WEBVTT - Boneheads 0:00:02.600 --> 0:00:06.560 You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and 0:00:06.640 --> 0:00:16.000 Grimm and Mild from Air and Manky. 0:00:17.800 --> 0:00:21.520 The Victorian Age was a time of wonder. The people 0:00:21.560 --> 0:00:25.680 were experiencing things that felt nothing short of magical. They 0:00:25.720 --> 0:00:29.560 saw their cities light up with electricity. They sat for 0:00:29.720 --> 0:00:33.199 new fangled cameras and took home images of themselves on 0:00:33.320 --> 0:00:37.520 silver plates. Cable lines carried their telegrams to loved ones 0:00:37.680 --> 0:00:42.760 thousands of miles away. Their disembodied voices flowed through telephone receivers. 0:00:43.640 --> 0:00:49.159 They also witnessed the invention of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, of course, 0:00:49.240 --> 0:00:52.199 lived and died far before anyone, let alone people of 0:00:52.200 --> 0:00:56.040 the Victorian era, ever stepped foot on this planet. But 0:00:56.160 --> 0:00:59.840 it was this generation when the dinosaur's story began again. 0:01:00.760 --> 0:01:04.920 Humans had been unearthing strangely fossilized bones and other remains 0:01:04.920 --> 0:01:09.400 for centuries, but what were they, exactly where did they 0:01:09.400 --> 0:01:13.280 come from? The debate had long been heated. Some believed 0:01:13.280 --> 0:01:16.040 they were left by the devil, others thought they were 0:01:16.080 --> 0:01:20.080 remnants of Noah's flood. At the time in Europe, most 0:01:20.160 --> 0:01:22.959 didn't realize that these were the remains of creatures who 0:01:22.959 --> 0:01:26.880 had lived a very long time ago. The study of 0:01:26.880 --> 0:01:30.120 these remnants began to codify in the seventeen hundreds, as 0:01:30.160 --> 0:01:33.679 paleontology got its start. The term finds its origin in 0:01:33.720 --> 0:01:39.560 the Greek words for ancient palaeo, being anto and study ology. 0:01:40.200 --> 0:01:43.640 Curious minds began to classify and label these bits and 0:01:43.680 --> 0:01:47.319 pieces of ancient beings, trying to make sense of what 0:01:47.400 --> 0:01:52.120 they once were. Fossils supported the theories presented in Charles 0:01:52.200 --> 0:01:55.120 Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, which to the 0:01:55.160 --> 0:02:01.280 Victorian mind was either hugely exciting or hugely blasphemed. In 0:02:01.440 --> 0:02:05.720 eighteen fifty one, Britain launched their Great Exhibition, a showing 0:02:05.760 --> 0:02:10.240 of magnificent resources pillaged from their colonies. They hired a 0:02:10.240 --> 0:02:12.880 man by the name of Joseph Paxton to design and 0:02:12.919 --> 0:02:17.440 construct a showcase, and he did just that, building a 0:02:17.480 --> 0:02:21.919 massive structure of steel and glass, naming it the Crystal Palace. 0:02:22.840 --> 0:02:26.920 A British sculptor and natural history illustrator, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, 0:02:27.160 --> 0:02:30.720 was hired to fill it up. Benjamin was taken by 0:02:30.760 --> 0:02:34.079 the ideas of the natural world and had designs on 0:02:34.240 --> 0:02:37.800 giving humanity something that had never seen before. He set 0:02:37.800 --> 0:02:40.800 his sights on creating sculptures of all kinds of extinct 0:02:40.840 --> 0:02:44.600 animals and placing them among greenery. He received advice from 0:02:44.639 --> 0:02:48.400 famed paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, the fellow who had only 0:02:48.440 --> 0:02:53.040 recently coined the word dinosaur, and so Benjamin got to work. 0:02:53.680 --> 0:02:57.680 He looked at notes, diagrams, and the fossils themselves. He 0:02:57.840 --> 0:02:59.800 had a lot of parts, but not a lot of 0:03:00.000 --> 0:03:03.520 direction for how to assemble them. But he had his 0:03:03.639 --> 0:03:07.960 artistic sensibility and a vague understanding of anatomy, and knew 0:03:07.960 --> 0:03:11.040 how to take big swings. What was also true was 0:03:11.080 --> 0:03:13.040 that no one was going to know if he was wrong. 