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it's the 20th of March 1877, in the Rocky Mountain foothills near the town of Morrison Colorad. A cooling wind whistles through the sagebrush bushes that thrive in this arid soil. Great boulders are strewn across the landscape. Though it's desert like now, once it was a verdant floodplain. Arthur Lakes, a slight, mustachioed clergyman and teacher, is scrambling over a sandstone ridge. He is a keen amateur naturalist from the nearby town of golden, and these foothills are a rich playground for those with interests like his own. Below the ridge sticking out of the rock, something catches his eye. He goes over and brushes away some dirt, revealing what might look to the untrained eye like an old tree root. But Lakes knows straight away that it's a piece of fossilized bone, very old, very large, and almost certainly part of a dinosaur. He rifles through his bag for his notebook and a pencil. Then he begins to sketch the find. A skilled draftsman, his hand moves quickly across the page. The sketch completed, he swigs from a bottle of water and takes a moment to simply look. How many people, he wonders, have walked past this spot over the millennia without ever realizing what was poking up out of the earth. Down on his hands and knees now, he uses a small tool to dig away at the dirt around the bone. But it's too big and the earth too densely compacted for him to remove. Resolving to return as soon as possible, he sighs and packs away his kit, then clambers back up the ridge. During the return hike, he formulates a plan, and before he knows it, he is back at home. Turning the key in his front door, he rustles through his desk for some paper and his pen. He quickly writes a note to a man named O.C. marsh, perhaps the most celebrated paleontologist in all of America. Though Licks doesn't know him personally, his reputation makes him the obvious person to turn to when he might have stumbled on a major discovery. In a rush of words, Licks describes what has happened and then folds the letter and his sketch into an envelope. But Lakes wants a second opinion too. So he fills a further envelope, this one addressed to another big name in paleontology, Edward Drinker Cope. Then he is on the move again, back out of the door and speeding to catch the post. What Lakes, in his innocent excitement, does not realize is that he is about to ignite a furious feud between Marsh and Cope, whose bitter professional rivalry has been simmering for years. It will be the most famous falling out in the history of paleontology, and one that changes our understanding of dinosaurs forever. When these two wealthy men entered their race to identify and name new species of dinosaur in the 1870s, paleontology was still a new discipline. The professional quarrel that replaced their earlier friendship played out for all to see, threatening to destroy both their reputations and livelihoods. But their rivalry also led to the discovery of dozens of previously unknown dinosaur a period of knowledge acquisition immortalized as the Dinosaur Rush, or alternatively, the Bone Wars. Before Marsh and Cope, a mere eight species of dinosaur had been identified in North America from the 1870s until the 1890s. Between them, they added 136 more. From Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the east to Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, north and South Dakota, Kansas and Utah in the newly opened up west, they trawled the earth for evidence of ancient life. They they introduced to the world such famous names as Allosaurus, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops. But at what price? And how was it that two previously affable young scientists became not only the most famous paleontologists in the world, but also sworn enemies? I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of the Dinosaur Rush. It's 1851. Millard Fillmore is a year into his tenure as the 13th president of the United States. California has recently joined the Union, having been under Mexican rule until just five years ago. And the state is currently at the eye of a storm. The discovery of precious metal has prompted a mass migration by by hundreds of thousands intent on hitting it rich in the gold rush. But over in New Haven, Connecticut, such drama seems a world away for one 20 year old making his way to lecture along an elegant corridor at the Prestigious Yale University. His name is Othniel Charles Marsh, but his friends know him as Oc. A born networker with cash to splash. He can often be seen striding about in his trademark shooting jacket in the company of his faithful hound Charm. An outdoorsy sort of fellow, at once slightly portly and sporty. But his greatest passion is natural sciences. While studying at Yale, he rents four rooms on the third floor of a private house. He's filled his digs with so many mineral and fossil specimens that the landlord has just had to reinforce the floors. It's a far cry from his childhood on a New York farm, routinely on the verge of going bust, where his dad struggled alone after Oc's mother died when he was three. But O.C. caught a lucky break. He was a good student at school, solid and competent, if not always spectacular. Definitely bright enough to go to university. But his higher education doesn't come cheap. He appealed for help from his maternal Uncle George. Uncle George happens to be George Peabody, a man of humble origins who has risen to become one of America's most famous and richest