The Bone Wars

In nature, the males of the species are often in conflict over control of resources, food, reproduction, survival. Sometimes the fight is physical, but more often, it's a show, posturing, roaring, the kinds of displays of strength and power meant to intimidate a rival and send them packing. And human animals do it too.

And once upon a time, there were two human males who puffed themselves up real big, who roared their loudest roars and schemed their most terrible schemes. They lied and tricked and undermined each other every chance they got. They weren't warriors or soldiers. They weren't kings or conquerors. They were a couple of paleontologists, and each was hell bent on being the world's authority on dinosaurs.

But all that bro-on-bro cerebral violence led to mistakes, embarrassing mistakes. And thanks to these two, we know a lot about the dinosaurs. And also, thanks to these two, with their giant egos and petty rages, there are things we may never know. Welcome to a true tale of the Wild West, the Bone Wars. We've got a small beam of light against me here.

Oh. Oh. What? Oh. Yeah. Aaaaaaaaah. What is going on? What is going on? What? Ha ha ha! True weird stuff. Dinosaurs had dominion over this planet for about 160 million years. Compare that to our puny 2.5 million years of running the show. Their reign was 64 times longer than ours, so far, and if not for a wayward asteroid six miles wide slamming into Earth 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs might still rule this place.

Because you've grown up in a world where dinosaurs were not only a scientific fact, but also beloved icons in pop culture, you may not realize how new our knowledge of dinos is. We discovered them less than 200 years ago. It was only 100 years ago that an explorer named Roy Chapman Andrews found the first nest of dinosaur eggs in the Mongolian desert.

Before that, we didn't even know where dinosaur babies came from. The 1970s saw the discovery of 50 new dinosaur species. The 1970s, as in when people were seeing Star Wars for the first time in a movie theater? And it wasn't until 1980, when the now famous Alvarez paper was published, that we even figured out what happened to the dinosaurs.

In the 150 plus years since the first fossils were discovered, one outlandish theory after the next was suggested to account for the abrupt and mysterious demise of these animals that once dominated Earth's land, seas, and skies. We're absolute newbies when it comes to dinosaurs. I mean, 1980? That's the year we figured out what killed off the dinosaurs?

That's the very same year we made Blondie's Call Me the top selling single in America brain melt. The first person to discover a fossilized dinosaur bone had no clue what he was looking at. The word dinosaur wasn't even invented yet, and it wouldn't be for another 165 years. That first discovery was made in 1677 by a man named Robert Plot.

He was given a fossil that had been unearthed in Cornwell in England. It looked like a femur bone, but it was so enormous that Plot first speculated it must surely have come from an elephant, maybe one brought to Britain during the ancient era of the Roman invasion. But then he laid eyes on a real living elephant in Oxford and immediately knew that whatever his find was, it couldn't possibly be an elephant bone and not a horse or an ox either.

After much thought, Plot settled on the theory that the fossil must be that of the femur bone of a giant human being. Wait, this man did not seriously think he found the leg bone of a giant human. Yeah, he did. And that wasn't as crazy a guess as you might think, because nearly every human culture on Earth shares folklore, legends, and myths centered on ancient races of giants.

You'll find multiple references to giants in the Bible, like in Genesis chapter 6, verse 4. There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. And how about in Deuteronomy chapter 3, verse 11?

Now, I know that sounded like a mouthful, but there's some disagreement as to the exact the New English Bible's math, which decided that King Og's bed was 14 feet long. That's more than twice the length of a California king-size mattress. So yeah, King Og was a big man. Stories of giants echo throughout Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology.

Japan, China, India, they all have tales of mythical giants. And the Americas have their own legends of giants, from Patagonia to Mexico to the Great Plains. Many Native American tribes have passed down tales of a race of proud, warlike white giants that once dominated the land, only to be wiped out by the Great Spirit for the crimes of abandoning justice and mercy.

