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What Were the BONE WARS? · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck and we're coming to
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  Speaker 1: we will see you then. Check it out at s
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  Speaker 1: y s K live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Charles to Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there and
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: raw that was a limp limp. Laugh, Chuck, I've gotten
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: way better laughs out of either. Uh. Are you a
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: dinosaur A little bit? I got a little dinosaur in me,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: a little Neander Tall in me. I learned from twenty
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: three and me. Um. But despite my dinosaur heritage, I
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: was never a big time into dinosaurs as a kid.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Were you not? Like it's astounding, Chuck, how similar we
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: were as children. Ums. I didn't smoke when I was
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: seven years old fourteen. I was the right bold asia
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: before started smoking. Um. So it wasn't like, I don't
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: know if it was the same with you. It's not
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: like I had anything against dinosaurs or kids who like dinosaurs.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: I thought they were kind of cool and I had
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: some like like figurines here there, But it wasn't anything
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: like I was nerdy about in any way, shape or form. Yeah,
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: And I mean I think there was there's a certain
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: movie that really really got kids into dinosaurs, The Lost
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: World No Ferris Putler's Day Off. Uh, And that movie
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: came out you know when I was older. Yeah. Here,
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: I think I wasn't even remember what year that was.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: I feel like I was in college, though I want
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: to say it was like ninety two to ninety four,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: one of those years. That's what I would guess. But
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: kids these days are and it's not just my kid,
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: but I see lots of kids in her age group
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: that are obsessed with dinosaurs. Yeah, and I think that's cool, Like,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: what a cool thing to be obsessed with that. It
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: teaches you so much stuff you know about the deep past,
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: about evolution, um, about you know, walking lizard, bird creatures.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: You know, there's a lot, there's a lot to learn from,
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: like being interested in dinosaurs. That's very cool thing to
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: be interested in. About death and extinction, sure, rotting, fossilization,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: all the good stuff, right, Um, But the whole interest,
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: including the interest that was around when we were kids
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: that just kind of passed us by, but definitely, you know,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: the interest in dinosaurs that gave rise to the idea
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: of Michael Krecht and even writing Jurassic Park and then
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Steven Spielberg even making it into a movie. That interest
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: in dinosaurs in America you can actually trace back to
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: almost a um a specific winter in a specific place
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. In the winter of eighteen seventy
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: seven in particular, and it was the result of a vicious,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: mean spirited, petty rivalry between two paleontologists that really kind
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: of sparked America's interest in dinosaurs. Yeah, I mean it
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: feels very Tesla. Uh who's the other guy? What was
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: his name? Marconi? Maybe your Ferris Bueller. Yeah, that it's
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: really reminded me of the Tesla Ferris Bueller rivalry. Ferris
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: won that one fare in the Current Wars, which, by
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: the way, that movies coming out. Have you seen the trailer?
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: You know? Who plays who? You know? I can't remember now,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: but I saw it the other day and it looks
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: it looks pretty good. Nicholas Cage plays both roles. O, God,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: how great would that be? It would be pretty great?
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: Ce DC just like that's two hours right there. Um,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: there's actually going to be a movie, or there was
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: going to be a movie about what we're about to
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: talk about today. Did you know that now? I kind
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: of wondered though. Yeah, it was scheduled for production. Steve
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Carrell was going to play Cope, Oh and James Gandelfini
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: was gonna play Marsh and James Gandolfini died unexpectedly and
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: the production just got kai boshed. And they also found
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: out that the title The Bone Wars had already been
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: taken by a adult pornography. Yep, we're so on the
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: same page. We totally children no interest in Jurassic Park
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: or any dinosaurs, but we think the names of porno
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: films is hilarious. That's our our big interest. So I
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: thought it was funny, you know. We we commissioned this
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: piece for for the Grabster, and he's a big dinosaur guy,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: and he was somewhat shamed. He was like, I just
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: and he said it two or three times, like I
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: can't believe I didn't know about these guys. Yeah, We're like,
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: it's okay, grab sir, It's all right. Yeah. But so
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: I feel like he learned something along the way. UM.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: And he starts out, and I think it's a good
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: thing for us to talk a little bit about just
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: um before these dudes, how paleot paleontology came about um
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: and that had you know, I think since people just
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: started stumbling upon bones, even by accident, before it was
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: even a discipline. People were like, oh man, look at
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: that thing. I'm gonna pick that up and take it
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: with me, right. I think they used to get classified
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: also is mythological creatures or dead gods or something like that. Um.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: But the first documented paleontological expedition in North America was
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: carried out by none other than Lewis and Clark. Did
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: you know that before? Did we mention that in the episode?