financiers. The first great philanthropist of the American Gilded Age and without children himself, Uncle George is happy to lend a hand to his promising nephew. While Marsh settles himself to a lecture on the ancient language of Sanskrit. Further down the coast, an 11 year old sits attentively behind his desk at an exclusive day school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Small for his age and prone to ill health, his name is Edward Drinker Cope. If Marsh was a solid performer at school, Cope is an absolute prodigy. He comes from a rich Quaker family, though in common with Marsh, he lost his mother when he was 3. His father, Arthur has earned a fortune from shipping and now owns property. He imagines his son growing into the life of a gentleman farmer. But Edward is already dreaming of bigger things. After completing his maths assignment in double quick time, his mind starts to wander. He mentally plans his next visit to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, one of his favorite places in the world. Last time he was there, a toucan's skull caught his imagination. He wants to study it in more detail. Then, as is his custom, he'll write a detailed and highly technical report of it in his journal. Cope's father calls a halt to his formal education when he is 15 to prepare him for life as a farmer. But the youth rebels, showing far more enthusiasm for private study than animal husbandry. By 1860, the 20 year old persuades his despairing father to sign him up to a series of lectures by the celebrated zoologist and paleontologist Joseph Leedy. Cope catches Leedy's eye with his sharp mind and within a year he has helped his young student win election to the prestigious Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. When he inherits a farm in 1861, Cope rents it out and uses the proceeds to finance his scientific career. Following the tradition of the amateur gentleman scientist, Lucas Rappel is a historian of science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
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C
Early modern scientists were wealthy gentlemen who in fact often made the argument fairly explicitly that only gentlemen could be trusted to produce reliable knowledge, authoritative knowledge, because only they were free from the corrupting influences of money. Right. In the 19th century, the language changes. Science becomes more professionalized, so it ceases to be a kind of gentlemanly enterprise, gentlemanly pastime, and increasingly becomes a professional pursuit. Interestingly, though, Cope and Marsh actually were semi professional. You could say they both Cope and Marsh hailed from wealthy families and used their own personal fortunes to fund their research. So they were actually still very much working in this age old tradition of gentlemanly science.
- [10:22]
B
Faced with the possibility of conscription during the American Civil War, not to mention burdened by ill health, Cope heads for Europe, seeking audiences with some of the continent's most acclaimed scientific minds. Having left school several years earlier, he considers his trip as almost in lieu of a degree. In 1864, on a visit to Berlin University, he meets O.C. marsh for the first time. When the Civil War had erupted back home, Marsh was found to have defective eyesight, so instead of fighting, he undertook a geological survey of the gold fields of Nova Scotia in Canada. He then gained his master's degree from Yale before setting out for the German universities. At the forefront of research in his favored disciplines, Marsh takes the younger Cope under his wing, introducing him to colleagues at the university and taking him around museums. Although there is an age gap of almost nine years between the two, they are in many ways professional contemporaries. In fact, the 19 year old cope published his first scientific paper on salamanders in 1859, two years before the older Marsh. Over coffees and pastries in an elegant cafe, they take a deep dive into their shared love of the natural sciences.
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C
So they began their careers, you could say as friends might be putting it too strongly, but they certainly had a cordial relationship with one another. They had a kind of a reasonably good relationship where they admired each other at some distance and, you know, would complement each other.
- [11:56]
B
But even as their conversation fizzes, Marsh thinks he spots a few tells suggestive of Cope's anxious nature, a sort of nervous energy that he cannot put down to simply caffeine and sugar. After a few days, Cope leaves to continue his trip and returns home later in 1864. Despite his lack of formal qualifications, he has won a reputation as an intellect of note. On his trip he is made professor of zoology at Haverford College, an old Quaker establishment in Pennsylvania. A year later he marries, and in 1866 a daughter arrives. But if his wife, Annie, thinks that it is time for him to settle down now, Cope has other ideas. At this stage, neither Marsh nor Cope are considered to be specialist paleontologists. Their interests are much wider, encompassing the natural world from ancient times to the present day, and not only animals, but plants and geology too. Indeed, paleontology, the study of fossils to better understand ancient life forms, is still an emerging academic field. The word dinosaur, from the Greek for terrible lizard, was coined by British scientist Richard Owen as recently as 1841.
