The Bone Wars, Part 2

In Part 2 of this podcast, we examine the tactics rival paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh used in their battle to achieve preeminence. Ultimately, the men took their war to D.C. and the press. In the end, did either win?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
to bling a truck reporting and I and we're continuing
on here with our discussion of the Bone Wars, which
are also sometimes known as the Dinosaur Wars or the

(00:22):
Great Dinosaur Feud. And it's the story of an intense
scientific rivalry between two really talented nineteenth century paleontologists, Edward
Drinker Cope and off Neil Charles Marsh. And they entered
the field at a time when very few dinosaur species
were known and competed defined fossils, name the species that

(00:42):
those fossils belonged to, and to be the first to
publish their findings. And in part one of this episode,
we learned a little bit about Cope and Marsh's backgrounds
and how they got to be paleontologists because they took
very different paths, as we'll get into a little bit
more later. And we also talked about how they started
out as friends, or at least as friendly colleagues or acquaintances.

(01:05):
I don't know if even their early friendships wud Yeah,
I wouldn't categorize that as a friendship. People do friendly. Yes,
they were friendly, and uh, we also talked about what
exactly it was that caused this enormous riff to form
between them. Yeah, and when we left them off, Cope
and Marsh had just started to look west in search

(01:26):
of fossils. In this episode, though, we're going to be
talking a bit about what they found out west and
these sometimes shady tactics that they employed to be the
first to get credit for their discoveries. We're also going
to take a look at the more official stage on
which their battle played out and where it got truly
truly nasty. But first we want to take a closer

(01:47):
look at who these guys were, because it might help
provide at least a little more insight as to why
they were destined to clash in the first place, the
clash of the dinosaur hunters. Okay, so we've already talked
about the differences between Cope and Marsha's socio economic backgrounds
and their educational training, which is kind of where it

(02:08):
all started. And if you'll recall, Marsh was poor raised
on a farm until his uncle, George Peabody stepped in
with the financial support that Marsh needed to go to
prep school. And then onto Yale. And it's Peabody's generous
donation at Marsha's request that also led to the creation
of a Museum of Natural Sciences at Yale, which was

(02:29):
a move that then helped secure Marsha professorship there and
it created a great resource for him while he was
hunting for fossils. Yeah, he had the Yale in its corner.
But all of Peabody's support did unfortunately come with a catch.
According to an article by James Pannic an American Heritage,
it turned out that Uncle George had a certain stipulation

(02:50):
for anyone named in his will, and that stipulation involved marriage.
When he was twenty five and a freshman at Yale,
marsh received eaved a letter from his aunt indicating this stipulation,
and it read quote, if any of his nephews should
in any way conduct himself as to disgrace themselves and

(03:10):
him or now mine this, should any of them form
a marriage connection or even get engaged before they had
the means of supporting a family, they should never have
a cent of his money. He desired me to communicate
this to all his nephews. Yeah, and apparently there was
one other nephew who had gotten cut out of the

(03:31):
will for marrying too soon, so Peabody was serious about
put to the test. By the time March was financially independent,
he was well into his thirties, so Pennett kind of
suggests maybe he was too set in his ways to
marry at that point, or you know, just wasn't inclined
to do so, or just that he had this strange
break on his life until he could be financially independent.

(03:54):
He had some other friendly sort of issues though, Yeah,
just basically the issue was he didn't have many friends.
According to an article by Tom Huntington in American History,
people found Marsh to be quote autocratic and petty and
accused him of taking credit for the work of his
assistance and for falling behind on paying his employees, never

(04:16):
a good move. At one of his clubs, they apparently
nicknamed him quote the Great dismal Swamp. That's a bad sign.
He doesn't do well with the nicknames. No, she really doesn't,
except for the bone wars that one is. It's a
pretty great nickname for his rivalry. Cope, on the other hand,
came from a very different kind of background, which we

(04:37):
discussed on the on the last podcast. It was a
more privileged beginning, if you remember in the last episode.
Though he didn't have a lot of formal education. He
was self taught and he was a part of this
whole gentleman's world of natural science that existed in the
nineteenth century. Deblina and I were talking about it earlier,
how it just fascinates us that gentleman would choose to