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Do you think? I don't know, but I did know
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: at some point from somewhere, maybe it was the the
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: kin Burns Peace, but that you know one of the
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: things they did, I mean they were they were logging everything,
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: including bone deposits. But they spent like a week um
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: around salt lick flats or salt like gully or salt
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: like something, um where there was a big old salt
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: like that used to attract dinosaurs and um pli sustine
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: mammals um from two different periods. Everybody puts your emails away, um,
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: and the bones that would collect there were really significant.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: So they spent a week like excavating there. But that
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: was the first one. But that was even before the
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: world the word paleontology was coined. Yeah, that was in
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: eighteen twenty two in the French journal de physique and Um.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: There were a couple of people that proceeded Uh and
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: in in fact um, one of whom went on to
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: be a sort of a mentor to Cope. But I
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: got named Edward Hitchcock and another guy named Joseph. Is
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: it Lighty or Leady Um? I think Lighty is what
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: I've seen the most. Yeah, l I d y Um
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: and he's the one that went on to to work
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: with Cope later on. But just put a pin in this.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: But in eighteen fifty eight, I'm pretty important find basically
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: the only big dinosaur find on the East Coast where
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: the fossil live bones of a herbivore name Hadrosaurus Folky
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: in New Jersey. And it was a big deal because
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: it was on the East Coast and this is where
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: the stuff was going on in time and you get
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: a lot of footprints on the East Coast, but not
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: a lot of finds like this. Yeah, it was an
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: enormous fine and Um Lighty Uh was called in to
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: excavate it and put it together because he was America's
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: first vertebrate paleontologists. He was the first guy and was
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: really prolific and really good at what he did. Um,
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: and like you said, would eventually become a mentor to
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: one of the guys we should probably introduce now, because
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: Lighty was working in I think his first real burst
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: of energy came in the eighteen fifties, early eighteen fifties,
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  Speaker 1: and Um, within about fifteen maybe twenty years, there were
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: a pair of guys who would come along and just
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: completely changed the field of paleontology. It started out very normally,
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: just another scientific field, very exciting, lots of discoveries to
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: be made. I mean, that's the point of all this, right,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: is that, like if you have a brand new scientific field,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: everything you come across is worth writing about describing. You
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: get to name everything. So it was a really exciting,
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: like dynamic time for the field of paleontology. But but
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: a field of science is the character of it is
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: based on its earliest practitioners. And Lighty Um was a
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: very steady, normal scientist who was very reliable, so he
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: kind of set paleontology up like that. But then along
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: came a couple of guys who would form this rivalry
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: and they would change all of that. Um No, I
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: don't think necessarily to this day, but there was a
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: a lot of sniping that used to go on in
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: the field of paleontology. That that was because of the
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: tone that these guys set. Yeah, and both of them
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: would end up basically bankrupt at the end of each
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: of their lives because of all their efforts to outdo
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: and undermine one another's work. Um, so we're talking about
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: two dudes. Uh, one is Marsh and one is Cope
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: on off. Neil. I've never heard that name before. I
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: I think his parents made it up. Maybe O T
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: H N I E I'll auth. Neil Charles March born
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: in October one in New York and he was Um.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: They didn't have a lot of money in his family.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: They were farmers. Um, he would have been a farmer,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: but he had and this kind of really changed his life.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: He had a very rich uncle named George Peabody, UM,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: who would go on to really kind of fund his
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: education in early parts of his career later on. Yeah,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: he just plucked him out of the farm field basically
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: and said, And I have no idea why he did this,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: but he said you I I like the look of
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: you and your brain, nephew, and you're gonna go to
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: smart would be my guess. Was that it? Okay, Well,
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: I don't know how he demonstrated it, I guess, is
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: what I'm trying to say, Like, how did his uncle say, yes,
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: you're the one. You know, smarts are always evident. Okay,
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Well he plucked him out, sent him to boring school,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: then sent him to Yale, and eventually sent him off
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: to grad school in Germany. So um, Marsh. We're just
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: gonna call him Marsh because his name is just too
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: ugly and horrible to say out loud. Um. He was
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: basically set. He was fine. He had a benefactor in
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: his extraordinarily wealthy um philanthropist uncle. Yeah. So Cope. On
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: the other hand, Um similarly had money, but his was
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: like in his family. He wasn't like poor with a
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: rich uncle. He had a wealthy family, very prominent family
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was born in July eight forty,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: and he went to you know all the Uh, I
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: was gonna say trappings, but I guess all the benefits
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: of being born into money. He went to very nice,
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: expensive boarding school. Uh, and that wasn't so much up
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: his alley. So he dropped out when he was sixteen,
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: and uh, because he had a rich rich dad. Um,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: it allowed him a lot of opportunities that other people
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: wouldn't have, including you know, going to college later on,
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: even though he never graduated high school. Yeah, well so
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: there so it was definitely in part because of his dad.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: But also this was a time and like say the
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: eighteen fifties, it was lax. But also like even if
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: you wanted to go on and become like a um,
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: get a PhD, American universities weren't you know, they didn't
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: offer many PhD programs in sciences, right, So there was
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: a there was a whole um something called gentleman naturalists
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: who were amateur self taught um scientists who just just
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: did the work. They knew what they were doing, they
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: figured it out as they went along, and they actually
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: developed some of these fields. And so he kind of
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: subscribed to that school where um, that old school of
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: gentleman naturalists where there was you could you could go
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: figure it out yourself without needing to go through the university.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: But he did that just on the cusp like our
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: parents generation was just on the cusp of the last
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: group who could get away without knowing how to use email.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: He was like part of that last generation that could
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: become a scientist with out having to go through formal
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: training at a university. Right, Like if you have a
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: tweed suit with a stiff color and a pencil and
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: a pad, you can and lots of time on your hands. Yeah,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: and that's that's I mean. To to Cope's credit, I
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: think that that really kind of demonstrates like he's like, no,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: I'm going to go learn from experience. And he did
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: keep knocking it, but he did get entree into places
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: like the University of Pennsylvania or the Academy of Natural
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Sciences in Philadelphia because of his family's context. But I
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: get the impression that he worked his way uh into
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: those places. Once he got in, he he didn't just low.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: He learned what he needed to learn. Yeah. I mean,
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: because if there's one thing we're gonna learn about Cope
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: here over the next thirty minutes or so, is he
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: worked hard? Yes, he's my pick of the bone wars.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: He's who I put my money behind. Is your guy? Yep? Interesting?
