Boneheads

The Gilded Age was a time of opulence and opportunism, an age that turned businessmen into household names. But it also created some of the biggest rivalries in the rush to unearth the past.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and
Grimm and Mild from Air and Manky.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
The Victorian Age was a time of wonder. The people
were experiencing things that felt nothing short of magical. They
saw their cities light up with electricity. They sat for
new fangled cameras and took home images of themselves on
silver plates. Cable lines carried their telegrams to loved ones
thousands of miles away. Their disembodied voices flowed through telephone receivers.

(00:43):
They also witnessed the invention of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, of course,
lived and died far before anyone, let alone people of
the Victorian era, ever stepped foot on this planet. But
it was this generation when the dinosaur's story began again.
Humans had been unearthing strangely fossilized bones and other remains

(01:04):
for centuries, but what were they, exactly where did they
come from? The debate had long been heated. Some believed
they were left by the devil, others thought they were
remnants of Noah's flood. At the time in Europe, most
didn't realize that these were the remains of creatures who
had lived a very long time ago. The study of

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these remnants began to codify in the seventeen hundreds, as
paleontology got its start. The term finds its origin in
the Greek words for ancient palaeo, being anto and study ology.
Curious minds began to classify and label these bits and
pieces of ancient beings, trying to make sense of what

(01:47):
they once were. Fossils supported the theories presented in Charles
Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, which to the
Victorian mind was either hugely exciting or hugely blasphemed. In
eighteen fifty one, Britain launched their Great Exhibition, a showing
of magnificent resources pillaged from their colonies. They hired a

(02:10):
man by the name of Joseph Paxton to design and
construct a showcase, and he did just that, building a
massive structure of steel and glass, naming it the Crystal Palace.
A British sculptor and natural history illustrator, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins,
was hired to fill it up. Benjamin was taken by

(02:30):
the ideas of the natural world and had designs on
giving humanity something that had never seen before. He set
his sights on creating sculptures of all kinds of extinct
animals and placing them among greenery. He received advice from
famed paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, the fellow who had only
recently coined the word dinosaur, and so Benjamin got to work.

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He looked at notes, diagrams, and the fossils themselves. He
had a lot of parts, but not a lot of
direction for how to assemble them. But he had his
artistic sensibility and a vague understanding of anatomy, and knew
how to take big swings. What was also true was
that no one was going to know if he was wrong.
Benjamin began constructing his hulking beasts with a combination of clay, brick, tiles,

(03:19):
and cement, all supported on iron columns. Some contained thirty
tons of clay. He built thirty three different creatures and
placed them in the palace's green gardens. These were the
first life sized models of dinosaurs ever constructed. Visitors could
walk right up to a creature that supposedly existed many

(03:39):
millions of years ago, something that seemed inconceivable to the
minds of so many The sculptures ended up being wildly
popular and are still on display in London today. In retrospect,
Benjamin statues are rife with error, and to our modern eye,
sometimes silly looking, but they represented some thing hugely important.

(04:01):
They've acted as touchstones by which we can measure scientific
progress and acknowledge our own evolutions in thought and theory.
If the Victorians thought they knew a lot, then it's
become more clear in contemporary times how much we simply
don't know. Today paleo illustrators are constantly updating what they

(04:21):
know about dinosaurs and trying to more accurately represent them.
It's a tall order to try to perfectly recreate an
animal based only on its fossils. Even still, we feel
compelled to know who and what has walked before us.
And for some this question has turned into a fascination,

(04:42):
which then morphed into obsession. And where obsession arises, so
often does a good story. I'm Lauren Bogelbaum. Welcome to
American Shadows. When Andrew Carnegie unfolded his newspaper that morning

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in eighteen ninety nine, he read the front page, headlined
exclaiming that the most colossal animal ever on Earth had
been discovered. He knew that it had to be his.
There was nothing that the richest man in the world
wanted that he couldn't have. Andrew Carnegie was a product
and poster boy of the Gilded Age. It was a

(05:24):
time of glitter and gold, of ostentatious wealth and opulence.
Author Mark Twain coined the term to characterize the new
American aristocracy that was on the rise in the period
after the Civil War. The country was hitting a growth spurt.
The railroads and laws benefiting industrial production infused the country

(05:44):
with jobs and money, But underneath that guilt veneer there
was darkness and corruption. A new class of people were
forged at this moment. The industrialists the money largely lined
their pockets and created a system of social inequity unlike
anything America had ever seen before. They wielded power unmatched

