← HISTORY This Week
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- [00:04]
Sally Helm
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com this episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling, and when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person on the phone or using the award winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [00:56]
Dr. Hans Suess
The History Channel Original Podcast.
- [01:01]
Sally Helm
History this week, October 4th, 1915 I'm Sally Helm. It is a big win for anyone who loves dinosaurs. President Woodrow Wilson officially establishes 80 acres on the Utah Colorado border as Dinosaur National Monument. It's been an active paleontology site for six years, ever since a scientist spotted something at the top of a sandstone ledge. He called it in his diary, a beautiful sight. The rock had been worn away by wind and rain to reveal eight tailbones of a brontosaurus. A brontosaurus who had walked on the same high desert plateau where Native American tribes would hunt for buffalo. Tens of millions of years later, and as of today, that spot is officially protected. Officially a monument to the dinosaurs. Imagine the spectacle on the monument's opening day. Parades of dignitaries in pinstripe suits, excited speeches, marching bands, ladies admiring the fossils while twirling their parasols. Kids running around in the Utah dust pretending to be their favorite dinosaur, roaring and raising their hands in the air like claws. Only none of that happens. President Wilson signs this document in Washington, D.C. and has it sent off to the Bureau of Rolls and Documents. And no one ever celebrated the Bureau of Rules and Documents with a ticker tape parade. This this moment passes quietly. In fact, the paleontologists working at Dinosaur National Monument don't even know about the announcement until they read about it in the paper. Which seems weird. It feels like there would have been a parade because we're talking about dinosaurs, these massive prehistoric creatures that once walked across the very lands we live on. Now, even we non paleontologists can name a the Brontosaurus with its long neck, the Stegosaurus with its spiky back, and of course, the king of all the tyrannosaurus Rex. Dinosaur mania is real. Just ask any group of 5 year olds.
- [03:31]
Dr. Hans Suess
Indoraptor Triceratops Spinosaurus T. Rex Stegosaurus.
- [03:35]
Sally Helm
But compared to today, few Americans in 1915 know or care very much about dinosaurs. A handful of people make the long trek out to Dinosaur National Monument even before it opens, and once it's official, more arrive then more and more. This era marks a turning point. People are about to become completely obsessed with dinosaurs, and when they do, it'll be largely thanks to the work of two men who they probably haven't heard of. They were scientific pioneers and kindred spirits until the hunt for bones turned them into foes. Today, the Bone wars how did the competition between a pair of paleontologists lead to unprecedented dinosaur discoveries? And how did the rivalry unless unhinge them both? Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebglis. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EVGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [04:59]
Dr. Hans Suess
Eglis Librekizumab LBKZ, a 250mg per 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 80 or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief?
- [05:34]
Sally Helm
Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit epgliss.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545- hi, I'm Nancy Cartwright. You may know me better as the voice of Bart Simpson on Simpsons Declassified. We're diving into the mysteries that keep the Simpsons forever young. Have you ever wondered how the Simpsons regularly predicts future events? Who better to ask than the show's creators, performers and writers, the celebrity guests? Be sure to follow and listen to Simpsons declassified wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back, and.
- [06:11]
Dr. Hans Suess
Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL.
- [06:15]
Sally Helm
I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie. Broke the Internet last year, and I.
- [06:19]
Dr. Hans Suess
Think this season's lineup is even cooler. And so does my wife, who keeps.
- [06:23]
Sally Helm
Stealing all my hoodies.
- [06:25]
Dr. Hans Suess
Stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals.
- [06:28]
Sally Helm
Shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online and in store. Digging for fossils is part treasure hunt, part time travel adventure.
- [06:47]
Dr. Hans Suess
I mean, you're the first person who sees this once living thing that lived 60, 100, 300 million years ago. You sort of basically conjure out of these fossils ancient lands in ancient times with ancient beings that were living in them.
- [07:07]
Sally Helm
Dr. Hans Suess is the head paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution. He helps oversee the United States collection of fossils. It's a dream job for a kid who fell in love with dinosaurs, which seussed it like a lot of kids.