(05:00):
to science in some form, and there's something very romantic
about it. I mean, we both talked about how it's
just there's something very ideal. A little troubling too, because
it ends up with you end up with personal disputes
like this. But um Cope was considered to be very brilliant,
considered to be a prodigy, and his life was also

(05:20):
very different from marsh Is on a personal level too.
We mentioned that he was married, he had a wife,
he had a daughter named Julia. Unlike marsh to Cope
was pretty charming. The friends he had seemed to really
like him, really care for him, although they would agree
that he could kind of be arrogant sometimes he could
be quick tempered. According to Huntington's article, paleontologist William Berryman Scott,

(05:44):
who took Cope side in the war with Marsh instead
of Cope Quote, despite his greatness in some measure, indeed
because of it, he had some unfortunate personal peculiarities. Was
pugnacious and quarrelsome and made many enemies, so many enemies,
many friends, no friends on the other side, kind of
unusual guys. So when we last left off of our story,

(06:07):
Cope had kind of broken the mold of those gentlemen
naturalists that we were describing. They usually waited for things
to be sent to them to study. They didn't actually
go out on these great expeditions. They limit their study
to the comfort of their own home exactly. And Cope,
like Marsh, went out to hunt fossils, but he had

(06:28):
a different way of traveling from Marsh. We mentioned how
Marsh went out with this entourage and had guides in
a military escort. Cope did not have a resource like
Yale behind him, so he didn't have all these graduate
assistants to come with him, so he often put together
teams for his expeditions when he got wherever he was going. Also,

(06:48):
since Cope was a Quaker, he really used a military
escort because he was a pacifist, and he pretty much
refused to carry a revolver, which a lot of people
thought was crazy because of the threat of hostile Native
American tribes out west, among other things. Yeah, Bandit Taiwan,
then all sorts of of risks he might come across,
not to mention just the wildlife Pentually, um Cope did

(07:12):
things his way, though, and he was very tough about it.
Panic relates how Cope would read the Bible every night,
even when he was out in the field, and if
others in his camp would would laugh at him, he'd
sort of stare them down until they would just uh
straightened up, you know, stop laughing, stop making fun of him.
Cope and Marsh did both have successes in the field

(07:34):
that we've kind of described the way they carried about
their expeditions, but they did both have successes though Marsh,
of course, with his official Yale connection and his Peabody
inheritance at his disposal, did have more resources to throw
at the situation. However, both to some extent, Cope especially
or reliant on being associated with one of several geological

(07:57):
surveys of the West that were going on at the time.
It was kind of an official backing almost Yeah. Being
involved with these surveys provided economic support for their work
and a vehicle for publishing their findings, and this becomes
important later in our story as well. So just kind
of remember that. We talked a little in the last
podcast also about how Marsh and Cope started going at

(08:18):
each other mostly by way of letters after their initial
expeditions out west, when they started really competing in a
sense for fossil finds out there. But they really launched
into full scale warfare in eighteen seventy seven when Arthur Lakes,
who was a mining teacher, wrote to Marsh saying that
he discovered some fossils near Morris in Colorado. Now Marsh

(08:40):
didn't reply, so Lakes said, well, okay, I want to
do something with these, so he sent some samples to Cope.
When Marsh heard that, though he sent Lakes some cash
to win him over, he was like, well, I don't
want Cope to get these. After that, after getting that cash,
Lakes asked Cope to please send back his samples so
that he could work with the Marsh And according to

(09:01):
Huntington's part of what Marsh found among Lake's initial find
were the remains the first remains of the Stegosaurus around
the time. The same time, too, another teacher named O. W.
Lucas also found some fossils in Colorado. He contacted Cope
first about it, and Cope jumped at the chance to
to check out the fossils. Overall, according to Huntington's, Cope's

(09:25):
Colorado finds actually turned out to be better than marshes
because they were bigger and they could be taken out
of the surrounding rock without breaking them. Marsh, of course,
so did come out on top in other situations. In
the summer of eighteen seventy seven, for example, two railway
workers in Como, Wyoming named William Reid and W. E.