0:03:13.639 --> 0:03:19.240 Benjamin began constructing his hulking beasts with a combination of clay, brick, tiles, 0:03:19.280 --> 0:03:23.840 and cement, all supported on iron columns. Some contained thirty 0:03:23.880 --> 0:03:28.000 tons of clay. He built thirty three different creatures and 0:03:28.080 --> 0:03:31.600 placed them in the palace's green gardens. These were the 0:03:31.639 --> 0:03:36.360 first life sized models of dinosaurs ever constructed. Visitors could 0:03:36.360 --> 0:03:39.640 walk right up to a creature that supposedly existed many 0:03:39.720 --> 0:03:43.480 millions of years ago, something that seemed inconceivable to the 0:03:43.480 --> 0:03:47.080 minds of so many The sculptures ended up being wildly 0:03:47.160 --> 0:03:51.760 popular and are still on display in London today. In retrospect, 0:03:52.160 --> 0:03:56.360 Benjamin statues are rife with error, and to our modern eye, 0:03:56.640 --> 0:04:01.440 sometimes silly looking, but they represented some thing hugely important. 0:04:01.880 --> 0:04:05.120 They've acted as touchstones by which we can measure scientific 0:04:05.160 --> 0:04:09.200 progress and acknowledge our own evolutions in thought and theory. 0:04:10.040 --> 0:04:12.680 If the Victorians thought they knew a lot, then it's 0:04:12.760 --> 0:04:16.839 become more clear in contemporary times how much we simply 0:04:17.080 --> 0:04:21.880 don't know. Today paleo illustrators are constantly updating what they 0:04:21.920 --> 0:04:25.800 know about dinosaurs and trying to more accurately represent them. 0:04:26.040 --> 0:04:29.160 It's a tall order to try to perfectly recreate an 0:04:29.160 --> 0:04:33.800 animal based only on its fossils. Even still, we feel 0:04:33.800 --> 0:04:37.480 compelled to know who and what has walked before us. 0:04:38.440 --> 0:04:41.800 And for some this question has turned into a fascination, 0:04:42.640 --> 0:04:47.520 which then morphed into obsession. And where obsession arises, so 0:04:47.880 --> 0:04:52.880 often does a good story. I'm Lauren Bogelbaum. Welcome to 0:04:52.960 --> 0:05:03.760 American Shadows. When Andrew Carnegie unfolded his newspaper that morning 0:05:03.800 --> 0:05:07.000 in eighteen ninety nine, he read the front page, headlined 0:05:07.160 --> 0:05:11.080 exclaiming that the most colossal animal ever on Earth had 0:05:11.120 --> 0:05:13.880 been discovered. He knew that it had to be his. 0:05:14.680 --> 0:05:17.000 There was nothing that the richest man in the world 0:05:17.000 --> 0:05:21.240 wanted that he couldn't have. Andrew Carnegie was a product 0:05:21.279 --> 0:05:24.400 and poster boy of the Gilded Age. It was a 0:05:24.400 --> 0:05:28.640 time of glitter and gold, of ostentatious wealth and opulence. 0:05:29.480 --> 0:05:33.160 Author Mark Twain coined the term to characterize the new 0:05:33.200 --> 0:05:36.839 American aristocracy that was on the rise in the period 0:05:36.880 --> 0:05:39.880 after the Civil War. The country was hitting a growth spurt. 0:05:40.360 --> 0:05:44.839 The railroads and laws benefiting industrial production infused the country 0:05:44.839 --> 0:05:49.600 with jobs and money, But underneath that guilt veneer there 0:05:49.720 --> 0:05:53.880 was darkness and corruption. A new class of people were 0:05:53.920 --> 0:05:58.719 forged at this moment. The industrialists the money largely lined 0:05:58.760 --> 0:06:02.560 their pockets and created a system of social inequity unlike 0:06:02.600 --> 0:06:07.400 anything America had ever seen before. They wielded power unmatched 0:06:07.440 --> 0:06:10.960 by politicians and often made the rules by which others 0:06:11.000 --> 0:06:14.839 had to play. The tycoons and lawmakers scratched each other's 0:06:14.880 --> 0:06:18.839 backs and cut back room deals, amassing wealth while exploiting 0:06:18.880 --> 0:06:24.920 the working class. Every major business, from railroads to timber, meatpacking, 0:06:25.000 --> 0:06:28.640 to steel and oil to tobacco, came under the pull 0:06:28.880 --> 0:06:33.480 of these captains of industry. That money needed to go somewhere, 0:06:33.960 --> 0:06:37.400 a spending became almost a performance art, as the moneyed 0:06:37.400 --> 0:06:42.800 class erected massive homes, through lavish parties and curated exquisite collections. 