- [07:24]
Dr. Hans Suess
In most cases, you know, it starts around 3 or 4, and then it ends at 10 at latest. Then other things happen, you know, sports, members of the opposite sex, you know, and that's when most people lose interest.
- [07:38]
Sally Helm
But not Zeus. He kept looking for fossils, this treasure from the past.
- [07:45]
Dr. Hans Suess
When I was a teenager, I found a group of other amateur fossil collectors. And they were like, from all walks of life. One was a policeman, one was an accountant.
- [07:55]
Sally Helm
Did you feel like you had kind of found your crowd when you walked into that room?
- [07:59]
Dr. Hans Suess
Oh, totally, yeah. Yeah. I was the only crowd that took me seriously.
- [08:05]
Sally Helm
In school. He says he was sort of a science nerd, but he found his people as an adult. He leveled up from the world of amateur fossil collection. He went pro, started going out on digs, jackhammering away the sandstone, then painstakingly pulling out the bones with below.
- [08:23]
Dr. Hans Suess
Many cases, I've been lucky to find actually things that were completely new to science. And those are, of course, then you feel like it's almost a religious experience.
- [08:34]
Sally Helm
Seuss's story has a lot in common with the story of a kid who lived hundreds of years before he did. A poor farm boy named othniel Charles Marsh.
- [08:45]
Dr. Hans Suess
O.C.
- [08:45]
Sally Helm
Marsh, O C, spelled O, S E E. He was born in upstate New York.
- [08:52]
Dr. Hans Suess
He was an odd kid, you know, sort of a proto nerd. The other kids were probably kicking balls around or climbing around in trees.
- [08:59]
Sally Helm
But Marsh passed on kicking balls instead. He wandered off to kick at the banks of the nearby Erie Canal, trying to unearth Fossils. For Marsh, there was no group of fossil hunting policemen and accountants to join the field of paleontology barely existed. But his nerdy ways did catch the attention of his uncle George Peabody, the famous banker and philanthropist.
- [09:29]
Dr. Hans Suess
And Peabody saw the potential in this boy and basically arranged for him to get an education because he early on just had a very sort of miserly education, as was typical for most Americans. Then you learned to read and write and maybe read the Bible, but that was about it.
- [09:47]
Sally Helm
Peabody pays for Marsh to go to Yale University, where an entire world of knowledge is spread out at his feet. But Marsh chooses to focus on his long held fossils.
- [09:58]
Dr. Hans Suess
That was his main thing. He wanted to acquire fossils, wanted to study them and wanted to publish on them.
- [10:04]
Sally Helm
Legend has it that as an undergrad, Marsh collects so many fossils that his landlady has to prop up the floors to keep them from collapsing under the weight of of the bones. Marsh is a quiet person. He keeps to himself. He isn't a scientific genius, just utterly captivated by dinosaurs. As he grows older, he does reveal a certain inner strength. He'd been a loner as a kid and in many ways he still is. But there's a forcefulness to O.C. marsh.
- [10:38]
Dr. Hans Suess
He could be charming, but he generally was kind of cold in calculating. He was a very determined person, a superb organizer, and he was the kind of person that would, under different circumstances, grow up to be a captain of industry.
- [10:54]
Sally Helm
But that's not what O.C. marsh does. He gets his master's degree from Yale in 1862. Then he sets off to Europe to learn even more about fossils.
- [11:04]
Dr. Hans Suess
The study was the great scholars there in UK and in Germany.
- [11:08]
Sally Helm
This also allows him to avoid fighting in the Civil War. And in Germany, Marsh meets a young man like himself, a proto nerd named Edward Drinker Cope, our second dueling paleontologist. We don't have details about their first meeting, in part because Cope would later burn Marsh's letters. But we do know that they form a strong bond centered on their shared fascination with fossils. They have that in common. They also share an interest in avoiding getting killed in the Civil War. But they don't share much else.