No wonder Robert Plot thought he was dealing with a relic from a vanished race of colossally large humans. It took another 138 years for another set of bones to be found in England. Bones that turned out to be from the same species as Robert Plot's so-called giant. And a few years after that, William Buckland, the very first professor of geology at Oxford University, declared the bones were not those of a giant person, but of a now extinct carnivorous lizard.

He called the creature a megalosaurus. 18 years later, Sir Richard Owen, who went on to establish the Natural History Museum of London, took a look at Plot's find and Buckland's megalosaurus and some others, and decided that these were the remains of creatures he called dinosauria, which means terrible lizard. And that's when the word dinosaur entered our vocabulary.

A trippy thing to think about, though, is how clueless we've been about the existence of dinosaurs for pretty much most of human history. Think about all of the historical figures who were born and lived and died with no knowledge whatsoever about dinosaurs. Shakespeare, Napoleon, Henry VIII, Aristotle, Cleopatra, George Washington.

Not one of them knew that there was any such thing as a Tyrannosaurus rex or a Triceratops or a pterodactyl, that screeching monster with its 35 foot wingspan and hooked razor claws. Doesn't this all give you the deep time willies? For us modern humans, dinosaurs are as ubiquitous as dogs. You can buy dinosaur bed sheets, dino shaped toys for kids and pets, frozen chicken nuggets molded into crunchy little dinosaurs.

Wayfair sells an end table shaped like a T-Rex hoisting a tray. There's a company called Tasco that will hook you up with a dinosaur toilet paper holder. And believe it or not, Alibaba.com offers an array of adult novelty items that let you bring the old thunder lizards into the bedroom. Not anyone does that with a straight face.

I can't even begin to guess. And if you're a super rich movie star like Nicolas Cage or Russell Crowe or Leonardo DiCaprio, you can even buy the real thing. Dinosaur skeletons and skulls. Because nothing says rich guy man cave like the complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Edward Junker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh were friends and colleagues.

Cope, a member of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Marsh was a Yale man who in his lifetime named 86 new species of dinosaurs, outpacing his buddy Cope, who named only 56 species. They were in serious competition. But the world is vast and deep time is, oh, deep.

And the earth is bursting with fossil evidence of the past. You'd think there'd be enough for a couple of dudes to divvy it up in the name of human knowledge and all that blah, blah, blah. But you'd be wrong. The whole world and millions of years worth of evidence waiting to be unearthed wasn't enough for Cope and Marsh.

It's mine, said one. No, mine, shouted the other. Like two toddlers battling over a single toy. These two grown men, eminent academics, entered into a feud that spanned 25 years. There were accusations of incompetence, of spying, of plagiarism. There were mortifying mistakes made, like valuable, even priceless fossil artifacts were destroyed out of sheer spite.

And if you've ever wondered why we don't call the brontosaurus brontosaurus anymore, you're about to find out. And it is awkward. This epic feud that spanned a quarter century in the breadth of the United States began as many unfortunate things do in a pit in New Jersey. Cope was supervising a dig there in 1868, and he invited his pal Marsh to come have a look.

The dig site in South Jersey was at what's called a marl pit. The land had once been submerged underwater for millions of years, and it was rich in marine fossils like ancient crocodiles and sea turtles. And there were also bits and pieces of dinosaur bones in there, too. This was a time when any and every fossil pulled from the ground might just be the greatest discovery ever made.

The whole field was so new and so thrilling. Now, Cope and Marsh didn't have to break a sweat with shovels and pickaxes. They had people for that. Cope's New Jersey dig was well funded, and the two could park themselves in camp chairs while paid laborers did all the literal dirty work. They passed the time by slapping each other on the back and probably saying stuff like by Jove and my good man and whatnot.

And that is when Marsh most likely came up with his idea. It was actually a pretty good idea, just totally unethical and not at all how a gentleman and a scholar should behave. Marsh secretly approached Cope's team of diggers and offered them cash to give any fossils they found to him and not to their boss. And so it was Marsh's fossil collection in New Haven that grew and not Cope's in Philadelphia.