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C
there's an interesting question about when we should date the beginning of paleontology, but the standard canonical answer is around the turn of the 19th century. So roughly around the period of the French Revolution, there were scientists who started to use the fossil remains of prehistoric creatures to elucidate the deep history of life on earth. So by the time Martian Cope began their acrimonious dispute. Paleontology was less than a hundred years old as a scientific discipline. Let me make one small footnote to that observation, which is that's not to say, of course, that nobody had taken an interest in fossils and other material remnants of prehistoric life prior to, let's say, the French Revolution. They just were thinking about and understanding fossils in a different kind of way.
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With Europe established as paleontology's birthplace, North America is playing catch up. It was only in 1855 that fossilized teeth were found in Montana, the first specimens determined to have come from dinosaurs on the continent. Then, three years later, an amateur geologist discovered a virtually complete dinosaur skeleton near the town of Haddonfield, New Jersey. He called in Joseph Leedy, soon to be Cope's mentor, to help him reconstruct the 80 million year old beast. Over 12ft tall and perhaps as heavy as 4 tons, the specimen, which they called the Hadrosaurus, became the first dinosaur anywhere to be mounted and put on display, prompting a surge in public interest in dinosaurs. In 1867, Cope resigns his teaching post and resettles his family across the Delaware river at Haddonfield, itching to see what he can discover in its famous marl pits. It is not long before exciting new specimens reveal themselves and Cope fires off one academic paper after another. He even invites his regular correspondent, Marsh, who'd returned to the US from Germany a year earlier, to join him on a dig. Their cordial relationship continues, and as the finds stack up, they name the new discoveries after one another. Their work until now has been restricted to the eastern part of the us but as the country opens up, new opportunities present themselves in the west. It is April 1868, 8200ft up in the Rockies In Wyoming, the sun beats down with brutal intensity, but the air is thin and cool up here nonetheless, it's hot work building railroads. A man in his late 20s tips the brim of his derby hat and wipes the sweat from his brow. He came to America from famine struck Ireland almost 20 years ago. A veteran of the Civil War, he has seen a lot in his short life. But still the tough existence out here in the west keeps him on his toes. He is one of the many thousands making a buck by building the 2,000 miles of railroad connecting Sacramento, California, in the west with Omaha, Nebraska, in the American interior, a swathe of country that has so far been largely unexplored by the continent's European settlers. Today, the laborers have made it to what will become known as Sherman Summit, the highest point on the transcontinental railway. Rickety horse drawn carts laden with tools and equipment trundle noisily along the mountain pass. The breath of the horses condenses in the atmosphere. Occasionally they neigh their protests and at being overworked. The Irishman is part of the rail laying team. With a rail bed prepared, his job is to hammer metal spikes to secure the rails in place. He still has hours left to work, but already his head is fuzzy from the persistent clang of metal on metal. At the end of his shift, he drags his weary bones back to the makeshift camp. He slumps down outside his tent, a bottle of whiskey in hand, and knocks back a slug of it, closing his eyes. But here among the wagons and tents, peace is hard to find. A couple of tents along, a poker game turns nasty. One man shouts at another, calling him a thief and a cheat. Fists start flying. Then the Irishman sees the glint of a pistol being pulled from a holster. Two other men jump in between the feuders. Disaster is averted. This time a timely shout goes up. It's payday. The boss lines up his men and hands out the cash. The Irishman enjoys the weight of it in his hand, his reward for the mile or two that the railway has nudged along. Today, even the card shops forget their squabbles for a moment. They all know that as white men working for Union Pacific building the line west to east, they get a better deal than the Chinese immigrants used by Central Pacific building east to west. In a year or so, the two companies will meet in the middle in Utah, and great vistas of the country previously off bounds will be open for business. It's all great news for Marsh and Cope. The transcontinental railway is the culmination of decades of white settler interest in the western reaches of the country. Events like the California Gold rush have convinced many that there are fortunes to be made out there.
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C
In 1802, Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana Territory from Napoleon from France. And as the United States was colonizing the interior, kind of white settlers began to move westward, largely in search of material wealth, mineral wealth in particular. The United States federal government sent out a great deal of government sponsored surveys to explore the interior of this continent that the United States was so desirous of colonizing. And those surveys produce knowledge about the physical geography, the topography, as well as the mineralogy and the geology of the American interior.
