, somewhat crazy ideas about how living beings evolve.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  But as creative as he was, he had one fatal flaw.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was temperamental and sort of volatile. You know, he had a really stormy personality. The personality characteristics, I think, that sort of set the table on the Cope side of the battle.

• 7:45Roman Mars?

  On the other side of that battle was an American paleontologist named Otneal Charles Marsh. He was also a man of three names, but differed from the young ingenue Cope in many ways. For one, he had a much slower, much steadier approach to the scientific process.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Whereas Cope was given to bold theorizing, Marsh was a dogged empiricist, by which I mean that his obsession was really collecting more fossils, describing those fossils, really doing the kind of painstaking work of describing the anatomy of each individual fossil in great detail, and not speculating too much about the relationship between those fossils, and even less so about the kind of evolutionary history of those fossils. So he was much more, in some ways, more careful, more empirical in his approach.

• 8:35Roman Mars?

  Also, according to written and photographic documentation, he both looked and acted like a curmudgeonly cartoon walrus.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Marsh was stalky. He was more of a loner, a confirmed bachelor, quote unquote. I never quite know exactly what to read into that. Also quite arrogant. He loved telling stories in which he was the hero of the story, let's put it that way. Of the two, I've read a lot of their letters and, like, publications, and Marsh just must have been a terrible person. He just seems like, just someone that you would not want to spend a lot of time around.

• 9:12Roman Mars?

  Marsh's father struggled financially and his family grew up poor. He may have had to abandon science altogether had it not been for one stroke of good fortune.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  He was the nephew of one of the earliest and most important financial capitalists in the history of American capitalism, George Peabody.

• 9:31Roman Mars?

  Peabody bankrolled a Yale education for his nephew, but that wasn't all. At this time, there were very few opportunities to pursue paleontology. So Marsh got Unki George to create one for him.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  George Peabody ended up endowing a museum at Yale University named after him, the Peabody Museum of Natural History. But there were strings attached, so he endowed that museum on the condition that Yale University hire his nephew, give him a job as curator. So it was like Marsh was kind of the original Nepo baby, you could say.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  This dependence on wealthy benefactors would be a running theme through paleontology's fledgling years. In fact, paleontology, as we know it today, owes its existence to robber baron capitalism.

• 10:13Roman Mars?

  In the second half of the 19th century, wealthy guys like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and JP Morgan were sitting on an obscene share of America's wealth and power. This did not sit well with the rest of the population, but it's not like they were willing to pay people fairly or improve labor practices to correct that.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  These wealthy elites wanted to paint over the concerns about this obvious wealth gap by providing the public with the types of grand institutions one may find in Europe. Things like libraries, symphony halls, and most importantly to the field of paleontology, natural history museums.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  These museums had multiple functions, but among other things, they were part of a PR campaign, right? The other function of these museums was to legitimize and justify the tremendous concentration of wealth that was a product of American-style capitalism in the late 19th century. And so for the museum to succeed at that second function, at that kind of legitimizing function, the museums had to attract a popular audience, a working-class audience.

• 11:17Roman Mars?

  These new natural history museums would be open to the general public. And what the public wanted to see was the biggest, baddest, most awe-inspiring objects nature had to offer.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  What's the most spectacular thing that will draw all kinds of people from all walks of life into the natural history museum? It's these amazing fossils.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  With the rise of natural history museums, paleontology suddenly had a venue. They were grand palatial halls waiting to be filled with bones.

• 11:48Roman Mars?

  Kope and Marsh met for the first time in Berlin in the year 1864. OC Walrus-Faced Marsh was there studying at a German university.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  While the temperamental Kope was in Europe dodging the Civil War draft.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Marsh and Kope, they started off as, maybe you could say like frenemies? I don't know exactly, like they were sort of, you know, they ran in similar circles.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  They were both naturalists who were interested in geology, fossils, and the discoveries to come. They actually exchanged correspondence and even named fossils after one another.

• 12:24Roman Mars?

  But that wouldn't last long at all. And within just a couple of years of meeting, the two began stepping on each other's toes.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  The real break comes with the Elasmosaurus.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Mark Jaffe again. In 1868, Kope was curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. At the time, he was still only 28 years old. He was tasked with the restoration of a fossil of a prehistoric sea creature called the Elasmosaurus.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  And this was a, a long, snaky aquatic animal.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  The Elasmosaurus could grow to 43 feet in length, and Kope had painstakingly reconstructed the skeleton. In Kope's description to the Academy of Natural Sciences, he wrote, quote, "It possesses a tail of great length, which was elevated, compressed, and adapted for sculling the ponderous body through the water." And alongside the reconstruction, he published an extensive academic paper, complete with detailed illustrations. He was quite proud of his work.