- [11:42]
Dr. Hans Suess
Unlike Marsh, who really probably wasn't that much of a genius, Cope was a genius.
- [11:49]
Sally Helm
Cope had been a child prodigy. Born to well off Quaker parents in Pennsylvania, he left school when he was 15. By 1861, at the age of 21, he had talked his way into an apprenticeship with Joseph Leidy. Leidy was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the dean of a new field Paleontology. He'd identified the first dinosaur remains ever found in the United States. A handful of teeth brought back to him from Montana. He then went on to dig up the country's first dinosaur skeleton. And several years later, Cope would establish himself as Leidy's peer by discovering the second. By the age of 23, when he meets Marsh, Cope has published 37 scientific papers. He apparently could be quite full of himself.
- [12:39]
Dr. Hans Suess
You look at some of his pictures and you just see him like this little bantam rooster and he had this very intense expression on his face. There's a picture of him from the 1870s and you know, he has this little Van Dyck beard and he just, he has this look like bring it on, bring it on.
- [12:57]
Sally Helm
Edward Drinker Cope was even better than O.C. marsh at not making friends.
- [13:03]
Dr. Hans Suess
He was somebody who made enemies naturally. You know, he probably got up in the morning, opened the door and immediately made an enemy out there.
- [13:10]
Sally Helm
But when Cope meets Marsh in Germany, they click. Eventually, both men return to the States and they stay in touch. They send each other the articles they publish in scientific journals and they write letters. We still have some of Cope's letters to Marsh, or Yale Library has them. One begins, my dearest Professor Marsh and ends with kindest regards, I am thy friend, Edward Drinker Cope.
- [13:39]
Dr. Hans Suess
And in fact, in their very early career, they both named new species of fossils after each other.
- [13:46]
Sally Helm
Cope discovers a carnivorous amphibian and names it after Marsh. In this case, being associated with an animal and insect eating lizardy creature is the highest of compliments. Cope calls the animal Teutonius Marshi. A year later, Marsh returns the favor. He's studying a type of massive sea lizard called a mosasaur. And when he finds a new subspecies.
- [14:10]
Dr. Hans Suess
He names the it Mosasaurus cupeanus. So Kops Mosasaur.
- [14:15]
Sally Helm
In a world where hardly anyone cares about fossils, these two nerds have found each other and the field of paleontology is theirs to define. Imagine what they could accomplish if they join forces, work together. That seems to be the plan in 1868 when Cope invites Marsh on a carriage ride. They head out to New Jersey to a place called the Marl Pits. These pits are the best place to find fossils on the east coast. They're Cope's main stomping ground. Naturally, he's eager to show them off to his buddy Marsh.
- [14:52]
Dr. Hans Suess
So the two of them went collecting there and you know, Cole found lots of interesting new things that hadn't been scientifically studied.
- [14:59]
Sally Helm
This quarry might hold the next great dinosaur discovery. Marsh and Cope are in the right place at the right time.
- [15:09]
Dr. Hans Suess
And then came the turning point.
- [15:12]
Sally Helm
Marsh returns to the Marl pits a few days later, this time by himself. He walks straight up to Alfred Voorhis, the man overseeing most of the digs. Marsh says to him, I know you've been selling bones to Cope, but next time you find a really good one, how about you send it my way? He slips Voorhees some money to secure the arrangement. In the following months, Cope starts to notice that he hasn't had any new bone shipments from the Marl pits. Coincidentally, Marsh is suddenly publishing about all these great new fossils he discovered without really saying where he found them. Cope gets suspicious. He goes to Voorhis and says, did you and Marsh make a deal? Voorhees denies it, but Cope can't shake the feeling that his friend Marsh has betrayed him.
- [16:06]
Dr. Hans Suess
And of course, once Cope found out about it, he was furious. And that's when their relationship became too cool.
- [16:13]
Sally Helm
It's the first fracture in a great friendship. The following year, there's another. It begins when a collector sends Cope a massive shipment of bones. The paleontologist speaks, spends months piecing them together, working on this ancient puzzle. When he's done, Cope finds himself staring at a breathtaking new discovery. An ancient sea monster.