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These surveys indicate a wealth of potential fossil fields. Paleontologists have been exploring out west since the 1840s, but such trips take Months and are expensive and dangerous. The railroad can cut a trip down to a relatively affordable week or so.
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C
So the Americas were seen as a kind of naturalist's El Dorado, you could say. North America in particular came to be seen as a kind of geological wonderland. There were reputations to be made because there was so much that remained unknown about the prehistoric flora and fauna, the kind of life that thrived, that flourished in prehistoric times in the Americas. And so Cope and Marsh were very much caught up in this heady excitement of discovery, discovering all the different kinds of things that you could find by digging underground in the Americas.
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There has already been talk of discoveries of fossils, of ancient humans, tigers and elephants. When Marsh attends a meeting that will change his life. Hosted by the American association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago, The Union Pacific Railroad, hungry for publicity, offers delegates free passage into the American interior. Marsh jumps at the charts en route. His train stops for a short break at Antelope Springs, Nebraska. Marsh heaves himself out of his carriage close to the railroad. He spots a recently dug well and can't resist rifling through the rock pile next to it. He can hardly believe what he finds here. The fossilized remains of a turtle, there, a camel bone, and now the bones and teeth of what he soon realizes is an extinct species of miniature horse. The stationmaster shouts for him to get back on board, but it's agony for Marsh to leave so soon. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out some coins, slipping them into the station master's palm. See what else you can find in there, he says, gesturing towards the mound. When he passes through Antelope Springs on his return journey a few days later, Marsh is presented with a treasure trove of fossil specimens that he takes back to New Haven. But his plans for a rapid return visit hit the buffers. Relations between white speculators and Native American groups out in the west are turning even sourer. Violence is becoming endemic.
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C
It's illustrative of so much of what was going on, the kind of extractive economy that was taking shape in this kind of very imperial space. The interior of North America in the period after the Civil War, and there was a kind of gold rush. I mean, there was a literal gold rush in this period. And at the same time as that kind of territorial dispossession was taking place, scientists were also moving into these regions, extracting specimens. And so there's also a kind of epistemic dispossession or kind of knowledge theft that's going on at the same time. There's a lot of appropriation going on. So indigenous people, of course, knew about fossils, had extensive knowledge of the flora and fauna and geology of their ancestral hunting grounds and their ancestral homelands, and had names in their own languages for all these things. And of course, those are names that are not entirely lost to history, but often we don't. You know, the scientific community did not respect the priority, you could say, of these people that had been resident in these areas since time immemorial, and they came in and they extracted these fossils and gave them new names.
- [24:08]
B
Cope, meanwhile, is still based out in Haddonfield, from where he launches a number of expeditions across the East. The relationship between the two men has not yet openly fractured, but their increasing competition is causing significant strains. Marsh, for example, tries to muscle in on his rival's network of mine operators in the East.
- [24:30]
C
At one point, Marsh visited Cope in Philadelphia and Cope took him around and showed him to some of these places where he was getting specimens. And the story is, according to Cope, at least, that Marsh serendipitously paid off some of these mine operators to send him the first news of new discoveries rather than Cope. So they were already starting to compete with one another, right? And they were already starting to use their both of their financial resources to try to out compete their rivals.