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by politicians and often made the rules by which others
had to play. The tycoons and lawmakers scratched each other's
backs and cut back room deals, amassing wealth while exploiting
the working class. Every major business, from railroads to timber, meatpacking,
to steel and oil to tobacco, came under the pull

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of these captains of industry. That money needed to go somewhere,
a spending became almost a performance art, as the moneyed
class erected massive homes, through lavish parties and curated exquisite collections.
Carnegie was able to purchase the dinosaur that he had
read about, but it fell short of his expectations. It

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just wasn't grand enough not to be discouraged. He commissioned
his own fossil hunting team to find a dinosaur that
was going to be bigger and better than anything anyone
had ever seen, and they did just that, discovering a
fossil in Wyoming that was over seventy feet long and
weighed more than fourteen tons. This new species was named

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after him, the Diplodocus carnegie Eye. Andrew Carnegie was just
one of many who hopped on the prehistoric bandwagon. The
rich loved their dinosaurs. They were big, they were expensive
to find, they were rare, there were limited quantities of them.
These qualifications created a national hunger that many would go

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to great lengths to satisfy. The moment leading up to
Carnegie's purchase was marked by a blazing period of intense excavation,
spearheaded by two men entangled in an intense rivalry off.
Neil Marsh, the first professor of paleontology in the United States,
and Edward Cope, a wealthy enthusiast, had long been a pair,

(07:52):
embattled and embittered, dueling for palaeontological supremacy, power, and fame.
These two men were different worlds. As individuals, they embodied
the social and economic differences of the Gilded Age. Marsh
was born on October twenty ninth of eighteen thirty one
in Lockport, New York, to a family with little money

(08:13):
in fewer connections. His father was a farmer and his
mother was soon dead. Marsh's mother had been the younger
sister of George Peabody, a wealthy banker and philanthropist. Marsh
might have gone on to become a farmer like his father,
but his uncle stepped in and paid for his education.
He eventually made his way to Yale, where he became

(08:35):
utterly taken by Darwin and his new ideas on evolution.
This would become his life's work, and he soon went
on to pursue an education at the University of Berlin.
It was there, in eighteen sixty three that he met
a wealthy, fiery classmate named Edward Cope. They shared similar
interests and friends, though their approaches to life and study

(08:57):
were radically different. Marsh was studious and regimented a while
Cope took a more unconventional approach to his education, preferring travel,
on the job, training, and mentorship. The Cope saw Darwin's
origin of the species as the key to unlocking the
secrets of life on Earth, whereas Marsh harbored more conventional
religious beliefs and regarded life as a project and intentional

(09:20):
gradual design. Even so, both remained in touch after they
returned to the United States and kicked off their palaeontological careers.
In time, they would even name some new discoveries after
each other. Cope and Marsh continued their relationship via correspondence,
sending manuscripts of papers they planned to write, along with
fossils and photos back and forth. They could have been

(09:43):
great collaborators, but instead, as it often does, greed got
in their way. The road to success wouldn't be paved
in bones for these two men, it was often paved
with sabotage. The Great dinosaur Rush was about to begin.

(10:09):
Cope and Marsh had a love hate relationship in frenemies.
If you will. They respected each other's brilliance in verve,
but simmering under all of that were egos that needed
to be sated. Upon their returns from Berlin, Cope and
Marsh worked together on many digs, celebrating and squabbling in
equal measure. But one project in eighteen sixty eight would

(10:31):
set the stage for their greatest disagreement yet. Southern New
Jersey is home to a singular deposit of this strange,
beautiful green sand, leftover from a time millions of years
ago when the place was underwater. It's rich in glauconite,
a green mineral that characterizes the deposit, and also it

(10:52):
seems rich in fossils. A Cope wanted to dig there,
and he invited Marsh to come along. They set out
to New Jersey to make some discoveries, make some names,
and make some money. They knew that everything that could
be found there would be incredibly valuable, especially now that
more people were collecting fossils than ever before. They hired

(11:14):
teams of people to help them. The dirty business of
digging up fossils required many hands and lots of organization,
so it was imperative that they find the right labor
to do the job. Scouts and site managers, operators and
diggers were soon on site for their part. Cope and
Marsh analyzed, cataloged, and then shipped these discoveries back to

(11:35):
their offices via hired railroad workers. And because this was
Cope's dig, anything that was discovered technically belonged to him.
It's here in these silty green sands they unearthed all
kinds of beautiful creatures, including ancient turtles and crocodiles that
died over sixty six million years ago. They found dinosaur

(11:57):
bones and giant sea bound lizards. As they broke down
camp and parted ways, they shook hands amicably and wished
each other well. But what Cope didn't realize was that
Marsh had bribed the laborers to siphon off some of
their fines back to his office in New Haven, Connecticut.
And when Cope soon learned about this, he felt utterly

(12:19):
betrayed and absolutely furious. This, however, didn't stop them from
continuing to work together. They admired each other intensely, bitterly,
and jealously. They each knew the other had connections, institutional resources,
and smarts, which further fanned the flames of their rivalry.