Was Cope pissed? Does a T-Rex have tiny arms? Of course he was pissed. He was furious. And you would be, too. This is not how gentlemen of science are meant to conduct themselves. Now, clearly, the two men had very different ideas about morality and competition. And if you boil it all the way down to what it means to engage in survival of the fittest, Cope was the son of a wealthy Philadelphia family so passionate about science that he rebelled against his father and became a naturalist and soon earned himself a professor's position at Haverford College.

But Marsh came from a poor family, and though his resources didn't match Cope's, his ambition was more than equal. Plus, Marsh had a benefactor, a wealthy uncle named George Peabody. Maybe you've heard of the Peabody Museum of Natural History? Yeah, it's named for Uncle George, but it was created at the request of his nephew, O.C. Marsh.

How's that for a lucky break? This difference in the two men's origins might just explain every stupid, reckless, crazy thing that followed. Was Cope a big old snob looking down on Marsh as capable, perhaps, but hopelessly crude and no gentleman? Did Marsh consider Cope a silver spoon trust baby who'd smoothed his path with money, but it never really earned his academic success?

Did it all come down to that kind of petty silliness? Depressing as it is, yeah, maybe. Maybe that's all it ever really was. Just a couple of threatened males squaring off in the clearing to test whose bellow was louder and whose bite was more deadly. Boys and their toys. Once Cope learned of Marsh's underhanded tactics in New Jersey, a fight was on.

It wasn't a case of pistols at dawn or anything melodramatic like that. The early skirmishes between Cope and Marsh were fought in academic journals. In 1869, Cope received a fossil specimen of a plesiosaur. This is a giant marine reptile, kind of a distant relative of the dinosaur. The creature appeared to have a long, slender tail.

So Cope named it a glasmosaurus platerus, which translates to ribbon lizard with flattened tail. And I know you're on the edge of your seat. What is Marsh's next play as a villain? Here it is. Marsh popped by Cope's lab and office at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philly, and he took a good long look at the 45 foot long assembled skeleton of the plesiosaur.

And then he announced that Cope had placed the animal's head on the wrong end of its body. And yes, indeed, Cope had perched the plesiosaur skull on the very tip of the tail instead of the neck. Oops. Cope was utterly humiliated, so much so that he set out to purchase every single copy of the journal referencing the incorrectly assembled skeleton.

You can guess how well that succeeded. Marsh realized immediately that the relationship between the two men would not recover. He later wrote, quote, when I informed Professor Cope of it, his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered. And he has since been my bitter enemy. Now, maybe you're like me and you're thinking, why did this have to go so nuclear?

Mistakes happen. And we're talking about animals that have been extinct for millions of years. No living person has any idea what such a beast might look like. So how about you cut yourself a little break and chalk it up to the scientific process? Nope, not happening. Not for Cope and not for Marsh. Like a pair of bull elk and rut with only one available mating site, they were now set on a course to tear each other apart.

Cope headed west for what Marsh considered his own private fossil hunting grounds, Kansas and Wyoming. But before we follow, let's pause and enjoy a delicious scoop of sweet, yummy karma. Remember how embarrassed poor Cope was when Marsh pointed out that he'd gotten the plesiosaur all wrong, placing its head on the tip of its tail instead of its neck?

Well, kids, strap in. In 1879, Marsh made a dazzling discovery. The fossil remains of an enormous plant eater. He carefully assembled the animal skeleton and dubbed it Brontosaurus. You know, everyone's favorite friendly green dino. The one that became the iconic logo for Sinclair gas stations. The star of one of the first animated films ever made, 1914's Gertie the Dinosaur.

Problem was, in his haste to name the animal and get credit for it, Marsh put the wrong skull on the skeleton. It took science a hot minute to catch the mistake, as in not until 1978. And that's when the Brontosaurus, as we knew it, got its new scientifically correct name, Apatosaurus. And that's why you have fights with small children when you call something a Brontosaurus and they're like, no, it's an Apatosaurus.

There's still a debate simmering today, though, over whether or not we owe the Brontosaurus a great big apology and the return of its good name. And it could happen. Who knows? Maybe you'll be lucky and live long enough to see it. And maybe someday you'll have a four-year-old with sticky hands and a Lego snort on her hair, give you a little condescending lecture on which dinosaur is which and what their correct names are.