- [25:00]
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In 1870, however, Marsh is ready to go back west. Using his personal funds, he employs three famous old Civil War generals, Sherman, Sheridan and Ordinary, to provide his expedition with military protection. Along with 11 hand picked Yale undergraduates, he is accompanied by no fewer than 43 troops. And once in Nebraska, he also hires local expert guides. Among them at one stage is William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. It is another hot day in The Nebraska Badlands. 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, sand hills burn beneath the midday sun. Marsh has seen no trees or water sources for hours. There are not even rocks to break up the barren vista. He kicks his heels into the side of his pony to gee it along. They've been riding all day in search of a promising spot to excavate. He's hungry and thirsty and his shoulders ache from the rifle slung across his back. His kit bulges not just with his geological hammers and other dig equipment, but also a Bowie knife and a revolver. Necessary precautions. Out here in the wilderness, they don't call it the Wild west for nothing. Six army wagons roll alongside, filled to the brim with tents, ammunition and sundry provisions. Guides ride out ahead on the lookout for trouble and a train of guards follows behind. Though there have been grumblings of frustration among the men. Marsh is undeterred. He knows there are rich pickings here, if he can only find them. Then at last, his eyes light up. He raises his arm to halt the convoy and gracefully sweeps down from his horse. He gets onto his haunches and begins digging at the chalky earth. Most of his colleagues look on in expectant ignorance. They have no idea what it is he has spotted, but they can tell it is something good. A moment later, he has a few bone fragments sitting in the palm of his hand. He delicately lifts them, one at a time, up to his eye for a closer look. Dinosaurs. The natives believe this area is the resting place of an extinct race of giants. They are not wrong, he thinks. The light starts to fade and the group head off to make camp. But as Marsh follows them down a deep, narrow trail, he spots, lying on the ground a thin hollow bone unlike any he has ever seen before. Soon he is sitting outside his tent as a warming fire crackles close by. While some of the rest of the party boil up a hearty stew, he inspects the bone in the light of the flickering flames. Joyfully, he identifies it as a finger joint from a pterodactyl, a spectacular type of flying dinosaur. Its wingspan, he calculates, must have been at least 20ft, much larger than anything ever previously known in North America. Proof, he thinks, that the west really was once a dinosaur's paradise. Word of Marsh's success soon gets back to Cope. He realizes he needs to go west too, or risk being left behind. So in 1871, he heads for Kansas, where much remains to be explored. Despite Marsh's previous excursions. Here, Cope writes elegiac letters back home to his family about the expedition, Painting a picture of pristine countryside, beautiful weather, even peaceful natives. He describes close encounters with buffalo and wolves that he dodges on his trusty old mule, and tells of how he has captured a rattlesnake that tried to bite him and pickled it as a gift for his daughter. A year later, Cope takes an unpaid position with a government led geological survey that helps cover the expense of his expeditions and publishing his papers. With both men intensifying their work in the west, their relationship sours to the point that they no longer speak to each other. Their contrasting approaches become ever clearer, too. Where Marsh is slow, steady and considered, Cope is a whirlwind, sometimes racing to conclusions ahead of the evidence.
- [29:31]
C
So Marsh was primarily celebrated as a hard nosed empiricist? You could say so. He was really celebrated for the material specimens that he dug up, or he mostly had other people dig up for him, in fact, and then described in meticulous detail and tried to organize into a kind of systematic classificatory scheme. Whereas Cope was famous for doing that kind of work too. But in addition to that was understood as much more of a bold theorizer. Marsh sometimes people would kind of snicker behind his back, not because he was seen as a stamp collector, but quite the opposite, because he was seen as being maybe too given to bold theorizing, that maybe sometimes his desire to engage in speculation got the better of him and he got a little bit beyond his skis.
- [30:16]
B
At times, the rivalry becomes increasingly acrimonious. In 1872, with the heft of the geological survey behind him, Cope sets out for the Bridger Basin in southwest Wyoming territory that Marsh considers morally his, having been there first. To add insult to injury, Cope poaches some of Marsh's best assistants. A year later, Cope receives some specimens from Kansas that should have been sent to Marsh. He writes to explain, promising to send them on. But Marsh is anything but grateful, accusing him of holding other finds belonging to him. He threatens to go after him in print. Cope retorts that if he hadn't generously accommodated Marsh's men on his own digs, Marsh wouldn't have many specimens to go awry in the first place. Soon their quarrel is playing out in public. The American Journal of Science is Marsh's favored publication thanks to its affiliation with Yale, while the American Naturalist is the main repository of Cope's works. The pair constantly critique each other's papers and fight for the right to publish new discoveries. First part of the problem is that they are often digging up fragments of the same species, like the Uintatherium, an ancient rhino like herbivore, and independently naming and analyzing them without reference to the overlap in their work. Such becomes the obsession with one another that Cope starts to refer to Marsh as the professor of copology at yes, Marsh, who unlike Cope never marries or has a family, grows rich enough to build an 18 room mansion in New Haven. An imposing central octagonal reception hall is filled with curios and specimens as a sort of museum to himself. But with so many demands on his time, his serious fieldwork draws to a close. By 1874, by contrast, Cope's nails are still dirty with clay and soil. But both oversee so many digs that they each come to rely on agents who are paid according to the volume of fossils they find for their bosses. This commercial arrangement, however, isn't always in the Best interests of true science.