0:06:43.560 --> 0:06:46.160 Carnegie was able to purchase the dinosaur that he had 0:06:46.200 --> 0:06:49.560 read about, but it fell short of his expectations. It 0:06:49.760 --> 0:06:53.719 just wasn't grand enough not to be discouraged. He commissioned 0:06:53.760 --> 0:06:56.640 his own fossil hunting team to find a dinosaur that 0:06:56.760 --> 0:06:59.400 was going to be bigger and better than anything anyone 0:06:59.440 --> 0:07:03.160 had ever seen, and they did just that, discovering a 0:07:03.200 --> 0:07:06.359 fossil in Wyoming that was over seventy feet long and 0:07:06.440 --> 0:07:10.400 weighed more than fourteen tons. This new species was named 0:07:10.400 --> 0:07:15.600 after him, the Diplodocus carnegie Eye. Andrew Carnegie was just 0:07:15.680 --> 0:07:19.520 one of many who hopped on the prehistoric bandwagon. The 0:07:19.640 --> 0:07:23.280 rich loved their dinosaurs. They were big, they were expensive 0:07:23.320 --> 0:07:26.640 to find, they were rare, there were limited quantities of them. 0:07:27.280 --> 0:07:31.120 These qualifications created a national hunger that many would go 0:07:31.160 --> 0:07:34.360 to great lengths to satisfy. The moment leading up to 0:07:34.400 --> 0:07:38.480 Carnegie's purchase was marked by a blazing period of intense excavation, 0:07:38.960 --> 0:07:43.640 spearheaded by two men entangled in an intense rivalry off. 0:07:43.760 --> 0:07:47.640 Neil Marsh, the first professor of paleontology in the United States, 0:07:47.920 --> 0:07:52.320 and Edward Cope, a wealthy enthusiast, had long been a pair, 0:07:52.440 --> 0:07:58.040 embattled and embittered, dueling for palaeontological supremacy, power, and fame. 0:07:59.080 --> 0:08:03.520 These two men were different worlds. As individuals, they embodied 0:08:03.560 --> 0:08:07.560 the social and economic differences of the Gilded Age. Marsh 0:08:07.680 --> 0:08:10.040 was born on October twenty ninth of eighteen thirty one 0:08:10.240 --> 0:08:13.160 in Lockport, New York, to a family with little money 0:08:13.320 --> 0:08:17.200 in fewer connections. His father was a farmer and his 0:08:17.280 --> 0:08:21.160 mother was soon dead. Marsh's mother had been the younger 0:08:21.200 --> 0:08:25.920 sister of George Peabody, a wealthy banker and philanthropist. Marsh 0:08:26.000 --> 0:08:28.360 might have gone on to become a farmer like his father, 0:08:28.760 --> 0:08:31.600 but his uncle stepped in and paid for his education. 0:08:32.600 --> 0:08:35.240 He eventually made his way to Yale, where he became 0:08:35.400 --> 0:08:38.640 utterly taken by Darwin and his new ideas on evolution. 0:08:39.720 --> 0:08:42.640 This would become his life's work, and he soon went 0:08:42.679 --> 0:08:45.240 on to pursue an education at the University of Berlin. 0:08:46.360 --> 0:08:49.040 It was there, in eighteen sixty three that he met 0:08:49.040 --> 0:08:53.559 a wealthy, fiery classmate named Edward Cope. They shared similar 0:08:53.600 --> 0:08:57.080 interests and friends, though their approaches to life and study 0:08:57.120 --> 0:09:01.280 were radically different. Marsh was studious and regimented a while 0:09:01.440 --> 0:09:05.600 Cope took a more unconventional approach to his education, preferring travel, 0:09:05.840 --> 0:09:09.760 on the job, training, and mentorship. The Cope saw Darwin's 0:09:09.760 --> 0:09:12.440 origin of the species as the key to unlocking the 0:09:12.480 --> 0:09:16.439 secrets of life on Earth, whereas Marsh harbored more conventional 0:09:16.480 --> 0:09:20.240 religious beliefs and regarded life as a project and intentional 0:09:20.520 --> 0:09:24.960 gradual design. Even so, both remained in touch after they 0:09:25.000 --> 0:09:28.920 returned to the United States and kicked off their palaeontological careers. 0:09:29.559 --> 0:09:32.320 In time, they would even name some new discoveries after 0:09:32.360 --> 0:09:36.599 each other. Cope and Marsh continued their relationship via correspondence, 0:09:36.880 --> 0:09:39.880 sending manuscripts of papers they planned to write, along with 0:09:40.000 --> 0:09:43.320 fossils and photos back and forth. They could have been 0:09:43.360 --> 0:09:48.920 great collaborators, but instead, as it often does, greed got 0:09:48.960 --> 0:09:52.559 in their way. The road to success wouldn't be paved 0:09:52.600 --> 0:09:56.680 in bones for these two men, it was often paved 0:09:56.720 --> 0:10:01.120 with sabotage. The Great dinosaur Rush was about to begin. 0:10:09.080 --> 0:10:12.640 Cope and Marsh had a love hate relationship in frenemies. 