• 13:25Roman Mars?

  Until he shared it with OC Marsh.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  When Marsh was visiting, Kope showed him the Elasmosaurus. And again, this goes back to the one-offmanship. Marsh looked at it and said, "You've got the head on the wrong end."

• 13:43Speaker 01

  The Elasmosaurus fossil either had a very, very long neck or a very, very long tail. Kope guessed it had a long tail.

• 13:52Roman Mars?

  And he guessed wrong. Kope deferred to Joseph Leidy, the father of American paleontology, for a second opinion.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  He looked at it and he took the skull from the one end and walked, this is quite a long, big animal, and walked to the other and fit it right into a socket there. Well, of course, Kope was mortified and of course, Marsh was quite happy with himself.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Humiliated, Kope frantically attempted to track down every copy of the offending paper, quietly removing it from libraries across the country.

• 14:23Roman Mars?

  Marsh, for his part, managed to acquire several copies, and he kept them as little trophies.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  For some reason, Kope and Marsh, for them, there was just like nothing more important than to get these details right. As scientists, they were just really, really invested in their own reputations.

• 14:39Roman Mars?

  Marsh even reflected on this moment as their breaking point, writing, quote, "When I informed Professor Kope of it, his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy."

• 14:53Speaker 04

  There's a funny thing about academic politics. People often say that academic politics are especially vicious because the stakes are so low.

• 15:04Roman Mars?

  The Elasmosaurus incident turned them into enemies, but it would be their own ambitions that would escalate their tension into an all-out war.

• 15:13Speaker 06

  I think Kope and Marsh, in their frenzy, wanted to just expand their own influence across the field. And the irony is that they did.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  This is Emily Grassley, host and writer of the PBS series Prehistoric Road Trip. She says that in the world of paleontology, the right to name a specimen is everything.

• 15:33Speaker 06

  The first person, the first description trumps anyone that comes afterwards. So taxonomists, the people being those who describe and publish new species, they are uniquely positioned in that they get to immortalize themselves.

• 15:50Roman Mars?

  Marsh and Kope wanted to be the first, the first to find, the first to name, the first to get the credit. But in order to do that, they would both have to look west.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  So far, our story has mostly taken place on the East Coast of the United States. Marsh is at Yale in Connecticut, Kope in Philadelphia. And while there were important fossil finds taking place around there, special shout-out to New Jersey, the fossils that really changed the game and put the United States on the paleontological map were in the American West.

• 16:22Speaker 06

  The American West was home to so many and remains home to so many different kinds of fossils.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  In the 1870s, fossil discovery in the American West was not at all new. Indigenous populations had already been finding and interacting with dinosaur bones literally for thousands of years.

• 16:41Roman Mars?

  But around this time, the transcontinental railroad, the mining industry, and manifest destiny brought the American spirit of extraction to the West. Paleontology, which had close ties to all of these expanding interests, kind of hitched a ride along the way.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  So whether it was timber or building supplies or farmland, you know, it was sort of like the government was poised to extract so many of these resources from native lands. And one of those resources were fossils.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Today, we have a picture in our heads of what a scientist is: lab coats, peer review, institutional credentials, a process. But during this time, almost none of that infrastructure existed. It was essentially the Wild West of paleontology.

• 17:29Roman Mars?

  Around the year 1870, OC Marsh set off from New Haven to lead a series of college expeditions of the American West on behalf of the Peabody Museum. They discovered early species of horses, toothed birds, and the remains of a pterosaur. Possessive as he was, Marsh would have staked the claim for the entirety of the West, but it was too vast to keep for just himself.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Kope didn't have the financial backing of a big institution like the Yale Peabody, but he did have family money. He was able to fund his expedition privately, and he chose essentially the exact same spot where Marsh had set up shop. Which is where things started to go off the rails.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  The quintessential story is the Bridger Basin.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Bridger Basin was a site in southwestern Wyoming that was essentially a treasure trove for vertebrate fossils.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  Marsh was there, Cope was there. They were all working in the basin at the same time.

• 18:26Roman Mars?