- [32:37]
C
It's extremely rare for a paleontologist to be working with anything that resembles a complete organism. And these two scientists, Cope and Marsh, are trying to imagine what these creatures might have looked like based on this very fragmentary scant remains, and often doing that work thousands of miles away from the actual localities in which those fossils were dug up. Owen, by the way, sometimes also having good reason not to trust the commercial motives of the people who are shipping them the specimens, right? And wondering whether these specimens, were they all found next to each other? Was this bone really found next to this other bone? Or were they? Maybe, maybe this person has combined bits and pieces of different specimens to create the illusion of a more complete specimen, because that way they can fetch a higher price, right?
- [33:21]
B
It's a situation that starts to tell in the quality of their work.
- [33:25]
C
And so a lot of mistakes were made, and in particular because the two were racing with one another over who could name more taxa, right? They were kind of engaged in this race to describe more species. They didn't have the luxury of time. They didn't feel like they could wait for more specimens to arrive at their museum so they could work up a more complete picture before publishing their results, because then they'd get scooped, right? They were competing with one another, so they would rush into publication and they would constantly just be publishing new names of supposedly new species based on just a couple of teeth or just a
- [33:59]
B
couple of bones, while each has made steady progress in terms of new discoveries. 1877, the year Arthur Lakes makes contact, is a game changer. Although Lakes sends specimens to both men, Marsh agrees to pay him $100 for exclusive access to his finds. He receives almost 3/4 of a ton of specimens and publishes a paper describing a dinosaur he calls Atlantosaurus. It's some 50 to 60ft in length, which at the time is the largest known land animal to have ever lived. After Marsh has outbid his rival, Lakes now asks Cope to forward his portion of specimens to Marsh instead. Cope reluctantly complies. But Lakes isn't the only amateur enthusiast to contact the warring pair.
- [34:50]
C
That year, word of their exploits made its way through the community of white settlers that were traveling west using this new railroad infrastructure being constructed, largely moving west in search of material gains. And in addition to finding precious metals and other kinds of mineral resources, they stumbled upon fossils, right? Dinosaur bones and other kinds of fossils. And when they did so, they had heard about the amazing exploits of these paleontologists on the east coast and began writing letters to Cope and Marsh and offering their services. And because Copen Marsh had the financial means to do so, they began hiring these collectors to dig up these specimens and use their railroad network being constructed to ship those specimens on the trains back to population centers in places like Philadelphia and New Haven, Connecticut.
- [35:38]
B
In March 1877, just as lakes is writing his letters, another fossil hunter hits pay dirt. OW Lucas is out collecting plants in Oil Creek, not far from Canyon City, Colorado. However, he stumbles not on some exotic plant, but an array of huge bones. He boxes them up and sends them to Cope, who excitedly rattles off another academic paper detailing a new dinosaur he says is even bigger than Marsh's Atlantosaurus. This is too much for Marsh, and when one of his hillside quarries in Morrison collapses, almost killing his research crew, he takes it as a sign. He packs up and starts a new dig next to his rival near the Canyon City limits. But now another letter arrives at his door, this time from two Union Pacific Railroad officials, W.E. carlin and W.H. reed. There's a huge boneyard at Como, Wyoming, they tell him, full of gigantic remains for mile after mile, many so close to the railroad that they can be hauled to the station in wheelbarrows. Marsh doesn't waste time haggling. He signs the pair up as his exclusive agents and sends his trusted lieutenant, S.W. williston, to supervise excavations. When Williston arrives, you can hardly believe his eyes. Beneath the ridge of Como Bluff is a landscape of colorful shales and easy to work rock faces. And scattered on the ground like logs in a forest, are dinosaur bones by the dozen. Within days, Williston has uncovered an extraordinary jigsaw of dinosaur bones from multiple species, all intermingled in a confusion of poses. He imagines some ancient mud hole where these huge monsters became stuck and died, only for their bones to be trampled down by later generations succumbing to the same fate. The great dinosaur rush begins in earnest at these three Morrison, Canyon City and Como Bluff, a