0:10:12.679 --> 0:10:16.199 If you will. They respected each other's brilliance in verve, 0:10:16.679 --> 0:10:20.360 but simmering under all of that were egos that needed 0:10:20.360 --> 0:10:23.880 to be sated. Upon their returns from Berlin, Cope and 0:10:23.920 --> 0:10:27.800 Marsh worked together on many digs, celebrating and squabbling in 0:10:27.840 --> 0:10:31.880 equal measure. But one project in eighteen sixty eight would 0:10:31.880 --> 0:10:35.880 set the stage for their greatest disagreement yet. Southern New 0:10:35.960 --> 0:10:39.840 Jersey is home to a singular deposit of this strange, 0:10:40.080 --> 0:10:43.800 beautiful green sand, leftover from a time millions of years 0:10:43.840 --> 0:10:48.319 ago when the place was underwater. It's rich in glauconite, 0:10:48.440 --> 0:10:52.560 a green mineral that characterizes the deposit, and also it 0:10:52.640 --> 0:10:56.760 seems rich in fossils. A Cope wanted to dig there, 0:10:57.000 --> 0:11:00.000 and he invited Marsh to come along. They set out 0:11:00.120 --> 0:11:03.200 to New Jersey to make some discoveries, make some names, 0:11:03.400 --> 0:11:07.000 and make some money. They knew that everything that could 0:11:07.000 --> 0:11:10.720 be found there would be incredibly valuable, especially now that 0:11:10.800 --> 0:11:14.520 more people were collecting fossils than ever before. They hired 0:11:14.520 --> 0:11:17.679 teams of people to help them. The dirty business of 0:11:17.720 --> 0:11:21.280 digging up fossils required many hands and lots of organization, 0:11:21.760 --> 0:11:24.240 so it was imperative that they find the right labor 0:11:24.280 --> 0:11:28.680 to do the job. Scouts and site managers, operators and 0:11:28.720 --> 0:11:31.920 diggers were soon on site for their part. Cope and 0:11:32.000 --> 0:11:35.840 Marsh analyzed, cataloged, and then shipped these discoveries back to 0:11:35.880 --> 0:11:40.160 their offices via hired railroad workers. And because this was 0:11:40.360 --> 0:11:45.080 Cope's dig, anything that was discovered technically belonged to him. 0:11:45.400 --> 0:11:48.839 It's here in these silty green sands they unearthed all 0:11:48.960 --> 0:11:53.400 kinds of beautiful creatures, including ancient turtles and crocodiles that 0:11:53.640 --> 0:11:57.480 died over sixty six million years ago. They found dinosaur 0:11:57.520 --> 0:12:02.160 bones and giant sea bound lizards. As they broke down 0:12:02.200 --> 0:12:05.800 camp and parted ways, they shook hands amicably and wished 0:12:05.800 --> 0:12:09.280 each other well. But what Cope didn't realize was that 0:12:09.320 --> 0:12:12.240 Marsh had bribed the laborers to siphon off some of 0:12:12.280 --> 0:12:15.760 their fines back to his office in New Haven, Connecticut. 0:12:16.160 --> 0:12:19.520 And when Cope soon learned about this, he felt utterly 0:12:19.559 --> 0:12:25.720 betrayed and absolutely furious. This, however, didn't stop them from 0:12:25.880 --> 0:12:30.640 continuing to work together. They admired each other intensely, bitterly, 0:12:30.880 --> 0:12:36.160 and jealously. They each knew the other had connections, institutional resources, 0:12:36.240 --> 0:12:39.800 and smarts, which further fanned the flames of their rivalry. 0:12:40.720 --> 0:12:43.880 At times they were the best of frenemies. They would 0:12:43.920 --> 0:12:46.160 do almost anything to get a leg up on the other. 0:12:46.920 --> 0:12:49.840 Both had great personal wealth and were willing to throw 0:12:49.920 --> 0:12:53.360 money at their problems. It didn't take them long to 0:12:53.360 --> 0:12:57.240 start playing dirtier. Even though fossil hunting began on the 0:12:57.240 --> 0:13:01.480 East coast, the situation soon became the Wheiled West, a 0:13:01.640 --> 0:13:04.640 total free for all in the race for scientific glory 0:13:05.080 --> 0:13:08.600 and the money that came with truly rare and unique fines. 