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Did we ever say his name Edward Drinker Cope? Yeah,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: that's a weird middle name. It is. He was a drinker, literally,
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: he really was. He was. Also, he was also a
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: Quaker and a pacifist too, that's right. So at college
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: at University of Pennsylvania, that's where he met Joseph Lytey.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: He was one of his professors. So that just you know,
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: kind of kick started their relationship. Um. During the Civil War,
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: he went to Europe um the American Civil War because
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: he didn't want to be you know, he didn't want
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: to go to war. He didn't want to go fight.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: He want to go dig up bones. Yeah, and he
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: was a Quaker pacifist too, that's right. So he went
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: to Germany, uh In in eighteen sixty three, he met
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: marsh and they really liked each other at first. They
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: had a lot in common, obviously, and I get the
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: feeling that in Germany in eighteen sixty three there were
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: probably not a ton of Americans who were super interested
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: in dinosaur hunting, and so they they locked up, became
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: really good pals. Uh. They came back to the US
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: after the Civil War and friends, and we're both like,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna go do our thing independently, but
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: we're gonna keep touch. We're gonna swap info early on here.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: And it was all very friendly at first, right, and
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: I think you can make a pretty good case that
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: they probably cut their own palms and clasped hands and
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: became blood brother brothers during the German meeting. Okay, so
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: that's what we're going with, because they really did like
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: each other, um, and things were going along just fine too,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: kindred spirits with a common interest in paleontology, um. And
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: they may have continued on that way, although I sincerely
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: doubt that that's the case, um, which means I just
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: undermine my own statement. But Um, after the Civil War
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: they both went back to the United States to start careers,
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: their own careers, and marsh um or Cope, I'm sorry.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: He had connected with Joseph Lydy, who he had met
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: through the University of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Natural Sciences.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: They worked together there, and so he went off with
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: Ldy to um study bones that were found at hadden
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Field in New Jersey. Were light You found that first skeleton, right,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: And so being friends with Mars, she naturally Cope naturally
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: extended an invitation. Hey, come visit me in the field.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: You got to see this place. It's amazing. There's fossils everywhere.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: You're gonna love it. And so Marsh came out for
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: a visit and this was this is mark one in
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: the turning point of their relationship. There were two distinct
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: marks um, each of them point to one is the
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: the end of their friendship. This was the the end
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: of their friendship starting with Cope. That's right. So both
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: of these guys had uh privilege, like we've been talking about. Um.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: For Marsha's part, his uncle, his rich uncle, donated a
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: hundred and fifty grand to Yale basically to sort of
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: get March a job. They created the Peabody Museum of
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Natural History, and then they were like, well, hey, we
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: need a professor to chair this new department, and so
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: why not your nephew. And they said, Bully, that's a
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: great idea. So based it cost a hundred and fifty
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: grand to get Marsh Uh this this job as the
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: chair of Department of Paleontology at this new Peabody Museum
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: at Yale University, right, And so they said, yes, Um,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: we want to make you the first professor of paleontology
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: in America. And Marsh said, yes, that's a great idea.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: I like where you're going, Yale. I'm going to spend
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: a lot of time here, I can tell. So that's
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: that's Marsh setting off on his little trajectory, basically ensconcing
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: himself in Yale Cope. Um, remember he was basically a
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: high school dropout and he had to kind of make
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: his own way. Um. He had trouble at first finding
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: a position until he struck upon a place called Haverford
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: College and he got a position as a professor of
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: zoology there. Um, And they said, well, you're a high
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: school dropout, so we'll just give you an honorary Masters
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: of Arts degree. Being now you're a professor. It's pretty
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: working out for both of these guys. Yeah, although Cope
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: didn't really like have her for that much. Um, he
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: ends up quitting. Um. And it actually kind of its
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: kind of describes his personality a little bit that that
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: incident that he would get a good job, um, having
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: kind of been carried into that position, and then says
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: this job is bs, I'm quitting that he was apparently
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: prone to kind of a quick temper here there. Yeah,
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: I mean it's it does make the point. It's kind
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: of hard to piece together a personality from someone way
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: back then, but by most accounts, Cope was a bit mercurial, Um,
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: a little more outgoing. Marsh was a little quieter and
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: kind of known as a bit of a flake. Uh.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: You know, but considering their backgrounds, it sort of makes
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: sense where they ended up, Um Marsh, you know that
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: they went about their work in very different ways. Marsh
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: didn't publish his first paper until he was thirty years old. Um,
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: he was a lifelong bachelor. Cope married when he was
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: twenty five. And Cope, you know, even the way they
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: wrote co wrote these very sort of flowery um descriptions
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: of things. Well, Marsh was much more sort of rigid
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: and sort of dry and scientific. Yeah, Like if you
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: if you read Cope stuff, he's trying to like set
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: the scene for you. You know, there's one paper where
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: he was describing terrod actyls, and like it's a scientific paper,
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: so all you have to do is describe the bones
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: and the measurements and extrapolate and that kind of stuff.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: But he's like painting the picture of what it must
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: have been like on a cliff side by the ocean
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: as a troop of these things were dangling by their claws.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, it's super cool. It would definitely transport
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: the reader there, and it was a little extra doll
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: above something that that you didn't have to put on.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: But Cope definitely did put on. Which is surprising that
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: he put anything extra into his work because he published
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: at an extraordinary pace, so much so that Marsh in
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: particular was like, this man is obviously fraudulent. Nobody can
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: publish this much. Yeah, for sure, And we'll touch on
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: that a bit later. Um, the big difference in their
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: earlier careers was when when it came to religion. Um,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: Like you said earlier, Cope was a Quaker and was
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: a religious man. Marsh was not. He was not very
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: into religion, and he was fully down with evolution and