One can hope, right? Anywho, back now to the vast, forbidding, desolate bone fields of the American West. In the mid-1800s, it seems like you couldn't take a step without tripping over the fossilized remains of one prehistoric monster after another. Southwestern Wyoming, in particular, turned out to be a near-bottomless treasure trove of fossil finds.

Paleontologists, bone hunters and adventurers made the journey west, unearthing breathtaking find after find. So rich was the fossil hunting that newspapers in the state lamented the near-constant exodus of railroad cars packed full of dinosaur bones that were forever heading east. Will any of Wyoming's dinosaurs be left for Wyoming, they implored?

A right slam in the thick of it? Copenmarsh. The territory was the Bridger Basin in Wyoming. Named like the Bridger Formation and the Bridger-Teton National Forest for explorer and trader Jim Bridger, the region was a paleontologist's dream of layer upon layer of sedimentary beds. The fossils found in the Bridger Basin told the story not only of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but of the evolutionary rise of the mammals that And we have a trapper named Uncle Jack Robertson to thank for kicking off this new era in science and discovery.

Because about a decade before Copenmarsh showed up, Uncle Jack plucked from the ground something he thought was the skull of a petrified grizzly bear. Other explorers got wind of that and soon arrived and began collecting and reporting about their own fossil finds. But the bitch slapping between Marsh and Cope all began before a single shovel was hoisted.

Marsh made good use of his connections, not only persuading the U.S. military to provide protection to his team, but to torment the bejeebers out of Cope. So when Cope petitioned the military at Fort Bridger to aid him by providing accommodations or assistance, Marsh made sure that the answer was a firm no. Cope, the patrician son of a prominent Philadelphia family, was forced to make his bed in the Fort's hay yard, and you know he had some hard feelings about that.

Marsh also befriended one William F. Cody, hiring him as guide for his first Wyoming expedition in 1870. But you know him better as Buffalo Bill Cody, and that friendship endured for all of Buffalo Bill's life. Having the legendary scout, soldier, gunslinger, and wilderness icon as a guide saved Marsh time, time he could better spend digging for bones.

So it's 1872, and both Marsh and Cope are supervising dig sites in the Bridger Basin. The two digs were close enough to be visible to the other, and reports say that Cope spent hours every day at his telescope watching Marsh's crew, which gave Marsh an idea. His diggers carefully constructed a skull, gluing together bits and pieces and fragments from dozens of other finds until they had assembled a Frankenstein of a fossil, and then under cover of darkness, they buried their creation.

The next day dawned, and with the sunrise right on schedule was Cope at his telescope. Marsh's diggers then proceeded to find their Franken fossil, making a huge dramatic show of unearthing such a major discovery. Cope was fooled. He waited till after dark, and then he crept to Marsh's dig site, and he stole the skull.

And Marsh let him do it because he very correctly guessed what Cope's next big move would Publishing a paper about the significance of his latest find in the Bridger Basin. Got him! And now the feud raged at whole new levels of insanity. Gone was any pretense of mutual professional respect, and although both men and others were making incredible discoveries of both prehistoric reptiles and mammals in the Great Western Bone Beds, they were often the same discoveries.

In those heady days before the phone was invented, the dino hunters would zip quickly word of telegrams back east, claiming credit for a find, and then follow that up later with more detailed reports. And in the fossil hunting game, it wasn't just the find that mattered. It was the naming rights, and here Marsh had the edge.

His naming system was scientifically valid, and Cope's was not. So frustrated, Cope proposed an entirely new classification method for what he called the Eocene mammal fossils. Eocene refers to the geological epoch that lasted from 56 to about 34 million years ago. Cope's ideas were shot down. And to add just a little more gasoline to that fire, Marsh then loudly insisted that all of Cope's names for every specimen of extinct plant-eating hoofed mammal was wrong.