  Separately, their crews were racing to classify an entire ancient habitat of eocene vertebrate species. Rhinos, crocodiles, camels, massive land turtles as big as grizzly bears.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  There were no proper protocols for publication standards. And in their mad rush to be the first, Cope and Marsh ended up claiming credit for several of the same discoveries.

• 18:49Speaker 05

  They found the same animals and gave them different names. And so it took years to unravel.

• 18:56Roman Mars?

  One fossil was given seven different names during this time. And on top of that, they were also making a mess of the record by resorting to some petty scientific sabotage.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  One of the things that the Marsh people did was they they created a false fossil. They put a bunch of bones together that came from all different things, leaving it for Cope to find, which he did.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Cope may have been younger and less connected than Marsh, but he did have one advantage in this whole rivalry. He was an extraordinarily quick publisher who could churn out academic papers at a breakneck speed. Cope arrived later than Marsh and became severely ill during this time and still managed to publish 16 articles on one animal alone.

• 19:43Roman Mars?

  But because of his speed, he also made a lot of mistakes in his work, which Marsh would gleefully point out.

• 19:51Speaker 05

  Marsh was relentless. He challenged every Cope finding. It was just really just grinding for Cope.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Joseph Leidy, Cope's former mentor, and at this point, the most respected name in American paleontology, had also been working out of Bridger Basin that summer. He ended up being so appalled by how these two men of science conducted themselves that he left the field altogether.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  He just gave up on paleontology and studied worms.

• 20:21Roman Mars?

  Before the dust could even settle from all the havoc they caused in Bridger Basin, another paleontological battlefield emerged.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  One day in 1877, a geologist and professor named Arthur Lakes was hiking through Morrison, Colorado, when he stumbled upon one of the richest deposits of absolutely enormous fossils the world had ever seen. It was a site known as the Morrison Formation.

• 20:46Speaker 06

  The cool thing about the Morrison Formation is it doesn't just preserve one kind of organism.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Emily Grassley again.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  It preserves the entire environment of the Jurassic period. So everything from plants to the smallest of organisms to the largest animals that ever roamed the the earth, they're all represented in the Morrison Formation.

• 21:08Roman Mars?

  Lakes wrote to Marsh immediately about what he found.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  He also alerted Cope, and soon the two began battling it out again. Both men dispatched teams to roughly the same area, sometimes digging within miles of each other.

• 21:23Speaker 06

  I think the irony is that the Morrison Formation is absolutely massive. So you would have thought that they would have been able to split up a little bit further. You know, sort of like, man, you should have just transferred to a different school. Just, just go to Colorado.

• 21:39Roman Mars?

  Paranoid, Marsh would refer to Cope by code names and bribe members of Cope's team away from him.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  In retaliation, Cope would employ dinosaur rustlers to excavate fossils out from under Marsh's team.

• 21:52Roman Mars?

  There are even accounts of the two warring camps throwing rocks at one another, and one salacious allegation that one of Marsh's collectors destroyed a dig site after taking all the fossils he wanted from it.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  And that, of course, is destroying specimens, right? That's destroying the foundation for the production of more knowledge, which is basically, I mean, that's anathema to the, at least the stated ideals of the scientific community. So part of what's interesting about the Bone Wars is that it reveals the kind of chasm that separates the way scientists often like to present from the reality, which is that it's often very petty, it's often very self-serving, that scientists are more interested in credit than they are in actually developing new theories and so on and so forth.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  While it was their fossil collectors on the ground in Wyoming who were doing the physical fighting, Cope and Marsh were creating an absolute spectacle in academic papers. They accused each other of fabricating discovery dates, of plagiarism, of spying. They were essentially brawling in front of all of their scientific peers in print.

• 22:55Roman Mars?

  It was to the point that one prominent scientific publication actually had to ban them from criticizing each other.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  But both despite and because of this fierce competition in the West, today we have some of the most famous dinosaurs on record. Marsh described and named dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Apatosaurus, and of course...

• 23:19Speaker 03

  We're standing in front of an enormous freestanding fossil of the great long-necked dinosaur Brontosaurus, the Thunder Lizard. This was an animal named by Marsh, and it was one of the first dinosaur fossils ever discovered that showed just how titanic these animals could become.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  This is Dr. Bart Unjum-Bouler, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum. This history may be tawdry, but the Yale Peabody Museum has a lot of its fossil collection thanks to this historic beef.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  I mean, wherever there are people, wherever there are ambitious people, there is competition. And in the case of Cope and Marsh, a sudden windfall, a extraordinary treasure trove, open for the first time, there for the taking, two men, intelligent, ambitious, and equipped to do it, you're going to have this happen.