0:13:09.640 --> 0:13:13.360 In one instance, Marsh publicly humiliated Cope when he pointed 0:13:13.360 --> 0:13:17.040 out that his reconstruction of a water bound plesiosaur called 0:13:17.040 --> 0:13:21.880 an elasmosaurus was incorrect because in his reconstruction, Cope had 0:13:21.880 --> 0:13:24.280 put the head at the end of the short tail 0:13:24.640 --> 0:13:27.760 instead of at the end of the long neck. After 0:13:27.760 --> 0:13:30.360 they called in other experts to settle the dispute, a 0:13:30.440 --> 0:13:33.520 Cope was horrified to realize that he and everything he 0:13:33.559 --> 0:13:38.440 had recently published about his discovery was indeed incorrect. The 0:13:38.520 --> 0:13:41.800 whole field became a battleground for their squabbling as they 0:13:42.000 --> 0:13:45.320 rushed to both pull in other scientists and flood the 0:13:45.320 --> 0:13:49.560 field with their own publishing. As they rushed, they got sloppy, 0:13:50.160 --> 0:13:54.280 Cope started pushing further west into Kansas and Wyoming, what 0:13:54.480 --> 0:13:58.840 Marsh considered his territory for finding fossils. It was a 0:13:58.880 --> 0:14:02.720 gentleman's understand that each had their own turf, but Cope 0:14:02.720 --> 0:14:06.200 decided he would no longer abide by these arbitrary rules. 0:14:06.880 --> 0:14:10.040 Any kind of warmth between them chilled in eighteen seventy two. 0:14:10.400 --> 0:14:14.640 As they pushed further and further west, they became desperate 0:14:14.679 --> 0:14:18.480 to outdo each other, pumping more and more resources into 0:14:18.520 --> 0:14:22.240 digging up the earth. They also weren't actually at the 0:14:22.280 --> 0:14:26.160 pits that were being excavated. They relied solely young collectors 0:14:26.200 --> 0:14:28.720 to get them what they wanted and to ship everything 0:14:28.800 --> 0:14:32.240 back east. It was an exercise of trust, it seems, 0:14:32.960 --> 0:14:36.120 and in the haze of paranoia around their own relationship 0:14:36.560 --> 0:14:40.120 a Cope and Marsh failed to realize the secondary duplicity 0:14:40.120 --> 0:14:44.080 at hand. You see, the market for bones and other 0:14:44.120 --> 0:14:48.960 fossils was prone to fraud. There was no established regulatory 0:14:49.000 --> 0:14:52.080 framework for how to do all this, and these vines 0:14:52.200 --> 0:14:56.680 often traveled great distances over large amounts of time. It 0:14:56.720 --> 0:15:00.520 was hard to keep track of contracts and laborers. Whatever 0:15:00.600 --> 0:15:03.880 arrived in crates was usually going to be what you got. 0:15:04.920 --> 0:15:09.000 As the railroads moved further west and explorers and colonists followed, 0:15:09.520 --> 0:15:12.840 plenty of lines were established and plenty of hands were 0:15:12.880 --> 0:15:16.360 willing to get paleontologists like Marsh and Cope what they wanted. 0:15:17.320 --> 0:15:20.760 These folks were often paid well by their scientist bosses, 0:15:21.440 --> 0:15:26.600 but the handsome pay didn't necessarily guarantee worker loyalty. Those 0:15:26.720 --> 0:15:29.840 muscling the dirt knew that their labor and their fines 0:15:29.880 --> 0:15:33.360 were in high demand, and their affections could be bought. 0:15:34.560 --> 0:15:38.440 In eighteen seventy three, Marsh wrote publicly that he believed 0:15:38.440 --> 0:15:40.880 half of his discoveries in the West were poached from 0:15:40.960 --> 0:15:44.240 him in this way. In that same year, the scientific 0:15:44.320 --> 0:15:47.640 journal The American Naturalist decided that it would stop publishing 0:15:47.680 --> 0:15:51.680 any materials from either scientist, even though Cope later had 0:15:51.720 --> 0:15:56.320 a huge ownership stake in the publication. There was one dig, though, 0:15:56.480 --> 0:16:00.360 that would prove to end all digs. It was discuss covered. 0:16:00.440 --> 0:16:03.360 The Como Bluff, Wyoming, was home to one of the 0:16:03.440 --> 0:16:13.080 richest bone quarries ever discovered. The bones and other fossils 0:16:13.080 --> 0:16:16.240 at Coma Bluff were discovered in eighteen seventy seven by 0:16:16.280 --> 0:16:20.400 geologist Arthur Lakes. It was a veritable gold mine, one 0:16:20.440 --> 0:16:23.880 of the richest deposits ever found. It would become known 0:16:23.960 --> 0:16:27.560 as the Morrison Formation, a huge span of sediment that 0:16:27.680 --> 0:16:32.400 reaches from New Mexico to Montana. It stretches back, encompassing 0:16:32.440 --> 0:16:35.600 over two hundred million years, and would go on to 0:16:35.640 --> 0:16:38.320 teach us much of what we know about the Jurassic Period. 