- [16:40]
Dr. Hans Suess
Imagine an animal where you draw a snake through a turtle shell and then put flippers on it.
- [16:49]
Sally Helm
It's the kind of monumental discovery that could make someone's career. Cope has never seen anything like it. He thinks maybe this is not just a new species. No, it's way bigger than that. Maybe this could be an entirely new category, a new order of dinosaur. Cope calls the order Streptosauria, which means twisted reptiles. Because of the animal's unusually long tail, Cope rushes to publish his findings. He produces a lengthy scientific paper, chock full of detailed lithographic sketches, bringing this twisted reptile to life. Then, brimming with confidence, he invites his now on shaky terms friend Marsh to show off this latest discovery. But when Marsh sees the skeleton, he's skeptical. It's just too weird looking. He asks Cope, are you sure you put this thing together right? Cope is annoyed by the question. And so, to prove Marsh wrong, he asks his mentor, Joseph Leidy, to take a look.
- [17:54]
Dr. Hans Suess
Leidy was sort of a quiet, retiring kind.
- [17:57]
Sally Helm
He has a reputation for being able to identify even the smallest, most obscure fossils. This sea monster skeleton is at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Lydie walks right up to it, looks it over and pauses. Something is wrong. Then it Hits him. The skeleton is backwards.
- [18:23]
Dr. Hans Suess
And Lydie quietly went up, took the skull from the short tail and moved it up to what Cop had thought was the tail. And it fit perfectly because it was actually the neck. And the skull fitted perfectly on the neck.
- [18:38]
Sally Helm
With the head now in its correct place, the three men realized that it was not a new order of sea monster. It was just a regular old plesiosaur with an unusually long neck. Cope is mortified. Not only has he made a blatant error, he's shown it off to his mentor. And O.C. marsh has seen it too.
- [19:04]
Dr. Hans Suess
And of course, Marsh thought this was grand. You know, his arch rival had sort of made a major mistake and, you know, so he filed this away for future reference.
- [19:14]
Sally Helm
Cope tries to cover up his mistake, put his head down and get through it. But his big triumphant article has already been printed.
- [19:25]
Dr. Hans Suess
So we try to buy up every copy of the monograph that existed, buy.
- [19:31]
Sally Helm
Them up and destroy them. But he can't get them all.
- [19:36]
Dr. Hans Suess
In fact, I own one. You do?
- [19:38]
Sally Helm
Do you have it right now in the room?
- [19:40]
Dr. Hans Suess
No, it's in my office. But it's phenomenal. So, yeah, yeah, I got one of those.
- [19:48]
Sally Helm
You know who else gets his hands on a copy of this embarrassing monograph? O.C. marsh. He files it away for a rainy day in case he ever needs some good dirt on his former friend, Edward drinker Cope. These two paleontologists are now officially nemeses.
- [20:09]
Dr. Hans Suess
From there on, it just got worse and worse and worse. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft.
- [20:24]
Sally Helm
Of making something timeless while being a.
- [20:26]
Dr. Hans Suess
Part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, There's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [20:44]
Sally Helm
At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way. @newbalance.com Running.
- [21:13]
Dr. Hans Suess
I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone. Lowe's knows Sundays hit different when you earn them. We've got you covered with outdoor power equipment from Cobalt and everything you need to weatherproof your deck with Trex decking. Plus with lawn care from Scotts and of course, pit boss grills and accessories. You can get A home field advantage all season long. So get to Lowe's, get it done, and earn your Sunday. Lowe's official partner of the NFL.
- [21:46]
Sally Helm
It's 1870. O.C. marsh is sitting in his office at Yale University after being named America's first professor of paleontology. And lately he's been hearing tales about the west and what bones you can find there.
- [22:02]
Dr. Hans Suess
Dinosaur bones, once they are exposed, are often of spectacular size. You know, six, seven, eight feet, bones.