• 24:25Roman Mars?

  Throughout this war, Marsh had the upper hand. He had the Peabody Museum, he had political connections, and he could hold a wicked grudge.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  But temperamental Cope managed to find a way around that, because the first to publish was the first to get credit. So Cope ended up using his personal money to purchase a prominent scientific journal called The American Naturalist to fast-track his publications. Between 1879 and 1880 alone, he published 76 papers, attempting to overwhelm Marsh with the sheer volume.

• 25:01Roman Mars?

  In 1882, Marsh struck back hard. He used his political connections to position himself to be named chief paleontologist at the US Geological Survey, and he used that power to cut Cope off from any government funding.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  Cope lost out on the surveys. And what the surveys gave Marsh was money for exploration, money for publication. And this was, again, you know, poor Cope, he's, he's out in the cold.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Cope, unfortunately, had spent much of his money purchasing The American Naturalist and had a hard time finding employment, thanks to Marsh's allies in higher education, and also because of his terrible personality. Cope invested what remained of his inheritance in silver prospects in the West, but those investments failed. His largest remaining asset was his personal fossil collection. Broke and without prospects, Cope dropped out of the Bone Wars.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Cope was a very sympathetic kind of guy. I mean, in a way, you know, he was, he was also ruthless and a womanizer and many other things.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that part.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  But he's compelling in this sort of heroic and also train wreck way. And like, there are these letters where he's, kind of when he lost a bunch of money, he's off in the desert in New Mexico, and he like, just he went out there by himself, like by himself, right? Man, this is the Wild West. And he's writing, like, he's, he's, it's nighttime, and he's writing to his daughter, you know, and he's going, I, I wish I could see your face. And I'm out here alone. It's cold. I found some bones today. I'm worried about finances, all of this stuff, this sort of plaintive thing to his family. You can imagine his just being there under the stars alone, thinking about his life and...

• 26:51Speaker 03

  And that's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  His career was ruined, his money was gone, and his wife had left him, you know, on account of him being a womanizer. Kope was at his lowest point.

• 27:06Roman Mars?

  The bone wars could have ended there with Marsh on top and Kope's professional and personal life in shambles. But that wasn't enough. Marsh wanted to pry Kope's most prized possession out of his hands. He wanted to take the man's bones.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  And this is when Marsh finally went too far.

• 27:25Roman Mars?

  On December 16th, 1889, Kope was sent a letter from the Secretary of the Interior demanding that he turn over his personal fossil collection to the Smithsonian Institution. Marsh had alleged that Kope's fossils had been collected using federal money and thus needed to be seized and turned over to the government.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Kope was able to provide meticulous financial records proving that he personally funded the majority of his expeditions. He was allowed to keep his fossil collection, but now he was pissed. And Kope was ready to finally take Marsh down for good.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  For years and years, Kope had collected any complaint or possible near due well doing by Marsh.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Mark Jaffe again.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  He interviewed a lot of the disgruntled assistants, got stories from them, and he gathered all this stuff and he called it his Marshiana. He kept it in a drawer.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Kope had been keeping what was essentially a secret dossier full of terrible accusations against Marsh. It included allegations of plagiarism and abusing federal funds, specifically with those national surveys. And he handed all of it over to a journalist for the New York Herald.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  Who ended up shopping around a series, three part series, exposing Marsh. And this landed in January of 1890.

• 28:52Roman Mars?

  This petty scientific feud had jumped from dusty academic papers to the front page of major newspapers. The headline read, "Scientists Wage Better Warfare."

• 29:02Speaker 05

  And again, everybody in the scientific community was just horrified. It was like this battle that they'd suffered for years and years between the two of them on the six o'clock news. It was, everyone just wanted it to go away.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  As embarrassing to the field as it was to witness, the bone wars were about to have consequences that would reverberate out of academic politics and into politics, politics.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Probably the most destructive thing they managed to do was to become so notorious for their feud that members of Congress managed to pick up on it.

• 29:40Roman Mars?