0:16:39.280 --> 0:16:41.840 At the time, though, all Lakes knew was that this 0:16:42.120 --> 0:16:46.360 was a singular repository, and he quickly sent word back east. 0:16:46.920 --> 0:16:51.520 He tried Marsh first, but Marsh was slow to respond. Impatient, 0:16:51.720 --> 0:16:54.960 he sent some findings to Cope. When Marsh heard this, 0:16:55.240 --> 0:16:58.920 he kicked into gear. Marsh was able to send out 0:16:59.000 --> 0:17:03.000 his representatives first. They reported back that there were miles 0:17:03.040 --> 0:17:06.119 of bones right for the picking. He worked quickly to 0:17:06.160 --> 0:17:09.040 secure the site for himself with all the labor his 0:17:09.160 --> 0:17:12.280 good money could buy. He was eager to get his 0:17:12.359 --> 0:17:16.080 hands on anything that was dug up and promptly started negotiating. 0:17:16.560 --> 0:17:21.240 The specimens were enormous and numerous. Cope, for his part, 0:17:21.520 --> 0:17:25.120 thought nothing of Marsh's claim and refused to be deterred. 0:17:26.080 --> 0:17:29.480 The race was once again on from Marsian Cope and 0:17:29.680 --> 0:17:33.760 although neither was personally at the bluff, they sent workers, 0:17:34.000 --> 0:17:37.840 including former students. It didn't take long for Cope's men 0:17:37.880 --> 0:17:40.760 to start encroaching on the territory that Marsh had staked out. 0:17:41.560 --> 0:17:44.280 Marsh knew that this was where he needed to dig 0:17:44.320 --> 0:17:48.200 to outpace Cope. In truth, Marsh might not have become 0:17:48.200 --> 0:17:51.119 involved with this dig's location at all if Cope hadn't 0:17:51.160 --> 0:17:54.959 sent the team. At that point in his career, Marsh 0:17:55.040 --> 0:17:58.600 was far more interested in mammalion specimens than dinosaur bones, 0:17:59.240 --> 0:18:02.360 but once heard Cope's team had shown up, he refused 0:18:02.359 --> 0:18:07.520 to be outshined. So there they were, warring factions on 0:18:07.560 --> 0:18:12.159 a bluff under the sun, furiously digging and conducting shady dealings. 0:18:13.000 --> 0:18:16.199 Each scientist was determined to get the upper hand and 0:18:16.320 --> 0:18:19.120 started paying more money to their workers to keep them 0:18:19.160 --> 0:18:23.399 digging and keep them loyal. They worked tirelessly back east, 0:18:23.800 --> 0:18:27.640 intercepting huge wooden crates and publishing at a breakneck clip. 0:18:28.240 --> 0:18:31.800 Efforts of other paleontologists who showed up paled in comparison 0:18:31.880 --> 0:18:37.040 to these feverish and bitter operations. They planted fossils and 0:18:37.080 --> 0:18:40.639 locations where they weren't discovered to confuse the other, they 0:18:40.720 --> 0:18:43.880 bribed quarry owners to pull fossils out before they could 0:18:43.920 --> 0:18:48.000 be observed and documented. Their rivalry had become an all 0:18:48.040 --> 0:18:53.239 out war, rife with bad blood and explosions. Literally, it 0:18:53.320 --> 0:18:55.680 was reported that they had ordered the dynamiting of their 0:18:55.680 --> 0:18:58.959 completed dig sites lest any yet to be discovered bones 0:18:59.359 --> 0:19:02.800 fell into the world wrong hands. They continued to fight 0:19:02.840 --> 0:19:07.160 in the pages of academic journals and newspapers. They mutually 0:19:07.160 --> 0:19:10.879 attempted to sabotage each other's funding in efforts to slow 0:19:10.960 --> 0:19:15.560 down their respective careers and stardom. Their community was growing 0:19:15.680 --> 0:19:19.960 tired of the very public performance of their spite and 0:19:20.200 --> 0:19:23.640 called into question their ability to even do their jobs. 0:19:24.440 --> 0:19:28.399 Their work was often sloppy, rife with careless errors, and 0:19:28.760 --> 0:19:31.080 people knew about the shady dealings they were willing to 0:19:31.119 --> 0:19:35.280 engage with in order to bolster their reputations. It's said 0:19:35.320 --> 0:19:39.760 that competition breeds progress, and in one sense this rings true. 0:19:40.680 --> 0:19:43.159 This period was one of the most productive in the 0:19:43.240 --> 0:19:48.080 history of paleontology. Lay people were astounded and captivated by 0:19:48.119 --> 0:19:52.440 their very public duelings and were often inspired by their discoveries. 