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