(09:46):
Carlin contacted Marsh about some fossils that they had discovered
as a site known as Como Bluff, and marshal course
and his bone collectors out there. They ended up gathering
thirty tons of fossils from the Jurassic Age and shipped
all the stuff back to Marsh at Yale. And it
was very high quality, you know, large bones. It was
well preserved. The result of of Marcia's investigation of this

(10:10):
fine too, really speaks to how high quality it was.
He discovered several new species and named um the Allosaurus,
the Diplodocus, the Camptosaurus, all from those Como bluff fine
and also notably he named the Brontosaurus out of those fines,
one of the world's best known dinosaurs, and Sara doutis

(10:32):
favorite dinosaur. I should mention interesting, though, that the naming
of Brontosaurus is actually considered one of Marcia's biggest mistakes.
After he died, scientists realized that the creature Marcia named
Brontosaurus was just another example of a dinosaur Marsh had
already named the Patosaurus, so the designation Brontosaurus was taken

(10:54):
away obviously, though that's kind of an enduring yes. So
it's probably clear by now that Cope and Marsh often
weren't the ones actually digging in the ground, collecting fossils,
or even supervising digs themselves, Hence all the talk of
sending bones back east to them. They accomplished a lot
of what they did through the help of bone collectors.

(11:16):
Cope and Marsh would occasionally visit the dig sites, but
the fossil collectors were sort of the foot soldiers in
this battle that they were waging against each other. Too.
There really was a lot of taking sides. Reid took
Marsh's side and became a major collector for him. Well,
Carlin switched over to Cope side, Lucas remained on Cope side,

(11:37):
while Lakes stuck with Marsh. I was surprised by Lucas,
I think, since he sort of got slighted at the
beginning by Marsh. But I guess I was okay, might
have been better. Yeah, I mean that means a lot.
It does. Occasionally though, according to Huntington, again, the two
peontologists would try to woo each other's collectors away from

(11:59):
the other. Um. I don't know if they were attempting
them with better publication of the works or money all
the time. But that wasn't the most extreme of the
tactics used in this war. I mean that already sounds
a little bit dicey. But they also spied on each other.
Marsh at least would even communicate in code with his
collectors to try to keep Cope from figuring out what

(12:21):
he was up to, what his bone collectors were up to.
They referred to Cope as Jones in this Sneaky correspondence,
and one of Marsha's guys was so paranoid about Cope
spying on him that when a man showed up at
their camp one day in eighteen seventy eight, he asked
for a handwriting sample in case it was Cope in disguise.

(12:42):
He was so suspicious. So I guess they were right
to worry, though, because Cope really did charm his way
into one of Marsha's camps in eighteen seventy nine, probably
to woo some team members over to his side, or
just to steal information outright. But the funny thing was
Marsha's men really liked Cope. According to Huntington's article, Lakes

(13:05):
later wrote of the incident that Cope quote entertained his
party by singing comic songs with a refrain at the
end like the howl of coyote, and Lakes went on
to observe quote. I must say that when I saw
of him, I liked very much. His manner is so
affable in his conversation, very agreeable. I only wish I
could feel sure he had a sound reputation for honesty.

(13:27):
Maybe not. According to an article by Renee Clary, James Wandersie,
and Amy Capernelli in Science Scope, March was said to
have planted unrelated fossils at some of Cope's dig sites
to slow down his progress too. So it's not just
invading the other guy's camp and the reputation for honesty there, well,

(13:50):
I mean that that takes it to another level. So um,
tampering with the with the science essentially, Yeah, I mean,
and that was the really shocking part of Cope and
Marks's tactics is that they just they went beyond trying
to harm and hinder each other in their efforts. They
actually may have harmed the field itself from maybe even
hindered scientific progress in some cases. For example, if March's

(14:13):
guy read unearthed more bones than he could use, he
smashed them so that Carlin couldn't get to them. Marsh
is also said to have ordered that certain sites be
blown up with dynamite to keep Cope from getting to
the fossils, although, according to a two thousand eight article
by gen Viev Jiski, at least when it comes to

(14:34):
one of the sites that was supposedly blown up, Quary ten,
which is in Morris Some, Colorado, those allegations are false.
Some researchers found Quarry ten in two thousand two using
Lakes's field notes and determined that Lakes probably just shoved
some dirt in there and then said he dynamited it
to discourage the competition from checking it out. The way