0:19:53.640 --> 0:19:55.919 Marti and Kpe were able to uncover some of the 0:19:55.960 --> 0:19:59.159 world's most famous dinosaurs that we know and love today 0:19:59.600 --> 0:20:05.439 include the Stegosaurus, the triceratops, the Alosaurus, and eventually one 0:20:05.480 --> 0:20:09.480 of the most fearsome of all, the Tyrannosaurus wrecks. Without 0:20:09.480 --> 0:20:13.240 their flaring tempers and growing contempt for each other, it's 0:20:13.400 --> 0:20:16.000 hard to say what we would know or not know 0:20:16.320 --> 0:20:20.760 about dinosaurs today. But for all the progress that they made, 0:20:21.080 --> 0:20:26.960 their rivalry ultimately destroyed Martian Cope. However, if we were 0:20:27.040 --> 0:20:29.959 asked to tally numbers for a winner and a loser 0:20:30.000 --> 0:20:34.480 in all of this, technically Marsh won their competition. He 0:20:34.560 --> 0:20:38.760 discovered and named eighty new species, compared with copes fifty six. 0:20:39.640 --> 0:20:44.359 Even so, they never quite retired. The rivalry between the 0:20:44.400 --> 0:20:48.240 two men lasted until the day they died, when Cope 0:20:48.240 --> 0:21:02.359 made one last bet. The decades long fight between Marsh 0:21:02.400 --> 0:21:06.600 and Cope ended tragically for both of them after thirty 0:21:06.720 --> 0:21:11.360 years of public feuding. Cope lay dying surrounded by shelves 0:21:11.359 --> 0:21:14.240 full of his beloved specimens to which he had devoted 0:21:14.240 --> 0:21:17.639 his entire life. He had been sick for a long while, 0:21:17.960 --> 0:21:22.159 plagued by chronic illnesses. The nature of those were never determined, 0:21:22.320 --> 0:21:25.639 but he had found ways to self medicate. He didn't 0:21:25.680 --> 0:21:29.600 really trust doctors. Instead, he came up with an all 0:21:29.760 --> 0:21:34.840 natural cure, belladonna. In small doses, it can help with 0:21:34.880 --> 0:21:38.880 all kinds of things, but he didn't take the right doses. 0:21:39.400 --> 0:21:42.920 He took it in small amounts, but too often this 0:21:43.200 --> 0:21:46.800 ultimately would lead to his end. He worked right up 0:21:46.840 --> 0:21:51.440 until he died on April twelfth of eighteen ninety seven. However, 0:21:52.040 --> 0:21:55.399 Cope wasn't content to let the war go, and just 0:21:55.520 --> 0:21:58.960 before he passed, he sent a challenge to Marsh. He 0:21:59.000 --> 0:22:02.440 wrote in his will, I direct that after my funeral, 0:22:02.560 --> 0:22:05.840 my body shall be presented to the Anthropometric Society, and 0:22:05.840 --> 0:22:09.000 then an autopsy shall be performed on it. My brain 0:22:09.040 --> 0:22:12.280 shall be preserved in their collection of brains for future study. 0:22:13.119 --> 0:22:16.639 In effect, Cope wanted to see who had the bigger brain. 0:22:17.760 --> 0:22:21.760 Marsh died on March eighteenth of eighteen ninety nine, effectively 0:22:21.800 --> 0:22:25.240 bringing the Bone Wars to an end. He never did 0:22:25.280 --> 0:22:28.600 turn over his brain to science, so we'll never know 0:22:28.880 --> 0:22:31.920 who the winner of that final battle would have been. 0:22:33.280 --> 0:22:36.280 There's more to this story. Stick around after this brief 0:22:36.320 --> 0:22:47.960 sponsor break to hear all about it. After the Great 0:22:48.000 --> 0:22:51.120 Dinosaur Rush of what became known as the Bone Wars. 0:22:51.880 --> 0:22:55.040 Fossil Hunting continued to be a favorite pastime among the 0:22:55.080 --> 0:22:59.920 wealthy and educated for decades. In nineteen ten, a very 0:23:00.000 --> 0:23:04.280 aristocrat and paleontologist by the name of Ernst freher Stromer 0:23:04.359 --> 0:23:07.320 von Reichenbach set out for a dig in the Egyptian 0:23:07.359 --> 0:23:11.080 desert outside of Cairo. He partnered up with Richard mcgroff, 0:23:11.320 --> 0:23:15.040 an Austrian fossil hunter, and together they found a glorious 0:23:15.119 --> 0:23:18.480 horde of all kinds of marine creatures. But it would 0:23:18.520 --> 0:23:21.880 be two years before their most spectacular discovery of all. 0:23:22.760 --> 0:23:26.760 Sometime between sixty and one hundred million years ago, an 0:23:26.920 --> 0:23:31.320 enormous predator died. It had long spines on its back, 0:23:31.640 --> 0:23:36.280 a crocodile like jaw, and massive teeth. When Ernst came 0:23:36.359 --> 0:23:40.040 upon its skeleton all of those years later, he was stunned. 