  Congress at this time had a conservative faction that was absolutely itching to slash its funding for the sciences. And earlier that year, Marsh published a monograph that described fossils of prehistoric birds with beaks full of teeth. It was actually important research that supported Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And it was all the ammunition one fundamentalist congressman from Alabama needed.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Hillary Herbert, I believe, walked into Congress with a copy of Marsh's Birds With Teeth, O'Donnell Harnethy's, and slammed this book down and said, "Birds with teeth, birds with teeth. This is where your taxpayer dollars are going. Birds with teeth." And through those efforts, the USGS was severely defunded.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  When his appropriation was cut off in 1892, Marsh received a terse telegram from the director of the USGS demanding his resignation. But that wasn't even the worst of it for Marsh.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  So Marsh lost his funding through the survey. And more than that was ordered to send all the fossils collected by the survey down to the Smithsonian. That was like 80 tons of fossils. I think it was five or six carloads.

• 30:53Roman Mars?

  Marsh was ultimately removed from his position, and the bone wars ended, seemingly with no obvious winner. And in the process, the two had taken down federal funding for scientific research with them.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Kope may have won the press war, but he was still broke. He had amassed an enormous collection of fossils over his lifetime, so many that he had two houses, one for himself and one for all of his bones. He eventually sold his entire collection to cover his many debts.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, the museum's pretty crowded today, I guess because of the holidays, but this, this, this hall isn't always crowded.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Kope's massive collection was purchased by the American Museum of Natural History, where Dr. Michael Novacek was able to point out some of his greatest discoveries.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  This is Allosaurus.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a, an older predator than Tyrannosaurus from the Jurassic. And it, it, you know, a little smaller, but still ferocious looking.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Kope died in 1897 at the age of 56. And even at the end of his life, couldn't resist taking one more swipe from beyond the grave.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Kope actually challenged Marsh.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  This is Dan Brinkman, museum assistant at the Yale Peabody Museum.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  So Kope gave his body to science. He wanted his brain compared with Marsh's brain to show who was the brainier of the two.

• 32:26Roman Mars?

  Marsh did not end up taking the bait, and he died just two years later, brain unremoved, but with no family or friends by his side.

• 32:35Speaker 05

  It sort of reminds me of like the opening scene of Citizen Kane, you know?

• 32:43Speaker 05

  Charles Schwarzenegger is there in bed. Yeah, except he says like, "Brontosaurus." But the irony is, they're known together, you know, Kope and Marsh, Abbott and Costello, you know, it's just kind of hardly say one name without the other. I don't think they would have liked that.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Combined, the two of them discovered over 25,000 new fossils.

• 33:10Roman Mars?

  Together, they also collected and described 136 dinosaurs. The two discovered many of the most recognizable species of dinosaurs known today, including Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Diplodocus.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  And if you want the final score, Marsh is credited with 80 new dinosaurs to Kope's 56.

• 33:31Roman Mars?

  In your face, Kope.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  However, between the two of them, only 32 of those species are considered valid today. That means roughly 76% of everything they named was either a duplicate, a misidentification, or based on such fragmentary bones that it couldn't be properly classified. It was a product of their mad rush to be on top.

• 33:55Roman Mars?

  In the end, both men were left battered and bruised reputationally. They were considered an embarrassment by the scientific community. But ultimately, both men's work accelerated the field of paleontology from a fledgling science to something worthy of the public's attention.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  They also furthered the reputations of two of the most renowned natural history museums in the world.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  And it is, isn't it ironic that, you know, out of this horrible kind of competition, it's more than competition, it was a fight, a feud, came this brilliant, this brilliant result.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Dr. Michael Novacek again.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  It was really the big spark for the growth of those museums and the establishment of the museums. I mean, dinosaurs are popular, and giant mammal fossils are popular, and people flock to them. And so the Carnegie, the Peabody, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the Philadelphia Academy, and more, were all, all, you know, catalyzed by all this collection in the west of these fossils.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  But personally, I think the most important impact of this silly rivalry was creating generations of dinosaur kids, like me. Wow. Can I ask if these kids like dinosaurs?

• 35:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  While I was wandering around the Yale Peabody Museum, the place that owes its existence to this feud, I came across a couple of kids visiting with their family, and I knew exactly how they felt.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  How can I describe how it felt to stare up at a T-Rex skeleton when I was five years old? To feel like there's finally something in real life that matches up to your wild imagination. Their presence made the museum a magical place that I couldn't get enough of, and I wanted to know more, more, more about dinosaurs. I wanted to memorize their names and wear dinosaur pajamas and drink out of a dinosaur cup. They told me the world was full of wonder and things to be discovered. I'm reporting a podcast about dinosaurs. I wanted to ask, what do you, do you like dinosaurs?

