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