What a science, he slapped in the face. Both men were determined to rack up the biggest piles of bones for themselves, all in territory that was wild, desolate, unexplored, and riddled with dangers. Yet, they were just fixated on each other. Marsh hired spies to track Cope's findings. Cope raced to publish everything he dug up.

And to be certain that his work would be published, Cope went and bought the American Naturalist Journal. Got him. In one year alone, Cope published 76 academic papers. I mean, his lifetime total was 1,400. And whatever else, you really do have to salute the man for being one of the most prolific writers in the history of American science.

All of which drove Marsh right out of his mind. Now, this all might seem quaint, a little drawing room shenanigans of a couple of stuffy professors. Except, you know, for the sabotage and the dynamite and the destruction that followed. Their expeditions to Como Bluff in Wyoming became notorious for the skullduggery they practiced there.

Marsh was in the habit of paying informants to quietly bring him and only him news of promising fossil finds. Como Bluff, it was whispered, was a land of wonders. The kinds of wonders you can find represented today in toy boxes everywhere. Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and the tragically misunderstood Brontosaurus. Marsh, so paranoid of being bested by Cope, gave all his informants code names and then paid them by check.

Checks made out to those code names. Checks that no bank would cash. The informants were so angry to be stiffed on their pay, one of them got revenge on Marsh by taking that knowledge and going to work for Cope. There was one occasion when Cope showed up at Como Bluff and accused Marsh not only of trespassing, but of stealing his fossils.

And Marsh responded to that insult by ordering that the dinosaur pits be blown with dynamite. Better to destroy the fossils than allow them to fall into Cope's hands. Cope had his own wily ways. He once managed to divert an entire trainload of Marsh's fossils to Philadelphia. Talk about being a bone bandit. Marsh, meanwhile, would try other, more subtle kinds of sabotage.

He was known to have fossils from completely different eras sprinkled in and hidden in Cope's dig sites, all in the hopes of confusing and confounding the man. And if this sounds like some acid trip mashup of the animated classic, The Land Before Time and the CBS sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, yeah, agreed. I warned you it was crazy.

And you want to hear something else crazy? The very different ways the two men dealt with what was then called the Indian problem. Listen, Marsh cared only for the collecting of fossils. Everything else was just noise and hassle to be dealt with. He relied on the military to protect his team. He counted on Buffalo Bill Cody to navigate the safest path, and he used every bit of his considerable charm and politicking to save himself from attack.

He made friends with Chief Red Cloud, a relationship that, like his friendship with Buffalo Bill Cody, somehow endured. Marsh promised Chief Red Cloud that in exchange for safe passage, he, Marsh, would personally intercede with the great father on behalf of the Indians. Excuse me, but did Marsh just promise to have a private work with God?

He did. And Chief Red Cloud, who many years later journeyed to New Haven, Connecticut, to visit Marsh, believed him and called him the best white man I ever saw. Cope, meanwhile, did not have the connections or the political savvy Marsh did. But Cope had his own way of brokering safe passage with the tribes. He would entertain them by taking out his false teeth.

The teeth would come out to gasps of wonder, and then an equally amazing display. The teeth would go back in. How spectacular! I know, right? You have to laugh. The people, the Indians had never before seen such a thing. A man who could painlessly remove his own teeth at will and then just put them back like it never happened.

Such wonders were truly unimaginable. Cope was a fun guy. He had an instinct for people. Unlike his rival, Marsh, whose own acquaintances called him the great dismal swamp behind his back. Now, sometimes in life, charm will carry you right across the finish line, and sometimes it won't. In this case, great dismal swamp or not, Marsh skillfully leveraged his connections and got himself appointed the chief vertebrate paleontologist for the brand new U.S. Geological Survey.

Sweet! Meanwhile, Cope, who managed to blow right through his inheritance, a string of bad investments on played out silver mines cost him his fortune, also lost his government research funding. And whether justified or not, he blamed Marsh. On June 2nd, 1890, Cope went for Marsh's throat. He handed years worth of records and accounts documenting Marsh's various improprieties to the New York Herald.