• 36:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, and want me to tell you something?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  I really like saber toothed tigers because, and pterodactyls because saber toothed tiger, griffon thunder, the penguin, power ranger.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 36:23Speaker 06

  I, I'm the yellow ranger.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  You are? And what do you like about dinosaurs?

• 36:28Speaker 06

  Some of them eat plants and some of them are super cool because they can run fast, blend in, and also they can run fast like saber toothed tiger.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Did you know?

• 36:40Speaker 06

  And also fly.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 06

  What's that dinosaur?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  I don't know, but these people would know.

• 36:45Speaker 07

  Professor Marsh named Brontops.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Brontops. Is that your new favorite dinosaur?

• 36:50Speaker 06

  No.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  No. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I hope you have the best time at the museum today. Okay. Bye. Bye. Thank you.

• 37:04Roman Mars?

  A Few Corrections with Gillian Jacobs, after this.

• 37:10Roman Mars?

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• 39:49Roman Mars?

  We are back with reporter and dinosaur enthusiast Gillian Jacobs. Hey, Gillian.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Hi, Roman. Am I now the official dinosaur correspondent for 99PI?

• 39:58Roman Mars?

  You are. You are the official correspondent of many things. Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, waterways, and dinosaurs.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  I'm so glad it's now clear to you how much I love dinosaurs, and I'm glad the world knows. In fact, I dressed as a dinosaur on an episode of Community as an homage to my childhood love for dinosaurs.

• 40:16Roman Mars?

  Really?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  You might not have noticed or remembered because everybody said I looked like Yoshi, but I was supposed to be a T-Rex.

• 40:23Roman Mars?

  That's awesome. So as we covered in the main episode, Kope and Marsh, they advanced the field of paleontology a lot in their work, but they also made a ton of mistakes along the way, and we're here to talk about those mistakes.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Yes, and I want to preface this with the fact that paleontology is a field where it is very easy to make very big errors. Paleontologists are constantly trying to correct the scientific record because constructing entire extinct ecosystems based on very, very old and broken bones is very difficult, even today. So no judgments from me.

• 40:58Roman Mars?

  Got it.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  That being said, the mistakes that Kope and Marsh made definitely weren't helped by the speed in which they were working, just so they could outdo each other.

• 41:08Roman Mars?

  That's right. Some of this was self-inflicted harm. So what are some examples of the things they got wrong?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so we know that the whole Bone Wars were actually kicked off by a really big slip-up. Here's Mark Jaffe, author of The Gilded Dinosaur Again.

• 41:21Speaker 05

  The single biggest mistake in paleontology was Marsh's. He made a mistake that stood for decades.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  So in the thick of the Bone Wars, Marsh described and named the species of Saurapod, which is a type of dinosaur with a very long neck and a very long tail. And he named this Apatosaurus. Well, a couple of years later, his team found the remains of another Saurapod, this one much bigger, which Marsh believed belonged to an entirely new species.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  He had this nearly complete skeleton, again, very rare. All it lacked was a head. And they couldn't find it in the quarry that they were working in, but they found a nice complete skull at another quarry four miles away. So he said, all right, we're going to put that head on this one. And he called it the Brontosaurus. Well, there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus. What the Brontosaurus was, was an Apatosaurus body with a Camasaurus head. And the, sort of, the irony was that for years, many paleontologists sort of, eh, that's not right. That's not right.

• 42:34Speaker 05

  But because it was Marsh, he said, all right, I'm not going to, I'm not going to take that on. It took almost 60 years before everybody owned up, yeah, yeah, there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus.

• 42:45Roman Mars?

  I've heard this before, but I think there's probably a bunch of people who don't know that Brontosaurus never actually existed. Like, it's still kind of in the top five of dinosaurs that people know, but actually it was an Apatosaurus the whole time, which is the wrong skull.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the actual name Brontosaurus went unused by paleontologists for around 100 years. And it actually wasn't even until 1979 that the Carnegie Museum corrected the head on its own skeleton. But I am sure that there are some listeners out there who are dinosaur enthusiasts, and when Brontosaurus came up in the main story, thought, that's not even a real dinosaur.

• 43:18Roman Mars?

  Right. And there's probably a few who are like, what are you talking about? Brontosaurus is like one of the big five.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my favorite dinosaur.

• 43:24Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I love that one.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  You're rewriting my childhood.