- [22:09]
Sally Helm
Coming out of the ground when it rains. Ancient dinosaurs seemed to raise themselves from under the earth.
- [22:17]
Dr. Hans Suess
The Sioux at least called them thunder horses because often after really heavy thunderstorms, such bones would be washed out. Because out there you get these incredible downpours.
- [22:27]
Sally Helm
The bones were right under the surface of the earth. There was even a story about a prospector stumbling across a colony of ants that had built their home out of dinosaur dinosaur teeth. Marsh decides he has to see this for himself. So he rustles up a ragtag group of students and heads out to the wilderness. Naturally, these guys decide to dress as.
- [22:49]
Dr. Hans Suess
Cowboys, and they just had a good time. You know, they would sit, sit around the campfire, tell yarns, maybe in some cases, a little bit enriched by local alcohol.
- [23:00]
Sally Helm
Marsh himself poses as a real frontier man. He carries a bowie knife in his belt and hires Buffalo Bill Cody to guide his team through the backcountry. His Persona may have been fake, but the discoveries that he and his team start making are real. Like remnants of the first North American pterodactyl and the bones of ancient horses that mysteriously had toes instead of hooves. Meanwhile, Edward Drinker Cope is also consumed by visions of ancient beasts.
- [23:34]
Dr. Hans Suess
These anecdotes. Apparently, Cope was so obsessed with fossils that in the middle of the night, he would suddenly scream and jump up from his cot and fighting imaginary monsters that had sort of crept into his dreams, like he was back in the Cretaceous spirit or something like that.
- [23:50]
Sally Helm
Cope goes out west to compete with Marsh for fossils. He finds the spot where his former friend is digging and sets up a few miles away.
- [23:59]
Dr. Hans Suess
They were apparently sometimes in such close contact that they could have shootouts, but they're not well documented and apparently no one came to harm.
- [24:07]
Sally Helm
Cope does try to hire some of Marsh's students to be his spies.
- [24:12]
Dr. Hans Suess
Marsh did the same thing, though. Marsh tried to sort of attract people who had worked for Cope to work for him.
- [24:20]
Sally Helm
Cope and Marsh both have teams of men who do most of the actual digging. And these guys would sit, sneak into the enemy's camp in the middle of the night to steal fossils. Or they'd bribe railroad station masters to send their rival's shipment of bones to their museum instead.
- [24:38]
Dr. Hans Suess
Sometimes they were caught doing this, and then, of course, there was hell to pay and they had to return the shipment. But many times that apparently worked quite well.
- [24:47]
Sally Helm
Both teams are finding a lot of new kinds of dinosaurs, over 120 by the time this period is over, including a lot we know, the brontosaurus, the stegosaurus, the Triceratops. Marsh and Cope are rushing to catalog the finds and outpublish each other. In some cases, they've found different bones of the same new creature, and it really matters who's first to name it and introduce it to the scientific community.
- [25:17]
Dr. Hans Suess
Both of them started futzing around with the dates of publication because the earlier name is always the name that a species gets. That's the valid name. So they predated things, postdated things. You know, you name it.
- [25:30]
Sally Helm
There's even a rumor that when Marsh finishes digging in a quarry and wants to keep Cope away from it, he goes so far as to blow it up.
- [25:43]
Dr. Hans Suess
But it actually turns out that those anecdotes have no foundation in fact.
- [25:47]
Sally Helm
But that's the vibe. The vibe is they hate each other so much that they would even blow up a site.
- [25:51]
Dr. Hans Suess
They do anything. Yeah, bribe, steal, you know, shoot each other, you name it. Actually, it's a miracle that nobody got murdered, at least that we know of.