0:23:40.960 --> 0:23:44.040 In life, this creature was likely unmatched by any foe. 0:23:44.760 --> 0:23:48.280 If it was such an astounding and terrifying proposition in death, 0:23:48.760 --> 0:23:51.640 imagine what it could have been in life. Ernst named 0:23:51.680 --> 0:23:57.359 it Spinosaurus egypticus, or the Egyptian spine lizard. Ernst removed 0:23:57.400 --> 0:24:01.760 the skeleton, then brought it to Munich's Paleontological Museum, and 0:24:01.960 --> 0:24:05.119 there it was proudly on display for many years, bringing 0:24:05.160 --> 0:24:09.080 him great acclaim. It stayed there quietly as a new 0:24:09.200 --> 0:24:13.719 kind of terror rolled through Europe the Nazi Party. Ernst 0:24:13.920 --> 0:24:17.080 was nervous. His sons were fighting on the front lines, 0:24:17.440 --> 0:24:20.800 and he realized that the relentless bombing campaigns posed a 0:24:20.880 --> 0:24:24.160 threat not just to them, but to their treasured artifacts 0:24:24.160 --> 0:24:27.520 as well. He begged the head of the museum to 0:24:27.560 --> 0:24:30.000 move the fossil to safety, but the man was a 0:24:30.080 --> 0:24:33.840 Nazi sympathizer and had long ago stopped listening to anything 0:24:33.960 --> 0:24:38.520 Ernst had to say, political or otherwise. The spinosaurus was 0:24:38.560 --> 0:24:41.639 s mearily destroyed by Allied forces when they dropped a 0:24:41.640 --> 0:24:45.040 bomb on Munich. It died a second death that day, 0:24:45.760 --> 0:24:49.360 living on only in notes and drawings and Ernst's memory. 0:24:50.320 --> 0:24:52.880 He was heartbroken by the magnitude of what the war 0:24:53.000 --> 0:24:56.880 did to his family, his country, and his career, and 0:24:57.040 --> 0:25:01.520 he died soon after in nineteen fifty two. The spinosaurus 0:25:01.600 --> 0:25:05.200 was remembered in the paleontology community as something of a legend. 0:25:06.080 --> 0:25:09.400 There were so many unanswered questions about how and where 0:25:09.400 --> 0:25:12.639 it had lived, and the perfection of the fossil was 0:25:12.840 --> 0:25:16.560 wholly unmatched. It suggested a new kind of dinosaur that 0:25:16.720 --> 0:25:20.880 scientists had never considered, a semi aquatic creatures that thrived 0:25:20.920 --> 0:25:24.359 both on land and in the water. A fully constructed 0:25:24.400 --> 0:25:28.320 spinosaurus had never been discovered before, and there were questions 0:25:28.320 --> 0:25:32.040 as to whether another one ever would. For about another century, 0:25:32.320 --> 0:25:36.920 the spinosaurus drifted into oblivion. That is, of course, until 0:25:36.960 --> 0:25:39.800 a young doctoral student stepped onto the scene. In two 0:25:39.800 --> 0:25:43.840 thousand and eight. Nazarre Ibrahim was conducting research on the 0:25:43.880 --> 0:25:46.960 border of Morocco and Algeria when he met a local 0:25:46.960 --> 0:25:50.399 Bedouin fossil hunter. Nazar took a close look at the 0:25:50.400 --> 0:25:53.840 specimens he was offered and cataloged the findings in his memory. 0:25:54.760 --> 0:25:56.840 It was a year later when he was shown a 0:25:56.880 --> 0:26:00.680 newly discovered partial skeleton of a potential spinosaurus. Then he 0:26:00.760 --> 0:26:05.080 noticed something some distinct purple and yellow sediment he recognized 0:26:05.119 --> 0:26:08.080 from the year before. He was suddenly struck by the 0:26:08.119 --> 0:26:11.359 idea that he might have accidentally run into two halves 0:26:11.440 --> 0:26:15.080 of a whole dinosaurs. So he went back to Morocco, 0:26:15.480 --> 0:26:18.880 hoping to find his Bedouin friend, but with no cell 0:26:18.920 --> 0:26:22.520 phone number or email address. He hoped for good luck. 0:26:23.680 --> 0:26:26.239 For days, he looked for him, asking all around and 0:26:26.320 --> 0:26:30.359 searching the streets. It all seemed fruitless, until one day 0:26:30.560 --> 0:26:33.520 he was at a cafe and the very same man 0:26:33.600 --> 0:26:37.600 walked by. Nazarre jumped up and chased him down and 0:26:37.720 --> 0:26:39.520 convinced him to bring him to the spot where the 0:26:39.520 --> 0:26:42.920 bones he had initially seen were dug up from. He 0:26:43.040 --> 0:26:46.960 got his wish, and here began the next stage of 0:26:47.080 --> 0:26:51.439 Nazar's life work and that of the Spinosaurus. With new 0:26:51.560 --> 0:26:55.200 science and technology, Nazar has been hard at work putting 0:26:55.200 --> 0:26:59.080 together the life story of the spinosaurus and picking up 0:26:59.119 --> 0:27:03.000 where Ernst left off. We may never know the whole 0:27:03.040 --> 0:27:06.879 truth as to how these creatures lived and died, but 0:27:07.240 --> 0:27:10.119