(14:56):
I sort of read that though, is maybe he had
his history of dynamite things already established. Though if people
were going to believe that could be well. It may
have been out west that some of the more colorful
war tactics were used by these two. As we hinted
in the previous episode, the really decisive battleground for the
Bone Wars turned out to be Washington, d c. And

(15:16):
this is where Marsh really pulled ahead, because even though
he wasn't winning any popularity contests, he was much savvier
when it came to politics than Cope. Was. The first
development that really set the ball rolling for Marsh had
to do with those surveys out west that we talked
about earlier in the late eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties
or so, Congress, upon the advice of the National Academy

(15:38):
of Sciences, which by the way, was an organization which
Marsh had become president of, decided to do away with
all of the existing competing geological surveys and create just
one national geological survey to replace them. They decided to
call it the United States Geological Survey, and the former

(15:59):
head of one of the defunct surveys Marsh had been
affiliated with, was named as the director. Uh So, soon
Marsh became the official vertebrate paleontologist of the United States
Geological Survey. Not too surprising there, if if he's the
head of the National Academy of Sciences already, he knows
the new head of the Geological Survey. Uh. I mean,

(16:22):
he was certainly at this point winning the feud in
terms of political clout in the science world, in terms
of how his career was progressing. When Cope lost that
government support, it really devastated his research too, and his
publication efforts. He just didn't have any funding anymore, and
his personal wealth, which he had also put toward his

(16:44):
efforts in paleontology over all these years, was starting to
dry up. Cope, looking for a get rich quick sort
of scheme, tried to make up for it by investing
in a silver mine in New Mexico, but that turned
out to be a bust. He lost everything, and uh
it really seemed at this point where that there was
a clear winner and loser in this feud, but that

(17:07):
didn't seem to be enough for Marsh. He took things
a step further and tried to have Cope's fossils confiscated,
claiming that they had been collected with government funds. Cope
completely denied this. He said that he had used his
own money to collect the fossils. And then he decided
to fight back against Marsh and the only way that
he could at that point, and that was through the press.

(17:30):
He approached a writer for the New York Herald and
told that writer basically every bad thing that he had
ever thought or heard about Marsh, and this kicked off
a very public, very brutal battle of words between Cope
and Marsh that was splashed all over the pages of
the New York Herald between January twelfth, eighteen eighty in
January eighteen eighty under headlines like scientists wage bitter warfare.

(17:54):
And they went way back in their relationship too. They
weren't just considering the last few years as their at
their ammo um. They went back to the beginning. According
to hunting Kin's article, Cope said things like Marsh was quote,
unable to properly classify and name the fossils his explorers secured.
It's pretty damning. Uh. He said that Marsh took credit

(18:17):
for his assistance work, and he also accused Marsh and
the U S Geological Survey of corruption and Mithews of
government funds, which is pretty key here. For his part,
Marsh brought up how Cope rushed to get his discoveries
into print, you know, before they were ready, often making
errors in the process. He also brought up that embarrassing

(18:38):
mistake with the elasmosaur, among other things. We discussed that
in the in the last podcast, flipping the head and
tail of the dinosaur and then having Marsh be the
one to point it out. This newspaper feud didn't last long,
but it was really damaging to both of their reputation,
so nobody won. In this instance, Cope struggled to find

(18:59):
a buyer for his massive fossil collection because he needed
the money. Eventually he could only sell part of it,
and then he hit the lecture circuit and tried to
secure a paying position at a college. He didn't have
that backing behind him that Marsh had at Yale. I
think I saw him described in one spot as a
rogue rogue scientist or a rogue paleontologist, and now he

(19:22):
has all this bad press out too exactly, so doubly
he he just doesn't have anyone to go to at
that point. It just proved to be really tough to
find a pain position. According to Panix article. He finally
got a position though, and a small salary, at the
University of Pennsylvania in eighteen eighty nine, and he turned
out to be a pretty good teacher. But of course