golden triangle of paleontology straddling just a few hundred miles. In Colorado and Wyoming, they will give up the secrets of the Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Diplodocus and Stegosaurus, and many more besides. Marsh and Cope work with a renewed ferocity. Knowing that Marsh has the American Journal of Science on hand to publish him, Cope buys a controlling interest in the American naturalist to ensure he can compete in the field. The digs are plagued by tit for tat dirty tricks. At Como Bluff, Williston is constantly on the lookout for Cope's spies. Sure enough, Cope soon appears on the scene and persuades Reid to defect to him. As stationmaster, Reid is able to pack up specimens in the comfort of the station room, while poor old Carlin is forced to work outside on the platform. The railwaymen themselves become enemies. When a quarry is nearly empty, Reid takes to smashing the remnants to prevent Carlin getting hold of anything left behind. Nor is he averse to covering over with soil and rubble whatever his rival manages to dig in each day. Marsh and Cope make only the briefest of visits in person, preferring to spend their time at home unboxing specimens in comfort. Dinosaur hunting, though, is an expensive business and both men are burning through their fortunes. As the 1880s roll by. It is Cope who comes off worst, especially when a series of ill advised investments in New Mexico's silver mines fail to make ends meet. He gives lectures and painfully starts to sell his collections. All the while he writes, clocking up around 75 academic papers. By comparison, Marsh now has the powerful United States Geological Survey behind him, with its director, John Wesley Powell, a virtual personal benefactor. The embittered Cope decides the time has come to bring both opponents down. He encourages several of Marsh's disgruntled former assistants to spill the dirt on their old boss. Williston of Como Bluff comes forward, accusing Marsh of suppressing others work so as to claim glory for himself, even while making fundamental errors of interpretation. In 1891, Cope telegraphs the New York Herald. How would they like an exclusive on the famous OC Marsh?
- [40:17]
C
So previously newspapers had existed, but they'd been very much media for the elites. You could say they were quite expensive. And so they were, they were not there. There wasn't kind of mass circulation newspapers that changed at the very end of the 19th century. And the kind of journalism that emerged in this context in American history is often called yellow journalism. So yeah, there were these large mass circulation newspapers that basically sought to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And the copy that they had to write, it was kind of like clickbait. It's like late 19th century clickbait.
- [40:46]
B
On 12 January 1892, the Herald unleashes Cope's attack material, which he has gathered and stored for years in a drawer that he labels Marciana. The litany of accusations includes plagiarism, stealing without acknowledgment and incompetence. Cope mocks Marsh for once, mistaking a dinosaur bone for a buffalo horn, and quotes Williston as saying that Marsh has never been known to tell the truth when a falsehood would serve the purpose.
- [41:15]
C
As well, and this article was published and it got a lot of attention. Marsh was incensed when he heard about this and he read the article, and so, of course, he had to issue a public rejoinder. And so there was a kind of back and forth, a series of articles that was published, and of course, the owner of these newspapers loved it because it produced more copy that was more salacious. Right. So, yeah, it became a kind of media event.
- [41:39]
B
It turns out that Marsh has a steel safe of his own full of incriminating material against Cope, which he now deploys in retaliation. Perhaps most devastating of all is an article headlined Wrong End Foremost. In it, Marsh recalls visiting the Museum of Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences way back in 1869. Cope proudly showed him a reconstruction of the skeleton of a giant called the Elasmosaurus.
- [42:10]
C
So he imagined he made a drawing of what this creature would have looked like in life. And Marsh looked at the specimen and looked at the drawing and said, you know, Cope, I think you might have made a pretty major blunder here. You might have really made an error here. I think you've assembled the specimen the wrong way around, the way Cope had the specimen set up. The specimen had an enormously long tail and a fairly short neck. In fact, this specimen should have a very long neck and a fairly short tail. Cope was enormously wounded and embarrassed and tried to retract the article that was already in print. He tried to buy up every copy of the article before his blunder could spread too far, and it was unsuccessful.