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: natural selection in Darwin, whereas Cope kind of had them
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: make it all fit within his religious beliefs. So it's
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: not like he outright like called Darwin a fraud or
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: anything like that, but he worked in like the actions
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: of God into his theories and sort of make it
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: made it all work according to his you know, religious beliefs,
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: which is I mean back then a little a little
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: bit different, but even back then for a scientist, sort
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: of an odd thing, yeah for sure. But he he
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: he tried to rectify science and his religious belief, and
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: the way that a lot of people did that back
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: then was to subscribe to neo Lamarckism, which is this
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: idea that um changes in a population take place on
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: the individual level. Like an example I saw was if
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: you're a blacksmith and you UM use your arm a
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: bunch to hammer, you're gonna get a big old bulky arm. Right. Well,
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: when you have kids, you're gonna pass that bulky arm
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: that you developed in your lifetime off to them. And
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: that's how evolution happens. And it's much more directed by
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: God than what Darwin was saying, which is you're just
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: born with a random mutation, and if that mutation happens
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: to make it more likely for you to to survive
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: to pass along your genes, then that mutation will get
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: selected by nature, which basically has nothing to do with God.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: So there was a real like struggle for Cope throughout
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: his lifetime um rectifying the two, especially considering Chuck that
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: the body of work that he produced really helped prove
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Darwin's point more than anything. Yeah, Um, when it comes
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: still like where things went wrong because they were still
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: buddies up until this point, Uh, it seemingly looks like
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: Marsh drew first blood. UM we mentioned that hadn't field
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: dig earlier. So it's UM eight sixty eight. Cope has
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: left his job at Haversford. UM. He's not very happy there,
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: so he leaves. He's really kind of feed on the
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: ground doing the work UM publishing papers which will see
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: later at an alarming rate, and working with Lightie, who
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: we talked about. And he invited Marsh because their buddies,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: and he was like, dude, you gotta come check this out.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: We found a legit dinosaur fossil on the east coast.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: Marsh was like, great, I'll go check it out. He
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: loves what he sees and says this is wonderful, friend,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: you're doing such great work here. Then he sneaks back
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: later on by himself and bribes the workers there, Copes
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: workers and Lighties workers and says, hey, man, if you
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: find any more good specimens, send them to this address,
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: and here's some a little dough for your effort. Can
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: you believe that? Yeah? I mean just straight up sold
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: him out right. So Marsh has just outed himself as
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: a very wormy type of fellow not to be trusted
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: and the way that I thought there was a really
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: great American Experience episode called Dinosaur Wars that really kind
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: of described it. Like to to Cope, he subscribed to
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: that gentleman's scholar type of mentality, which was there's unwritten rules,
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: you know, like I came and showed you my quarry
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: and you went behind my back to steal my fossils
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: from my corey. Not cool, that was Cope's take. From
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: Marsha's point of view, he was kind of from the uh,
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: the business like American school of of um just conquer
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: at all costs, and he owed no allegiance really to
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: to Cope in that sense that he saw an opportunity
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: and he took it. And that was Marsha's view of
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: the whole thing. But to Cope, that was like that
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: was not very cool, and I'm going to remember that.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: But I'm still going to tell natively remained friends with you.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: All Right, Well, let's take a break and we'll come
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: back right after this and we'll we'll talk about what
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: marsh always said was the reason they were no longer
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: friends right after this. All right, So Marsha has really
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: screwed his friend over, Yeah, I mean his back paid
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: off dudes to send him stuff. But according to Marsh,
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: he's like, that's not why we weren't friends anymore, that
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: that was not what really killed our friendship at all.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Here's what happened. Later on that year, Cope published a
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: paper um establishing this new species at Las most Saris plutarius. Nice,
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: thank you. Um. Marsh goes to the Academy of Natural
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: Sciences in Philly to check this thing out, because they're
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: still sort of friends at this point, and Cope showing
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: off his things, like look at this thing. I put
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: this thing back together and look at the skeleton. It's amazing,
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: and said, my friend, it appears you have fallen into
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: the classic paleontology trap and mounted the head on the butt. Yep.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: And this was a humiliating thing for Cope, sure, so
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: much so that he realized, oh god, I just wrote
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: a paper describing this thing with its head on the
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: wrong end in the American Philosophical Society's journal, and ran
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: out and tried to buy as many of these copies
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: as he could just to cover up his his mistake.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: And um, the way that the way that Marsh put
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: it later, because he ran around telling everybody he could
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: about this gap was very glib about oh, very very
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: um like he he went, he just wanted to make
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: sure that everybody knew that Cope had screwed up right. Um.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: Whereas he characterized the story, he characterized himself in the
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: story is just having gently pointed this out. He basically
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: said that Cope's vanity um was wounded and or his
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: basically saying like, not only did he get it wrong
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: when I gently pointed this out, this guy just flipped
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: out and he still hasn't forgiven me. So that's what
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: happened to our our friendship. Never mind the whole going
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: behind his back thing at hadden Field. This is really
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: what happened. But the thing is that story isn't even correct.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: It's just like a sliver of the fuller picture, because
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: the fuller picture involves Joseph Lydy, who again remember was
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: working at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia where
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: this skeleton was in the first place. That's right, So
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: what apparently really happened is is marsh comes in and
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: just says, oh, actually the neck vertebrae is in is
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: in the wrong position and that got everyone over there looking,
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: and Lighty is the one who actually said, oh no,
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: you have the head in the wrong place where the
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: tail is, and so fully paint a picture here. This
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: wasn't like some huge, big deal like mistakes. It was
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: very early on in paleontology. Everyone was doing their best. Uh.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: There was a lot of trial and error going on,