(19:42):
that wasn't his life school, that's not what he had
really wanted. He died in eight of renal failure at
age fifty six according to PBS, and not right away,
but in a couple of years. Congress did investigate the
u S geological surveys use of funds and ended up
cutting their funding and completely doing away with the Department

(20:03):
of Paleontology. Marsh was forced to resign, and for the
first time he had to accept a salary from Yale.
He died of pneumonia in eighteen nine, two years after Marsh,
at the age of sixty seven. He only had a
hundred and eighty six dollars in his bank account. When
he died of all that Peabody money that had come

(20:24):
to him. His collection ended up in the Smithsonian and
at Yale, and part of Cope's collection ended up at
the American Museum of Natural History. That's like, those are
the two or the three winners in the story. I
think the places in us too. You know that we
can go see them today. Yeah, and that there's this
interesting story for us to look into. But looking at

(20:46):
this result there doesn't really seem to be like a
winner at the end. Neither of these guys seemed to
really come out on top. But of course they were
both very accomplished overall, and they both made major contributions
to science. If you stuck up some of their accomplishments
those side by side, what does it look like? We
wanted to take a look at that, So first we'll
look at the naming part of it. Well, March seemed

(21:07):
to win when it came to naming dinosaur species. He
named eighty six out of thet some odd ones that
they named. Total. Cope published war though according to Science Scope,
his record of twelve hundred publications is still unbeaten. Wow,
I mean, I guess that is not too surprising he
won that side of the battle. Um Marsh notably provided

(21:28):
evidence for the theory of evolution, to which Darwin himself
called quote the best support of the theory of evolution
at the time. Um He found thirty specimens, for example,
that allowed him to outline the evolutionary history of the horse,
and he recognized similarities of the modern bird in extinct dinosaurs. Cope,

(21:50):
on the other hand, because of his religious convictions, probably
didn't support Darwin's theory. But as science Scope points out,
he's known for Cope's rule, which is the observation that
organisms of a species tend to get larger over time
than the fossil records. So it just depends on what
you're judging them by, which one of them one. Yeah,

(22:10):
and and it certainly made me wonder too how much
they accomplished because they did have the other one they're
competing and egging him on, or whether they could have
accomplished more if they had worked in better concert together
than they did, not trying to sabotage each other's work
as much. No, but it's interesting, just another tidbit here.

(22:31):
Their competition continued a little bit even after the grave,
about a century after Cope's death, national geographic photographer Luis
Sahoyo Scott cope skull from the University of Pennsylvania. Cope
had willed his body to science, so this was available,
and he took the skull with him as he traveled
around the world interviewing paleontologists for a book, and he

(22:52):
referred to the skull as he was doing this as Eddie. Later,
he and paleontologist Robert Baker tried to have cope skull
named as the hype specimen, which means that it would
have been the standard of a species to which all
others are compared. He wanted to have it named as
a type specimen for Homo sapiens, but it turned out
that the late botanist Careless Linnaeus had already been named

(23:12):
the type specimen for Homo sapiens. So thank goodness for
Linnaeus able to to step in there with his skull
and and stop this feud from continuing after death. Yeah,
I read elsewhere that one reason that Cope will his
body to sciences that he wanted them to compare his
skull size to Marsha's after Marsh died, But Marsh didn't

(23:33):
leave any sort of instructions to have his skull studied
after the fact, so they didn't ever get to resolve
that question. I think that's for the best. Yeah, it's
better just to look at the story, look at their accomplishments,
and decide for yourself. I think who's the winner. But
I'm curious for listeners to write in and tell us

(23:54):
if they have a favorite in this war. I know
that in the War of the Currents, for example, Tesla
was the overwhelming favorite among our listeners at least, And
so I wonder, Cope or Marsh do you have a favorite? Terah,
who do you think you would have been pals with? I? Well,
I mean I don't know. Do I think the guy
who didn't have any friends? I mean, odds are You're

(24:15):
a nice person, so I could see I should have
made friends with Marsh. I don't know they I found
myself during this story kind of rooting for each of them,
and I think that for each of them, and then
thinking that they were each terrible, terrible people. So maybe
I'll pass on the Yeah, okay, you're taking your pleading
the fifth. Yeah, do you have a Do you have

(24:36):
a pick? I mean, I guess I sort of agree
with you, although I found myself sympathizing with Cope a
little bit more. And maybe it's because some of the
articles that I read were more biased in that direction.
But I think it may also have a lot to
do with the fact that, at least from what I read,
from the evidence that I saw, it seemed that Marsh
kind of did the dirtier stuff, like the dynamiting of

(24:57):
dig sites. I didn't like that at all, So that's
not cool. Maybe Cop did it too, but I didn't
read any evidence that he had. Okay, I'll stick to
the Braunosaurus. Stick with the brontosaurus. There you go, friends, Uh, well,
before we go off to too far on a dinosaur tangent.

