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A Bone to Pick · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
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  Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
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  Speaker 1: of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
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  Speaker 1: for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: Most restaurants pride themselves on the freshness of the food
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  Speaker 1: they serve. They'll stand at your table and discuss how
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  Speaker 1: the chickens led happy, satisfied lives before they ended up
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  Speaker 1: on your plate, or how the greens were harvested from
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  Speaker 1: local farms only a mile away. Nothing tastes quite as
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  Speaker 1: crisp as a let us leaf straight from the dirt.
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  Speaker 1: But in nineteen eleven, one place didn't care about farm
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  Speaker 1: to table. In fact, it refused to serve anything freshly
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  Speaker 1: made for a very good reason. It all happened in
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  Speaker 1: Chicago at the Hotel Sherman. Four hundred guests had gathered
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  Speaker 1: in the hotel's Louis the fourteenth room for a special
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  Speaker 1: five course meal lasting two hours. Among the elite clientele
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  Speaker 1: was the city's mayor, the health commissioner, and a number
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  Speaker 1: of politicians from Washington, DC, and New York, all who
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  Speaker 1: had arrived with hefty appetites. On their plates were things
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  Speaker 1: like April egg salad and roast February CAPAN. The menu
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  Speaker 1: didn't hide anything either. It explained where every ingredient had
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  Speaker 1: come from in detail, including how long ago it had
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  Speaker 1: been prepared. For example, the chicken had been kept in
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  Speaker 1: Chicago cold storage for almost a year. Mayor iich And Green,
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  Speaker 1: the VP of the National Poultry, Butter and Egg Association,
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  Speaker 1: told everyone that your CAPAN received its summons to the
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  Speaker 1: Great Unknown along about last Saint Valentine's Day. Now it
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  Speaker 1: was late October, None of the ingredients had come from
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  Speaker 1: local farms or suppliers, and everything being served was months old.
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  Speaker 1: So why were these high ranking officials willing to test
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  Speaker 1: their taste bunds and their stomachs with old food? Because
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  Speaker 1: the times had changed and the new age was upon them.
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  Speaker 1: This luncheon was called the Cold Storage Banquet, and it
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  Speaker 1: was designed to showcase the benefits of a brand new
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  Speaker 1: technology refrigeration. You see, in the days before this banquet
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  Speaker 1: was held, food was stored in a number of different ways.
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  Speaker 1: It was often smoked, salted, pickled, or kept in root
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  Speaker 1: sellers underground. People of means might have stored their ingredients
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  Speaker 1: in ice houses during the spring and summer months, while
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  Speaker 1: others had individual ice boxes in their homes and apartments.
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  Speaker 1: In fact, ice became a major part of daily life.
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  Speaker 1: What used to be cut from frozen lakes and shipped
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  Speaker 1: to the cities was soon made in factories and delivered
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  Speaker 1: right to homes and businesses. Many houses had ice boxes
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  Speaker 1: to store their milk and other perishable items. It was
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  Speaker 1: a rough time in America, where people often died from
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  Speaker 1: food based illnesses, but by nineteen eleven, refrigeration was being
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  Speaker 1: introduced to the masses, and it promised to end food
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  Speaker 1: poisoning and other food born problems. Now, ingredients and leftovers
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  Speaker 1: could be stored for longer at lower temperatures, without worrying
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  Speaker 1: about bacteria or needing to replace a large block of
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  Speaker 1: ice every few days. But of course, not everyone was
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  Speaker 1: quick to embrace this new fangled technology. In fact, the
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  Speaker 1: US government had considered passing laws that would impose strict
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  Speaker 1: time limits on how long things like meat and dairy
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  Speaker 1: could be held in cold storage, so to assuage the
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  Speaker 1: fears and demonstrate the value of refrigeration. The industry sponsored
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  Speaker 1: a special luncheon comprised only of foods that had been
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  Speaker 1: in long term cold storage, and the plan worked. The
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  Speaker 1: head chef of the hotel there said that it was
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  Speaker 1: the best luncheon he had ever served, and one congressman
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  Speaker 1: argued that the chicken was even more flavor than a bird,
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  Speaker 1: and I quote advertised as freshly killed. Overall, people were
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  Speaker 1: quite pleased with the meal they had eaten, and soon
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  Speaker 1: enough the idea of cold storage was everywhere, although not
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  Speaker 1: everyone was thrilled. Critics believe refrigeration would alter the taste
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  Speaker 1: of food, and not for the better. In some ways,
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  Speaker 1: that is true, but the benefits of keeping things fresher
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  Speaker 1: for longer far outweigh the changes in flavor. General Electrics
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  Speaker 1: started producing home refrigerators that very same year, although they
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  Speaker 1: were prohibitively expensive. A new fridge cost about one thousand dollars,
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  Speaker 1: twice the amount of a new car. But eventually those
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  Speaker 1: costs came down and refrigerators found their way into every
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  Speaker 1: home in America. And of course you know how this
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  Speaker 1: story ends. Today, we store almost all of our fresh
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  Speaker 1: food in the chilling embrace of our refrigerators. Preserving it
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  Speaker 1: for weeks at a time, and to think we might
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  Speaker 1: not have had them today if not for four hundred
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  Speaker 1: brave politicians willing to risk their lives a slice of
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  Speaker 1: one year old apple pie. What's your favorite dinosaur? That's
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  Speaker 1: a question that you might not have heard since elementary school.