(12:40):
At times they were the best of frenemies. They would
do almost anything to get a leg up on the other.
Both had great personal wealth and were willing to throw
money at their problems. It didn't take them long to
start playing dirtier. Even though fossil hunting began on the
East coast, the situation soon became the Wheiled West, a

(13:01):
total free for all in the race for scientific glory
and the money that came with truly rare and unique fines.
In one instance, Marsh publicly humiliated Cope when he pointed
out that his reconstruction of a water bound plesiosaur called
an elasmosaurus was incorrect because in his reconstruction, Cope had

(13:21):
put the head at the end of the short tail
instead of at the end of the long neck. After
they called in other experts to settle the dispute, a
Cope was horrified to realize that he and everything he
had recently published about his discovery was indeed incorrect. The
whole field became a battleground for their squabbling as they

(13:42):
rushed to both pull in other scientists and flood the
field with their own publishing. As they rushed, they got sloppy,
Cope started pushing further west into Kansas and Wyoming, what
Marsh considered his territory for finding fossils. It was a
gentleman's understand that each had their own turf, but Cope

(14:02):
decided he would no longer abide by these arbitrary rules.
Any kind of warmth between them chilled in eighteen seventy two.
As they pushed further and further west, they became desperate
to outdo each other, pumping more and more resources into
digging up the earth. They also weren't actually at the
pits that were being excavated. They relied solely young collectors

(14:26):
to get them what they wanted and to ship everything
back east. It was an exercise of trust, it seems,
and in the haze of paranoia around their own relationship
a Cope and Marsh failed to realize the secondary duplicity
at hand. You see, the market for bones and other
fossils was prone to fraud. There was no established regulatory

(14:49):
framework for how to do all this, and these vines
often traveled great distances over large amounts of time. It
was hard to keep track of contracts and laborers. Whatever
arrived in crates was usually going to be what you got.
As the railroads moved further west and explorers and colonists followed,

(15:09):
plenty of lines were established and plenty of hands were
willing to get paleontologists like Marsh and Cope what they wanted.
These folks were often paid well by their scientist bosses,
but the handsome pay didn't necessarily guarantee worker loyalty. Those
muscling the dirt knew that their labor and their fines

(15:29):
were in high demand, and their affections could be bought.
In eighteen seventy three, Marsh wrote publicly that he believed
half of his discoveries in the West were poached from
him in this way. In that same year, the scientific
journal The American Naturalist decided that it would stop publishing
any materials from either scientist, even though Cope later had

(15:51):
a huge ownership stake in the publication. There was one dig, though,
that would prove to end all digs. It was discuss covered.
The Como Bluff, Wyoming, was home to one of the
richest bone quarries ever discovered. The bones and other fossils

(16:13):
at Coma Bluff were discovered in eighteen seventy seven by
geologist Arthur Lakes. It was a veritable gold mine, one
of the richest deposits ever found. It would become known
as the Morrison Formation, a huge span of sediment that
reaches from New Mexico to Montana. It stretches back, encompassing
over two hundred million years, and would go on to

(16:35):
teach us much of what we know about the Jurassic Period.
At the time, though, all Lakes knew was that this
was a singular repository, and he quickly sent word back east.
He tried Marsh first, but Marsh was slow to respond. Impatient,
he sent some findings to Cope. When Marsh heard this,
he kicked into gear. Marsh was able to send out

(16:59):
his representatives first. They reported back that there were miles
of bones right for the picking. He worked quickly to
secure the site for himself with all the labor his
good money could buy. He was eager to get his
hands on anything that was dug up and promptly started negotiating.
The specimens were enormous and numerous. Cope, for his part,

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thought nothing of Marsh's claim and refused to be deterred.
The race was once again on from Marsian Cope and
although neither was personally at the bluff, they sent workers,
including former students. It didn't take long for Cope's men
to start encroaching on the territory that Marsh had staked out.