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: a lot of guesswork. And it wasn't like, oh my gosh,
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: she you know it's it's not like someone today drawing
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: the head of a bear mounted on his butt. They
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: were doing the best they could and it wasn't like
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: some huge error right now. And and it is true
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: from what I understand that Cope did run around trying
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: to buy the copies of the American Philosophical Society Journal
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: that had the incorrect part in it, and he was
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: um humiliated, especially the fact that Marsh was involved. But
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: it definitely wasn't Marsh running to the rescue to save
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: paleontology um and and Coke just being a voice. Overall,
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: it was definitely an incorrect picture that Marsh painted. But
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: regardless of how it's painted or what actually happened, that
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: two prong attack on the friendship, both of them perpetrated
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: by marsh Frankly, if you ask me, that ended their friendship.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Like their their friendliness was basically out the door. There's
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: some evidence that in the following couple of years when
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: they wrote to one another, they would kind of jokingly
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: reference some of the stuff in the past, but that
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: even that eventually dried up and they genuinely became bitter
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: bitter rivals, made all the more pronounced um when the
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: West was opened up by the Transcontinental Railroad, because all
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: of a sudden, you had said earlier that the fossil
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: fields in the east were the well the the conditions
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: of climate and geology in the East were not conducive
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: to preserving dinosaur bones. The exact opposite is true of
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: the Western United States. And when the West opened up,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: it was like, come on, in paleontology, that the timing
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: of the two is just astoundingly perfect. Yeah, I mean,
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: we're talking about the Dakotas, Kansas, um just bones everywhere
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: and not even too hard to find a lot of times.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you were a paleontologist and you headed west,
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: if you had some protection, because this is despite all
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: our efforts, that was still sort of a dangerous area
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: for a white man from the east to be traveling around. Um,
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: the Native American tribes there and the Western tribes did
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: not take kindly to a lot of it, No, because
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: think about it, like, they went from you know, wagon
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: trains of settlers coming through periodically, two trains daily moving
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: people in and out. So it was a big deal
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: to the Western tribes, um, who were fighting back and
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: pushing back against this encroachment and wave that was coming
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: much more strongly than it had been before. The railroad too, Yeah,
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: for sure. So from this point on, the guys took
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: very um sort of different I guess were forced to
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: take different approaches to their careers. Um cope. It basically
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: spent the rest of his life as a working paleontologist,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: like feed on the ground. For the most part. He
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: didn't work at a college. He didn't work at a
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: museum until much much later. Um. He was not like
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: taking care of or funded by the government. So he
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: paid for all the you know, he came from a
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: wealthy family, so he paid for most of the stuff himself. Uh.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Sold his farm, his you know family Quaker farm, and
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: got a big fat inheritance and started going west and
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: started amassing this big collection that was actually his, which
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: was a really big deal because since no one was
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: contributing to his um financial burdens, he I guess technically
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: owned this stuff, right. He he owned a fair and
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: square I mean, he'd financed his own expeditions. He paid
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: for the shipping and transportation of these things, which is
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: another thing. The railroad helped did not only open the West,
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: that helped ship enormous bones back east to the museums.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: But he was paying for this, So yeah, that his
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: collection was his own. Um. Marsh, on the other hand,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: being ensconsed in Yale, he was able to rely on Yale,
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Yale families, the government contacts that Yale had to finance
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: the expeditions that he went on. So in his mind
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: it was his collection, but um, technically it really wasn't
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: because he hadn't financed any of it himself. It had
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: all been financed by others. The thing the thing about Marsh, though, Chuck,
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: is that he was the first one to make it
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: out west, and because he was the first one there,
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: he basically considered the entire Western United States his turf,
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: and everyone else was encroaching on it, which is awfully
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: rich if you can remember what he did to Cope
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: back at hadden Field, and so you know, back then
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: there wasn't any kind of ownership on any fossils. But
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: now that he's the first one out west, there is
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: such a thing and they all belonged to him for sure. Um,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: so Cope and you know, when it comes to academics,
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: they also were really really different and how they approached things. Um.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: We kind of teased earlier about how much Cope wrote
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: and published, and boy, it's astounding. Um it seems like
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: he published throughout his career about fourteen hundred academic papers. Uh.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: In the eighteen seventies he was doing about twenty five
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: papers a year, and in one winter alone of eighteen
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: seventy nine and eighteen eighty he published seventies six papers,
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: very prolific to the point where it was pretty easy
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: for someone like Marsh to poke holes and um kind
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: of say that he was either copying people, or plagiarizing people,
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: or just outright fraudulent, and that no one can write
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: this much stuff. It also presented a problem in that Cope, Um,
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: he was publishing so much that he had a hard
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: time getting stuff published as a while after a while,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: because there weren't a ton of scientific journals and they
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: can't be like, listen, man, we can't publish like ten
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: things a month from you or a chord or because
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: we'll just call this thing the Coke Journal. And he said,
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: that's a great idea. So in eighteen seventy seven he
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: bought the American Naturalist Journal for himself to publish all
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: his own works, which ended up being a really uh,
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: I don't know about bad choice, but financially it is
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: what really put the biggest dent in his uh future
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: fortunes was sinking a ton of his own money into
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: this American Naturalist Journal. Oh is that right? I thought
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: it was the silver mine. The journals set him up
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: for it. Oh yeah, the silver mine was the last
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: ditch effort to try and make a little bit of
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: money because he was almost broke by that point. So
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: so he but he does have this forum now, um,
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: whether it was a good business opportunity or not, he
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: has a forum to publish in um. And And like
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: you're saying, he wrote just so many papers. Not only
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: was it just too many for the journals to keep