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  Speaker 1: But I like to think that whether you're nine or
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  Speaker 1: ninety nine, your answer still says something about you. As
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  Speaker 1: for me, my favorite dinosaur is the triceratops, because of
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  Speaker 1: good things come in threes. Right now, you might be
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  Speaker 1: a velociraptor enthusiast, or a t rex fan, or a
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  Speaker 1: lover of pterodactyls. You might even prefer the more peaceful brontosaurus,
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  Speaker 1: you know, those long necked, tiny head tree lovers. That's
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  Speaker 1: the one. Except for one little detail, your favorite dinosaur,
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  Speaker 1: the Brontosaurus, may have never actually existed. The whole mix
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  Speaker 1: up dates back over one hundred and forty years, when
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  Speaker 1: two American paleontologists were duking it out in a conflict
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  Speaker 1: known as the Bone Wars. You see, in the late
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  Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, you couldn't talk about paleontology without talking about O. C.
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  Speaker 1: Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. These two men were pioneers
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  Speaker 1: in the field. They began their career as friends and colleagues,
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  Speaker 1: but that didn't last for long. In eighteen sixty eight,
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  Speaker 1: Cope showed Marsh a quarry that he was digging in,
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  Speaker 1: and shortly after Marsh struck a deal with the quarry's
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  Speaker 1: owner giving him exclusive rights to fossils found in it. Essentially,
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  Speaker 1: he planned to steal Cope's specimens right out from under him.
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  Speaker 1: After that, it was all war. A few years later,
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  Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy seven, a wealth of dinosaur fossils were
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  Speaker 1: discovered at a dig site near Morrison, Colorado. Marsh and Cope,
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  Speaker 1: each desperate to one up each other, used every dirty
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  Speaker 1: trick they knew to protect their fines and to sabotage
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  Speaker 1: their rivals. There are stories of the two bribing each
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  Speaker 1: other's workers, spying on their dig sites, and even straight
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  Speaker 1: up stealing fossils from each other. There are even reports
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  Speaker 1: of the two paleontologists ordering their work to smash fossils
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  Speaker 1: left behind so the other men couldn't collect them. The
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  Speaker 1: entire time too, both Marsh and Cope were in a
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  Speaker 1: competition to make more discoveries, publish more papers and have
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  Speaker 1: more articles in the news. But in the rush to
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  Speaker 1: make new discoveries sometimes things got a bit confusing, Like
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  Speaker 1: how in eighteen seventy seven, Marsh's team uncovered a brand
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  Speaker 1: new skeleton in Morrison, Colorado. Of course, Marsh was a
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  Speaker 1: static to find that, hiding under tons of rocks and
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  Speaker 1: debris was a nearly perfect specimen of an unknown dinosaur.
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  Speaker 1: The creature had four limbs, a whiplike tail, and an
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  Speaker 1: incredibly long neck. The only thing missing was the new
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  Speaker 1: dinosaur's head. When a museum asked for a reconstruction of
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  Speaker 1: the skeleton to show in its collection a few years later,
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  Speaker 1: Marsh put a skull he found near the skeleton on
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  Speaker 1: top to complete it. He named the animal the Apotosaurus,
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  Speaker 1: which comes from the Greek deceptive lizard. By eighteen eighty five,
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  Speaker 1: Marsh had made dozens of discoveries the Apotosaurus, still trying
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  Speaker 1: to outpublish cope. He was excited when his team shipped
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  Speaker 1: him the bones of a new dinosaur. This was another
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  Speaker 1: species of a long necked leaf eating dinosaur, this time
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  Speaker 1: complete with a skull. Not wanting to waste any time,
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  Speaker 1: Marsh gave it a cursory examination then declared it a
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  Speaker 1: brand new species, the Brontosaurus, meaning thunder lizard. The only problem,
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  Speaker 1: the Brontosaurus and the Apotosaurus were one and the same.
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  Speaker 1: The brontosaurus skeleton was just more complete than the apotosaurus fossil,
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  Speaker 1: including the correct skull. Marsh was so desperate to defeat
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  Speaker 1: Cope that he didn't even realize the dinosaur he had
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  Speaker 1: just named had already been discovered by him. For nearly
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  Speaker 1: one hundred years, Cope's two long necked dinosaurs became fixtures
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  Speaker 1: in the public's imagination. The Brontosaurus especially, became a star
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  Speaker 1: of movies, books, and classrooms around the world. It wasn't
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  Speaker 1: until nineteen seventy nine that the confusion was finally clear up.
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  Speaker 1: That year, two paleontologists who had heard rumors about the
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  Speaker 1: two long neck similarities, dug into the data. The more
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  Speaker 1: they researched, the more they realized the two dinos were
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  Speaker 1: actually one. Finally, nearly one hundred years after it was
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  Speaker 1: first assembled, the two paleontologists put the right skulls on
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  Speaker 1: Marsh's original Apotosaurus. Then they made an announcement to the world.
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  Speaker 1: There was no such thing as a brontosaurus. The long
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  Speaker 1: neck dinosaur that Marsh found was the one and only
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  Speaker 1: a Potosaurus. They'd finally uncovered the truth. Well that's what
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  Speaker 1: they thought they'd done. But thirty six years later, in
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  Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, science threw a wrench into their conclusions. That year,
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  Speaker 1: a study was conducted that compared every long necked dinosaur
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  Speaker 1: fossil that had ever been discovered, and the results were surprising.
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  Speaker 1: It turned out that Marsh was right all along. The
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  Speaker 1: Brontosaurus and the Apotosaurus were two different, distinct dinosaur fossils.
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  Speaker 1: No bones about it. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided
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  Speaker 1: tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on
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  Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting
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  Speaker 1: Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me
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  Speaker 1: Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make
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  Speaker 1: another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
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  Speaker 1: book series, and television show, and you can learn all
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  Speaker 1: about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until
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  Speaker 1: next time, stay curious.