(25:20):
So we have a very special listener meal today, wouldn't
you say, to Blina, Special and delicious, Special and delicious.
It's a bottle of wine. Yeah, it's a gift we
got in the mail. We got it from listener Dana.
And what's it called again, It's called Brushelle Vineyards Rose.
We're gonna try it out after our recording session. But um,

(25:43):
we wanted to read Dana's note too, because she had
some ideas for future podcast too. She wrote Derris to
Blina and Sarah, Greetings from Paso Robless, California. My husband
and I work in the wine industry out here, and
we just finished a very long and grueling harvest feed sin.
My husband admitted that your podcast helped him through all
the brute donkey work that harvesting tails from pits to

(26:07):
punch downs to the bottling line. So I wanted to
say thank you for providing such a welcome day version
during the most exhausting time of the year. Of course,
we do love it. She went on to say, please
accept this bottle of rose from the wine or a
work at as our humble thanks. Sorry to Bolina, it
isn't sweet, but I grew up in Atlanta, and I
guarantee it's what my mom called a quote porch founder.

(26:30):
That's while we're for for after the episode. Um. But
she She went on to say too that she figured
she would use this opportunity to say that the historic
alcohol series we did with their favorite obvious reasons, but
she really wanted us to revisit wine as a topic
at some point, and a lot of listeners have been

(26:51):
suggesting this lately. Um something else on wine. Her suggestions
in particular were the quote cunning wealthy wine barrens of
the offs child Dan dynasty or the story of why
Charlemagne's wife insisted Burgundy plant more white grapes. She went
on to say, it's very funny, I promise so cool idea.
Thank you Dana for for some wine suggestions and for

(27:14):
the look. We're looking forward to it, thank you so much. Yes,
and it's a lovely gift and a lovely thing to enjoy,
but we're unfortunately going to be partaking of it for
kind of sad reasons. We're happy, happy and sad for us,
but happy for our producer and editor, Lizzie, who has
been with us for a long time. She's been editing

(27:37):
this podcast for a very long time, and she's moving
on to another really wonderful opportunity. Lizzie is a fabulous
photographer and she's going to be pursuing that a little
bit more directly, and we're gonna miss her so much.
We are. Lizzie is so fun to work with. She
always has good comments on on what we're talking about.

(27:57):
It's always fun to rehash the subjects with her after
recording and sort of let slip our secret opinions on
certain topic and she always makes wonderful things happen in
the editing process. Whenever we have any crazy idea about
inserting music into the podcast or anything like that, she
always helps us work it out or just cleaning us up,

(28:19):
you know, yes, making us sound good. Um. But we
are so happy for Lizzie to go off to new
and better things. And um, like de Blanta just said,
she's a fantastic photographer. She has a website, Lizzie photo
dot com. It's Lizzie with a why as it took
me way too long to why do we learn? Um,

(28:40):
But she's great. Good luck, We will miss you. Good luck, Lizzie,
you will be missed. To keep in touch with us,
and um, hopefully we'll get to see a lot of
your great work out there very soon. So on that note,
we want to wrap it up and invite anyone who
wants to to write to us with ideas, comments, questions,
anything that is on your mind. We're at History Podcast

(29:03):
at Discovery dot com. You can also find us on
Facebook and we're on Twitter at Myston History. And as
we mentioned in the last Bone Wars episode, we have
so many articles on dinosaurs. We actually have a site
director who loves dinosaurs, so it ensures that we are
well stocked on all topics paleontology related, So go check
that out. It's all in our science section on www.

(29:26):
Dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
dot com.