- [26:01]
Sally Helm
There is a winner in the bone cataloging competition, a pretty clear one. It's Edward Drinker Cope. He makes up for his previous humiliation with the sea monster that never was by publishing more than 1400 articles. Marsh just can't keep up. Still, by the 1880s, O.C. marsh is flying high. He's sitting on a sizable inheritance from his now dead Uncle Peabody. He's recently been appointed head paleontologist for the newly formed U.S. geological Survey. Charles Darwin himself has written Marsh a thank you note for finding the fossil of a bird with teeth, which has helped advance Darwin's theory of evolution. And best of all, Marsh can see that Cope's life is falling apart. Cope's government funding has dried up. He has an inheritance, too, but it's not as big as Marsh's. So he decides to invest his money in mining.
- [27:02]
Dr. Hans Suess
He chose something that was very popular in those days, silver mines in the west and in Mexico. But unfortunately, most of those mines only existed in the imagination of the people who were peddling shares in those mines. And so he lost his shirt, essentially financially, to these bad speculations.
- [27:23]
Sally Helm
Cope's wife and daughter end up leaving him. He's alone, defeated and angry. And then seemingly out of the blue, he gets a letter from the Secretary of the Interior informing him that the US government is seizing his entire fossil collection. The letter claims that because Cope's early expeditions were financed by the U.S. geological Survey, any fossils he'd collected during that time rightly belong to to the U.S. national Museum, which is run by, you guessed it, O.C. marsh.
- [27:59]
Dr. Hans Suess
This really drove Cope nuts.
- [28:01]
Sally Helm
To be blunt, Cope has already lost his house, his family fortune, his wife. Those fossils were all he had left. So he cannot let this go unpunished.
- [28:16]
Dr. Hans Suess
So Cope started remembering, oh, I have this file of Professor Marshall's mishaps and you know, shady dealings and all this.
- [28:25]
Sally Helm
He'd started keeping it after that incident with the backwards dinosaur and now he's about to use it. He describes his plan to paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. When a wrong is to be righted, the press is the best and most Christian medium of doing. Replaces the old time shotgun and bludgeon and is a great improvement.
- [28:47]
Dr. Hans Suess
And he found a receptive audience in a journalist by, by the name of William Hosea Ballou, who worked for the New York Herald.
- [28:54]
Sally Helm
The ultimate headline read scientists Wage Bitter Warfare. In the story Cope lays out all of Marsh's greatest failings. The time he misidentified a dinosaur bone as a buffalo horn. The fact that most of his research was done by grad students, not by him. Marsh fires back with of course, the backwards dinosaur. The public is eating it up. Dusty old dinosaur bones have become a soap opera with backstabbing and revenge.
- [29:25]
Dr. Hans Suess
People thought this was quite exciting, you know, these sort of ivory tower types battling us out over things that were really as far from the concerns of normal humanity as they could be.
- [29:35]
Sally Helm
But this all out academic slugfest has a cost. A lot of these accusations are true. And so the pressure war ruins both the paleontologists reputations. They become the laughing stock of academia.
- [29:51]
Dr. Hans Suess
Certainly the COP Marshall fair tainted paleontology for many, many years.
- [29:57]
Sally Helm
To make matters worse, Congress catches wind at the articles. Remember both men's expeditions out west were paid for by the US government. So taxpayer money is funding this juvenile feud and some people start making inquiries.
- [30:11]
Dr. Hans Suess
There was a congressman from Alabama where evolution was never a popular concept. And he had a copy of Marsh's monograph on the tooth birds. And he said, imagine taxpayers pay for birds with teeth.
- [30:25]
Sally Helm
Birds with teeth becomes the bridge to nowhere of its day. A stand in for the idea that the government is spending too much. The U.S. geological Survey cuts its funding to the paleontologists. And Marsh loses his government job, plus many of his valuable connections in Washington. This leaves him in a tough spot. The Peabody fortune he'd inherited is starting to dry up. He has to mortgage his house and Cope isn't doing any better. In 1895, he has to resort to selling off his beloved fossil collection. A year later, he develops a gastrointestinal disease called cystitis. It probably wouldn't have been fatal, but he insists on self medicating with a cocktail of morphine, belladonna and formaldehyde, so.
- [31:17]
Dr. Hans Suess
That that ended his life and he died at 57. In 1897.