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: up with, there were also a lot of questions of
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: these journals, like, wait a minute, if you're like a deliberate,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: thoughtful scientists, you shouldn't be able to publish this much.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: And one of the problems of the Bone Wars the
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: rivalry between Cope and Marsh, that that really kind of
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: got both of them to be the first to rush
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: to name a species or make some new discovery um
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: so that the other one couldn't. Is that there was
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: a lot of sloppy work that came out of it.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: And when there's a lot of slappy, sloppy taxonomical work
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: where the same species is getting different names from different
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: people at the same time, that takes a lot to entangle.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: And apparently it took um paleontology many decades to kind
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: of undo some of the sloppy work that was kind
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: of late at the foundation of the field in the
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: eighteen seventies. Yeah, and especially at Cope's feet, because for
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: his part, Marsh was very, very much more methodical, did
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: not publish nearly as many papers, but along with that
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: comes a lot more prestige. No one was gonna, um,
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: no one's going to talk about Marsh and say that
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: he's publishing too much he's doing sloppy work. Uh So
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: as a result, they were published in some really prestigious
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: journals over the years, kind of almost exclusively. And he had,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: like you said, Yale behind him, so he would take
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: students a lot of time to make them pay their
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: own way, because this is all a very expensive endeavor
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: for the time. Um you know, Cope was was sort
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: of creative and how he would fund some of this,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: like he would latch onto other Western expeditions that had
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with paleontology. This was one called the
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: Wheeler Survey, which was a mapping expedition that he was
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: able to hook up with. So he would cut corners
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: and save where he could. But with the power of
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: Yale University behind him in the students who would pay
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: their own way, Marsh had a real advantage when it
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: came to uh staking his claim at West right. And
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: also there was one of the first expeditions he went
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: on um was funded by the families of some Yale students,
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: So it was some you know, Yale students and Marsh
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: basically playing cowboy out West and the first I guess
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: the first day once they arrived out West where they
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: were gonna dig Um, Buffalo Bill Cody shows up basically
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: kind of like as a guest star to appear and
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: just delight and thrill the Yale boys, Um, one of
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: whom wrote about the whole expedition, and the whole thing
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: up published in Harper's. So the whole thing kind of
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: demonstrates that Um Marsh, as much as he's kind of
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: seen as like this meek, deliberate scientist, was also really
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: good at self promotion too. Oh for sure, he would
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: wear a gun. I think he sort of fashioned himself
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: as a Teddy Roosevelt type or maybe a Buffalo Bill type.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: And uh yeah, he would toot his own horn for sure. Um.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: For his part, Cope after his father passed away, spent
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: less and less time out west in the actual field,
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: more time in Philadelphia, and he would hire guys out
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: And in fact, Marsh would later go on to do
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: a very similar thing where they would have their diggers
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: out there, um excavating and then sending bones back to
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: the East coast where they could do their dig in
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: and do their studying there. Right, And it's out west
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: that this the famous bone Wars really started to take place.
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: But like you were saying, neither Marsh nor Cope were there.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: But what was going on out west, all the dirty
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: deeds and all that stuff. We're at the at the
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: direction and behest of these two. So you want to
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: take another break and then get into what the bone
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: wars are really all about. Okay, we'll be right back,
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: all right, Chuck. So the seventies roll around the west
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: has opened up from the Transcontinental Railroad. The it's giving up.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: It's fossils. It's just crazy how well preserved fossils are
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: out there because of um heat and dryness and wind
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: erosion exposes them. And there was a part of that
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: American Experience documentary where, um, they showed a picture of
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: like just this landscape that you could see from the train,
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: and um, they said that that some expedition was riding
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: by and figured that they were riding by just a
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: rock outcropping, and they realized there was just a field
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: covered in dinosaur bones. That that's it wasn't rocks, it
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: was bones. That's how many bones there were out west.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: So the West is starting to yield this stuff, and
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: just one place would become like a treasure trove, and
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: another place would become a treasure trove, and each of
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: these places, Um, some prospector would find a big bone
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: and the first thing they would think of was, I
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: need to either get in touch with Cope or Marsh,
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: because these guys are gonna want to know about this
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: and they'll probably pay big bucks for it. And that's
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: really once they stopped um mounting their own expeditions. That's
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: how they got most of their bones is from amateurs
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: getting in touch with them. Yeah, so this, you know,
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: this would open the door for these guys to really
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: kind of um get underhanded. They would hire guys away
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: from each other. They would pay for information about the
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: other person's digs and the bones that they were getting.
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: They would outbid one another and like you know, eventually,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: like I said, both of these guys would end up
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: pretty much financially ruined in the end. Uh. There were
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: reports of sabotage of theft um. There were reports of
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: dynamiting the other person's like digs in their camps. Well,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: one thing I saw listen to this, Marsh ordered that
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: if his men couldn't get bones out of like a
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: find like they just couldn't get it out, he said,
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: smash them, do not leave them, because I don't want
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: Cope to possibly be able to get him himself. Not
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: only that, but the bones that they would, like, smaller
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: fines that they would dig up that they didn't think
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: were as important. Uh, they would smash so the other
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: person wouldn't have anything to do with them. Yeah, so
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: they were smashing the fossils that they sought for science
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: because of their rivalry. That's the insane degree that it reached. Yeah,
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: and you know it's easy now to um. And I'm
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: wondering if this, like how much they had to trump
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: this up for a movie script because it seems like
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: some of this is exaggerated. Um, I don't know if
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: they found actual evidence that they would dynamite each other's camps. Um.