He told the paper that Marsh was incompetent and worse, guilty of plagiarism. Then Cope attacked the U.S. Geological Survey itself, calling it, quote, a gigantic politico-scientific monopoly run on machine politic methods. Ouch! Whatever Marsh thought of Cope, whatever you think of Cope, Mr. He puts his false teeth in.

He takes his false teeth out. He puts his false teeth in and shakes them all about. Congress listened to what Cope had to say. And then Congress cut off all funding to the U.S. Geological Survey for vertebrate paleontology. Marsh lost his job, his power, and nearly every penny of his income. And then, just to, you know, kick a dude while he's down, the Smithsonian demanded that Marsh surrender a huge chunk of his own personal collection of fossils, which, after all, had been collected on the government's dime.

Got him! The thing about a feud like this one, though, is that the flames were fed not with timber or coal, but with the very lives of Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh. That's the tragedy and the truth that neither man was willing or maybe able to see. Cope was impoverished, desperate for funds, and unable to find a buyer to meet the price he was asking for his entire fossil collection, something he'd spent 20 years amassing.

He was finally able to cut a deal with the American Museum of Natural History for a for the relatively small sum of $32,000. And then, in 1897, Cope fell ill and he died. He was only 56 years old. His rival, Marsh, didn't fare much better. He died just two years later at the age of 67. Pneumonia took him, and when he drew his last breath in this world, he had only $186 in the bank.

The Smithsonian had clawed back, wait for it, 80 tons of fossils from his personal collection. 80 tons! But that was only the tip of Marsh's prehistoric iceberg. He left the rest to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. The feud between Cope and Marsh ate up their lives, ruined their reputations, and maybe hastened their deaths.

But the bones they fought so fiercely to collect became the very foundation for paleontology in America. Cope left behind more than 13,000 specimens, Marsh managed to fill museums, and Charles Darwin himself praised the collection, saying that the two scientists had unearthed, quote, the best support of the theory of evolution, end quote.

It's hard not to wonder, though, at how much further along our knowledge might be of prehistoric life had the two worked together, had they not sabotaged and even blown to smithereens fossils that may have unlocked extraordinary mysteries about the life cycle of this watery globe we call home. But you know how it goes, two huge egos and all that.

What's that cliche line that we think is in every cowboy movie? This here town ain't big enough for the both of us. Upon his death in 1897, Cope donated his brain to the Anthropomorphic Institute and his skeleton to the Wistar Institute. A fitting gesture, right, from a man who'd spent his life in the study of bones. Newspaper accounts report that his brain seemed on the whole to be absolutely no different from that of any other human.

And the Natrona County Tribune and Cope's old Wyoming hunting grounds had this to say about his donated skeleton. The disjointed bones of the great scholar lie in a rough box in the basement where they have remained untouched since the day of which he saw the completion of the process of First, maceration, yikes. The mental picture of Cope's body gently stewing away until nothing was left but bones is a little bit ghastly to imagine.

But even worse, even more of a mortality kick in the teeth is this realization, the one that Cope was mercifully spared. Despite the man's enormous contributions to science, his bones were of no value at all. The skeleton, as it turned out, had less to offer science than even the smallest fossilized fragment he'd ever pulled from the soil.

And there's a lesson here for all of us. Live your life as best you can. Try to be a person who makes other people's lives a little bit easier. Don't take anything for granted, including the awesome fact of dinosaurs, because that's pretty new information. We're super lucky to be alive now to know it. Our conflicts are mostly petty.

Our bones are just bones. Throwing your life away on a feud is a gravely stupid idea. Unless you're a pair of brilliant scientists like Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh and your silly, stupid feud just happened to give humanity the dinosaurs. The feud was still really stupid, but I guess it wasn't pointless. And that's got to be some comfort, right?

Next time on True Weird Stuff, he was the man who wrote the U.S. Constitution. He fought for religious freedoms. He was a friend to many and a lover of women and a good time. But you put one whale bone in your penis and suddenly history forgets you completely. The Forgotten Founding Father on the next True Weird Stuff.

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