• 43:27Roman Mars?

  Exactly.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  And I'm about to make it even more complicated, because in 2015, there was a study that concluded that there were enough differences between Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus to distinguish it as a separate genus, and that the name Brontosaurus should be revived.

• 43:42Roman Mars?

  Oh, my God.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  It's still being debated within paleontology. Emily Grassley described it as the Pluto of the dinosaur world.

• 43:51Roman Mars?

  That sounds like a very apt metaphor, where people are fighting over something with great fervor that probably doesn't matter all that much, but...

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Watch yourself, the comment section's about to light up.

• 44:01Roman Mars?

  Okay. So what else did these two guys get wrong?

• 44:05Speaker 01

  So the next one came from Kope. So Kope was known for being an incredibly fast writer, and he would just fire off paper after paper after paper. And Dan Brinkman at the Peabody Museum told me about a mistake he made that was more of a clerical error than a taxonomic error as he was rushing to beat Marsh to publication.

• 44:23Speaker 06

  Kope had kind of poor handwriting, let alone when he's writing by lamplight at camp. But a poor tulligrafer in Black Butte, Wyoming, got this six-line description that he was to telegraph back to Philadelphia. Kope had intended to name one of these animals Laxolophodon, which means beast with crested tooth. But the poor tulligrafer, trying to make it out, bastardized it into Letholophodon, which is pure gibberies.

• 44:56Roman Mars?

  Well, that's happened to all of us, I think.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm glad I can spell my own name some days.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  The next one is actually a double oopsie from Marsh. So Marsh first described Stegosaurus in 1877. Pop quiz, Roman, what does a Stegosaurus look like?

• 45:15Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I know exactly what a Stegosaurus looks like. You can't, you cannot stump me here. It is the, you know, four-footed dinosaur. It's one of the big, sort of like, one of the big humpback, and it has the bony sails, like a mohawk on its spine, and has a spiky tail that it uses to, like, fight other dinosaurs with.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Ding, ding, ding. Exactly correct. So it's got those plates that stick up all the way down its back and down the tail, like you said, kind of like a mohawk. But Marsh pictured the bony plates lying flat across the animal's back, like roof shingles or like a suit of armor, which is actually where the name Stegosaurus comes from, because it means roofed lizard. And it took years of later analysis and better fossil evidence for paleontologists to work out that the plates almost certainly stood upright in two staggered rows down the spine, not flat, not armor, more likely for display or temperature regulation.

• 46:13Roman Mars?

  I'm glad they corrected it to be upright, because that looks way cooler.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. It is so much cooler. But my favorite mistake that Marsh theorized about the Stegosaurus was that it possibly had two brains, and one of those brains was in its butt.

• 46:31Roman Mars?

  I do remember this, now that you mention it, like a walnut-sized brain in his butt. But why did he think this?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  So he noticed that the neural canal running through the sacrum, which is the fused vertebra at the hip, widened into a large, empty cavity in its bottom half that no one could explain. And he also noted that the Stegosaurus had an unusually tiny brain for its body, so it was possible that the second cavity could be some kind of secondary nerve center that could help coordinate the massive hind legs and the spiked tail.

• 47:03Roman Mars?

  Like, kind of how those big fire trucks have, like, two drivers, like, one at the front and one at the back, just to make sure that you can make a tight corner?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly that.

• 47:13Roman Mars?

  That's awesome.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Okay, I have to be serious. Like I said, paleontology is hard, and none of this is meant to dunk on Kope and Marsh specifically. And paleontology corrects itself constantly. That's the whole point of science. But the way these two guys acted, that could probably use a little humbling.

• 47:32Roman Mars?

  That's right, that's right. A lot of this is, they're being sort of hoisted on their own petard. We're not making fun of general science, which involves a lot of, you know, discussion and conflict and people fighting over ideas and revision. And it's good when people revise things. That's the whole story of science.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:50Roman Mars?

  So thank you so much for bringing us the amazing story of the Bone Wars. It's fun to geek out about dinosaurs with you.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  I don't think I could enjoy anything more.

• 48:04Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was reported this week by Gillian Jacobs and edited by Vivian Lay with additional production by Jacob Medina Gleason. Mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Graham Hesha. Special thanks this week to Leslie M. M. Bloom. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kirk Colestead is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Moshe Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Pram, Talon and Rain Stradly, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find

• 48:47Roman Mars?

  us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 49:04Roman Mars?

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