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: It seems like the most they would do is like,
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: you know, push dirt back onto the things that they
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: had dug up and not you know, again their their
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: lackeys out there are doing this stuff. Um. And you
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: know these guys, this was all kind of perpetrated by
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: Martian Cope themselves. They would kind of trump up these stories,
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: uh in the press and things to kind of make
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: the other one look bad. So while there were bone
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: wars going on, I'm not sure it was quite as
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: like um exciting as they're made out to be. Well,
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: there weren't like shootouts or anything like that, but I
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: mean just the fact that these two paleontologists are trying
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: to sabotage one another's career is kind of hilarious in
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: and of itself, you know, Yeah, I mean, and it
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: could have you know, the fact that these guys were
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: driving each other. It's like this is the lens we
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: look at it through. Now, it's like did this hurt
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: the field of paleontology or help it? And you can
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: kind of look at it from two angles, um and
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: one hand. What if they would have worked together and
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: pulled their resources, maybe they could have found a lot
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: more and gotten a lot of more things straight that
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: they didn't have to untangle later. Or maybe because they
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: were so competitive and drove each other to work harder,
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: maybe they were uncovering things because of that, because they
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: uncovered a lot of stuff, Like they were both super
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: prolific together. I think between the two of them, they
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: accounted for a hundred and twenty six new species of
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: dinosaur and that's just dinosaur. Yeah, and again this is
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: at a time where you could like stub your toe
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: and look down and you just discovered a new species
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: of dinosaur because so little work had been done in
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: the field. But yeah, they definitely did drive one another
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: to um, to to work harder and faster and try
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: to outdo one another. And one of the big benefits
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: that the field saw that you can point to in retrospect,
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: and even at the time was that winner of eighteen
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: seventy seven that I was talking about. Um, this is
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: like winter and wyoming. It's not a very welcoming climate. Um.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: And yet both marsh and Cope hired their prospectors, their
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: bone diggers to um continue working through the winner. Rather
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: than taking a break like you traditionally when you dug
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: in the summer wrote papers in the winter, they said, no,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: keep going. This is just too The bones that are
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: coming out of this place are too good, and I
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: don't want my rival to be the one to take
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: them all out. So both kept working through the winter,
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: and out of that one winner, we got Triceratops, we
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: got a Patasaurus vegas source all from that one winner
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: of eighteen seventy seven. And if you can't look back
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: and say, yes, these guys drove one another to to
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: this level of discovery. I don't know what you can say.
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: I just throw my hands up in disgust. Otherwise, did
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: that make sense? Okay? I mean as a paleontologist, you
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: could literally just say, uh, you know the Triceratops, I
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: discovered it. Yeah, and that could be it. That could
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: be your career right there. Let alone the Stegasaurus on
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: top of the triceratops come on, and then a Patosaurus. Um,
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: that may sound vaguely familiar, but here, let me drop
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: one on you that you'll say, Oh, you're ready, Braunosaurus,
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: same thing. Apparently, Yeah, I didn't. I didn't even fully
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: get I mean, this gets into the weeds with like
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: serious paleontology pedantry and nord ing out. But yeah, I
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: see Bronosaurus. Allow me to nerd out for just a second. Um.
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: The point of the Patosaurus Bronosaurus being the same thing
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: with different names as one of those things that's frequently
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: laid at the feet of Marsh is saying this was
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: sloppy work on Marsh's part, and maybe if he hadn't
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: been competing with Cope, he would have done better work.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: That's probably not the case, but he named the same
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: species two different things because he thought they were two
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: different species. And a later paleontologists about twenty thirty years
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: later came along and said, I think this is the
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: same thing. Since they were called the patosaurs first, that's
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: what we're going to call this from now on. And
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: so scientifically, Bronosaurus should have gone. I can't believe about
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: to say is the way of the dinosaur, But somehow
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: it got into the cultural zeitgeist and everybody said, no,
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: we like saying bronosaurus more. I blame the Simpsons or
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: um the flint Stones because of the Brontosaurus burger thing.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: Who knows if that's the case or not, but that
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: was that was supposedly the bronosaurs and the Patosaurus are
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: the same thing, and really you're supposed to call him
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: a patosaurs nerd ing out. So in the eighties, this
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: is after the big rush of the late seventies, Uh,
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: things started to change a bit. So marsh has got
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: a couple of good jobs. He's the he's uh he
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: works at the U S Geological Survey and as the
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: president of the National Academy of Sciences. But financially they're
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: not doing so great on either side, because, like we said, earlier,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: they'd spent a lot of their own money trying to
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: outdo one another. Right, so Um Marsh is in a way,
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: way better position than Cope. This is actually at a
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: point when Cope is kind of against the Ropes, but
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: rather than both of them just kind of going their
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: own way, the dinosaur wars have kind of ebbed a
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: little bit and they can just kind of go off
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: and and work as paleontal just for the rest of
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: their life. Marsh decides to come after Cope um and
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: deal him the death blow. The moment Marsh had a
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: position of power that he could use against Cope, he
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: abused his position immediately. He was very high up at
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: the U. S g S, and he used that connection
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: to freeze Cope out of any any chance of getting
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: any kind of government funding for any further expeditions. So
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: Cope was basically penniless, sorry Chuck, because he had invested
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: in that silver mind that that he used the rest
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: of his money for. Basically the silver mine went bust,
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: so he lost all of his money. And now his
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: greatest enemy and rival was in charge of the purse
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: strings for government expeditions and had basically said you're not
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: getting a dime Cope. So Cope was left with his
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: collection and nothing else. That's bad enough. But then Marsh
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: decided to take it one step further and he introduced
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: some laws into the U s g S. Um I
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: guess by laws had said if a government, if a
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: government program or agency has funded an expedition, any fossils
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: collected from that expedition belonged to the government. And he
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: sent the U s g S after Cope's collection. He
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: tried to take Cope's collection the own you think Cope
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: had left. He didn't have his family anymore. Um. He
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: was living alone in like a tiny apartment surrounded by
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: his collection. It was all he had left, and Marsh
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: tried to take it from him. And actually Marsh failed
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: because Cope could prove that he had paid for most
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: of it, that's right, And it was that collection that
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: kind of funded the rest of his life. He would
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: sell off parts of it here and there when he
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: needed to make rent and stuff like that. Uh. He
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: did get a job. He in eighty nine he was
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: hired as professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania.