- [42:48]
B
Now, 20 years later, the error is brought back under the spotlight for wider public humiliation. Soon, though, the news cycle moves on, but the damage to these T. Rexes of paleontology is longer lasting. Marsh is wealthy enough to carry on his work, but he lives in the knowledge that he is more famous for this academic feud than for his contribution to science. Eventually, the funding for the government's geological survey comes under scrutiny, and one of Marsh's favorite investigations into ancient birds with teeth is mockingly criticized by a prominent congressman. Indeed, birds with teeth becomes popular shorthand to refer to wasteful government spending. There are better days to come, not least the publication of his magnum opus, Dinosaurs of North America, in 1896 and the award of the prestigious Cuvier Prize a year later. But both men are reaching the end of the prehistoric road. Cope, with his resources drained and unable to secure a prominent academic position, takes a relatively low profile teaching job. But there is still time for an adventure or two. One day in 1892, he is walking in a flower strewn River Valley in South Dakota. Another promising dinosaur bed he wants to investigate. As early evening approaches, he comes to a low hill. Before him is a meadow of bones. He can hardly walk without stepping on one. The weather is turning bad. The sky is rumbling with thunder. Lightning begins to blaze around him. The Native Americans in these parts believe the hill is the tomb of giants, killed in a blitz of lightning bolts. With the sky flashing like a strobe light, he sees a dinosaur skull poking out of the ground. It's at least a yard long. He comes back at first light next day to dig it up. His fingertips tingle as he holds the fossil in his hands. It is no new species, not worthy of a new academic paper, let alone a headline in the press. But it stirs that old feeling in him. As he himself puts it, after all these years, and despite the public rancor and the diminished circumstances, he still dreams of dinosaurs. In the spring of 1897, Cope falls ill in the house in Philadelphia that he has converted into a museum for his specimens. He sleeps in a cot surrounded by piles of bones and books. To the alarm of his wife and assistant, who take turns nursing him, he self medicates a deadly cocktail of morphia, belladonna and formalin. On 12 April, he dies at his traditional Quaker burial. There are just six mourners, not counting his pet tortoise and a gila monster, a large venomous lizard who prowls around his coffin. Three years later, on 18 March 1899, Marsh also passes away after contracting pneumonia while walking home in the rain one night. And so the curtain descends on the most famous and unseemly battle in the history of paleontology. But did either of the two emerge victorious in the end? If anything, both lost, allowing their feud to tarnish their reputations. The rivalry left a messy knot of confusion as they sought to claim and name the same species for themselves, a mess that is still being unpicked in pure numerical terms. More dinosaur discoveries are attributed to Marsh, who claimed 80 to Cope's 56. But in the years immediately following their deaths, Cope is perhaps held in higher regard in academic circles. Though many of his theories are later dropped, his work is accepted into the intellectual landscape of American paleontology around the turn of the 20th century. Their shared story does, though, offer some enduring lessons for modern science.
- [47:00]
C
Earth scientists today, geologists, paleontologists today, still go on expeditions all over the world collecting fossils. And when they do so, they are often extracting those fossils from their local context, where there's a great deal of local knowledge and local significance around those object. I think science, natural history in particular, needs to think more about the politics, the kind of geopolitics, of the kind of work that they're doing. And this episode is an important reminder of that.
- [47:28]
B
It also speaks of the ties between science and money and causes us to take stock of how we approach the acquisition of knowledge.
- [47:37]
C
I think the kind of acrimony, the kind of competition between Cope and Marsh shows us something about the relationship between the competitive ethos of the political economy of capitalism and science, which is often, not necessarily understood, is often understood to be a kind of more collaborative enterprise. Right? Scientists like Isaac Newton has this famous apocryphal perhaps phrase where if I've been able to see further than others, it has been by standing on the shoulders of giants. So scientists work together. They build on knowledge that each other produces, and the competitive elements of capitalist political economy threaten to undermine that kind of community. I think there's real questions there about how we as a society want to fund science, how we want to pay for the production of knowledge, and then what kind of knowledge we get in return.
- [48:31]
B
In the next episode of Short History of We'll bring you a short history of Muhammad Ali. Ali was so happy, so proud of himself. He had that gold medal around his neck and he was not taking it off, he was sleeping with it. He was walking around the streets of Manhattan when he got back, before he returned to Louisville, just stopping people on the street saying, do you know who I am?
- [48:51]
C
Do you know who I am?
- [48:53]
B
For a kid from Louisville who was dyslexic and whose father was a house painter, a sign painter, suddenly, to have people paying attention to him was just glorious. That's next time on Short History. Off.
- [49:15]
A
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