- [31:24]
Sally Helm
Cope's funeral was held at the small museum in Philadelphia, where he had been living by himself for years. It was a modest service attended by only six mourners, plus Cope's pets, one tortoise and one lizard. Now it's February of 1899. O.C. marsh, at the age of 69, is nearly broke. One night during a drenching rainstorm, he decides to pass on calling a cab and save money by walking home.
- [31:54]
Dr. Hans Suess
He was thoroughly soaked, contracted pneumonia, old people's friend, and died from that in 1899. And so that was the end to these two infamous characters, a tragic end.
- [32:07]
Sally Helm
Of their own making.
- [32:09]
Dr. Hans Suess
If they had behaved differently, they both could have had productive careers without all of this agony. But it was this odd competition to name things, to get things for that did them in. I mean, they both lost their shirt financially, they lost their reputations, but they did a hell of a job, scientifically speaking.
- [32:30]
Sally Helm
Between the two of them, Marsh and Cope discovered 1600 new species of extinct animals. Their work formed the basis of American paleontology. Their two massive fossil collections ended up in different museums on the East Coast. Cope's at the American Museum of Natural History, Marsh's at The Smithsonian with Dr. Hans Suess. He still works with those bones today.
- [32:57]
Dr. Hans Suess
I take up a bone that I know was collected by this collective who worked for Marsh. So it's the old seven degrees of Kevin Bacon, you know. So here it's like I'm literally one degree from this collector who picked up this bone.
- [33:11]
Sally Helm
He can trace his academic family tree all the way back to those dueling paleontologists 200 years ago. Lots of modern scientists can. And another result of their bitter battle was to eventually put dinosaurs in all their majesty squarely before the public, especially before kids. There's just something about the ferocity of these ancient beasts that gets young imaginations fired up, as with these kids who spoke to Producer Julia Press.
- [33:44]
Dr. Hans Suess
Have you gone to the museum and seen the dinosaur bones?
- [33:47]
Sally Helm
Yes. They'd just come from New York's Museum of Natural History with its larger than life dinosaur display. I like the Triceratops because it has.
- [33:56]
Dr. Hans Suess
Big horns on the front and it was one. It's a herbivore so it doesn't eat other dinosaurs. And I like the Stegosaurus because of that plates. And I like the T. Rex because it's a big carnivore, a really big dinosaur and it's got sharp teeth.
- [34:11]
Sally Helm
On the count of three, can you guys make a dino noise?
- [34:14]
Dr. Hans Suess
Okay.
- [34:18]
Sally Helm
I don't know.
- [34:18]
Dr. Hans Suess
I think I like toy dinos. Oh, toy dinos?
- [34:25]
Sally Helm
Yeah, I got a toy toy dino at home. Oh, really? Do you like to play with it? Yeah. You put it on your heart and then you kill people. Oh, is it like a puppet? No, you kill people with it. Wow, that sounds scary. You kill people. Thanks for listening to History this week. For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching, check your local TV listings to find out what's on the History Channel today. If you want to get in touch, please shoot us an email at our email address History this week or you can leave us a voicemail. 212-351-0410. We love hearing from you. Special thanks to our guest, Dr. Hans Suess from the Smithsonian. We also consulted several great books in putting together this episode. Mark Jaffe's the Gilded Dinosaur, the Fossil War between ed Cope and O.C. marsh and the Rise of American Science, Earl Lanham's the Bone Hunters, the Heroic Age of Paleontology in the American west, and David Randall's the Monster's the Discovery of T Rex and How It Shook Our World. Check out those books if you're interested in learning more. This episode was produced by Rebecca Nolan. It was sound designed by Dan Rosado and story edited by Jim o'. Grady. Our senior producer is Ben Dickstein. History this Week is also produced by Julia Press, Morgan Givens and me, Sally Helm. Our associate producer is Emma Fredericks. Our supervising producer is McKamey Lin, and our executive producer is Jesse Katz. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review History this Week wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next week.