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: So that's good. At least had a little bit of
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: an income, and UH it was they were dead to
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: each other at this point, though Um spent a lifetime
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: battling each other. Cope was just infuriated at the links
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: Marsh would go. It was all just very petty UM
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: at this point. And neither one of them come out
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: looking great because of a career of sort of backstabbing
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: each other. And Um they went to the press. UH.
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: In the end, I think it was Cope he had
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: taken these copious note over his life about all the
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: grievances he had against Marsh over the years, and he
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: went to the New York Herald. They published an article
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: about this, but it ended up just making both of
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: them look bad. It made Marsha look bad because the
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: things he did made Cope look UM kind of petty
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: and angry about everything. And this is all kind of
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: played out in in public in the press, right and
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: in this in this first article UM. When Cope went
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: to the Herald, UH, he accused not just UM Marsh
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: of of UM like wrongdoing, but also the USGS of corruption.
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: And that actually got the interest of Congress, who started investigating,
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: and UH ended up cutting the U s G s
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: IS budget by like half, so Marsha ended up losing
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: his job in his position as head paleontologist at the U.
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: S g S. And in a beautiful ironic twist, that
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: law that he himself had inserted UH in through the
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: U s g S that anybody who's collection UM had
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: been financed by the US government it UM could lose
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: that collection meant that he actually lost his collection. The
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: government came after his collection and took a substantial chunk
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: of it for itself because it had financed so much
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: of his expeditions. So it ended up turning him and
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: biting him in his own rear, and he lost a
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: lot of his collection, which really burned. So Cope died first.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: He died in eighteen ninety seven at the age of
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: fifty six, but not before he would issue a challenge
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: to marsh which is, I'm leaving my body and my
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: brain to science, and I bet you my brain is
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: bigger than your brain. Marsha never took the bait. He
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: died in eighteen eighty nine of pneumonia at the age
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: of sixty eight, and by all accounts, did not UH
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: take part in this brain measuring UH competition. This this
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: posthumous competition in the grave, which I think is kind
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: of funny. Um, But to that brain, I think Cope's
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: brain is still uh still under the ownership of the
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania today. It still wanders the halls at night,
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: amazing ghostly brain. That's the surprise ending to this one.
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: That's right, And I guess in the end, Marsh is
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: credited with eighty species to cops fifty six, which is
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: not bad. Plus also Cope has that papers under his
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: belt too. It's a lot of papers. Uh. You got
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: anything else about the bone Wars? Well, that's it, everybody.
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: There's I think there's a Drunk History episode about this.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: I never saw it, but it looks pretty good. I
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: would recommend the American Experience episode on it and just
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: go bread up more on it because it's pretty interesting stuff.
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: And since I said um it a bunch of times,
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: just now it's time for listener mail. Alright, I'm gonna
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: call this Civil Air Patrol. This is from Jackson. Uh
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: share belati. Can I ask you a question? There was
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: a big influx of Civil Air Patrol emails out of nowhere?
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: Did you notice? I did not? Yeah, we got like
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: a handful of him just out of the blue and
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: I didn't know if if something happened or what, but
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: I guess it's making the round somehow. Who knows. Maybe
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: we're on the Civil Air Patrol watch list web blog.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: So uh from Jackson, he says, I have been a
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: listener for about seven years, since I was ten years old. Anyway,
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: I'm a senior Master Sergeant in the Civil Air Patrol
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: and I've been in it for about two and a
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: half years. I was really excited you guys finally did
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: a podcast on us. Is not a ton of people
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: even though he exists. Uh. Some say we are the
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: Air Force's best kept secret. I don't know about that. Yeah,
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: might have something on you guys. Uh, it is nice
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: to get some publicity like that. Though you guys totally
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: nailed it. Did an awesome job. Like always being a
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: cadet in the program. I'd like to hear more about
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: that part. Maybe you could do a short stuff on
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: it someday. Cadet life is more of a training life
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: than in actually doing the stuff, uh, like learning how
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: to eat effectively and all that jazz. We also have
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: a lot of mini bootcamp things that we go to
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: further our learning. Anyway, you did an outstanding job, and
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: I would appreciate it if you could give a shout
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: out to my squadron, the Green Mountain Composite Squadron. It's
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: not bad, not a bad night. Green Mountain Composite Squadron
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: sounds like a wholesale furniture material. I was gonna say
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: it sounds like a sort of a modern blue grass band.
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: Oh that's a good one too. Yeah, like there's a
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: lot of synth in ball Okay, synthon mandolin Okay. And
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: that was from Jackson. That's right, Jackson. Is he the
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: front man for this blue grass band? Of course? All right, Well,
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: thanks a lot for for writing in Jackson. Hopefully we'll
• 52:48
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• 52:53
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• 52:55
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• 52:58
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• 52:59
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• 53:02
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