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Marsh knew that this was where he needed to dig
to outpace Cope. In truth, Marsh might not have become
involved with this dig's location at all if Cope hadn't
sent the team. At that point in his career, Marsh
was far more interested in mammalion specimens than dinosaur bones,
but once heard Cope's team had shown up, he refused

(18:02):
to be outshined. So there they were, warring factions on
a bluff under the sun, furiously digging and conducting shady dealings.
Each scientist was determined to get the upper hand and
started paying more money to their workers to keep them
digging and keep them loyal. They worked tirelessly back east,

(18:23):
intercepting huge wooden crates and publishing at a breakneck clip.
Efforts of other paleontologists who showed up paled in comparison
to these feverish and bitter operations. They planted fossils and
locations where they weren't discovered to confuse the other, they
bribed quarry owners to pull fossils out before they could

(18:43):
be observed and documented. Their rivalry had become an all
out war, rife with bad blood and explosions. Literally, it
was reported that they had ordered the dynamiting of their
completed dig sites lest any yet to be discovered bones
fell into the world wrong hands. They continued to fight
in the pages of academic journals and newspapers. They mutually

(19:07):
attempted to sabotage each other's funding in efforts to slow
down their respective careers and stardom. Their community was growing
tired of the very public performance of their spite and
called into question their ability to even do their jobs.
Their work was often sloppy, rife with careless errors, and

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people knew about the shady dealings they were willing to
engage with in order to bolster their reputations. It's said
that competition breeds progress, and in one sense this rings true.
This period was one of the most productive in the
history of paleontology. Lay people were astounded and captivated by
their very public duelings and were often inspired by their discoveries.

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Marti and Kpe were able to uncover some of the
world's most famous dinosaurs that we know and love today
include the Stegosaurus, the triceratops, the Alosaurus, and eventually one
of the most fearsome of all, the Tyrannosaurus wrecks. Without
their flaring tempers and growing contempt for each other, it's
hard to say what we would know or not know

(20:16):
about dinosaurs today. But for all the progress that they made,
their rivalry ultimately destroyed Martian Cope. However, if we were
asked to tally numbers for a winner and a loser
in all of this, technically Marsh won their competition. He
discovered and named eighty new species, compared with copes fifty six.

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Even so, they never quite retired. The rivalry between the
two men lasted until the day they died, when Cope
made one last bet. The decades long fight between Marsh

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and Cope ended tragically for both of them after thirty
years of public feuding. Cope lay dying surrounded by shelves
full of his beloved specimens to which he had devoted
his entire life. He had been sick for a long while,
plagued by chronic illnesses. The nature of those were never determined,
but he had found ways to self medicate. He didn't

(21:25):
really trust doctors. Instead, he came up with an all
natural cure, belladonna. In small doses, it can help with
all kinds of things, but he didn't take the right doses.
He took it in small amounts, but too often this
ultimately would lead to his end. He worked right up

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until he died on April twelfth of eighteen ninety seven. However,
Cope wasn't content to let the war go, and just
before he passed, he sent a challenge to Marsh. He
wrote in his will, I direct that after my funeral,
my body shall be presented to the Anthropometric Society, and
then an autopsy shall be performed on it. My brain

(22:09):
shall be preserved in their collection of brains for future study.
In effect, Cope wanted to see who had the bigger brain.
Marsh died on March eighteenth of eighteen ninety nine, effectively
bringing the Bone Wars to an end. He never did
turn over his brain to science, so we'll never know
who the winner of that final battle would have been.

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There's more to this story. Stick around after this brief
sponsor break to hear all about it. After the Great
Dinosaur Rush of what became known as the Bone Wars.
Fossil Hunting continued to be a favorite pastime among the

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wealthy and educated for decades. In nineteen ten, a very
aristocrat and paleontologist by the name of Ernst freher Stromer
von Reichenbach set out for a dig in the Egyptian
desert outside of Cairo. He partnered up with Richard mcgroff,
an Austrian fossil hunter, and together they found a glorious

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horde of all kinds of marine creatures. But it would
be two years before their most spectacular discovery of all.
Sometime between sixty and one hundred million years ago, an
enormous predator died. It had long spines on its back,
a crocodile like jaw, and massive teeth. When Ernst came

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upon its skeleton all of those years later, he was stunned.
In life, this creature was likely unmatched by any foe.
If it was such an astounding and terrifying proposition in death,
imagine what it could have been in life. Ernst named
it Spinosaurus egypticus, or the Egyptian spine lizard. Ernst removed

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the skeleton, then brought it to Munich's Paleontological Museum, and
there it was proudly on display for many years, bringing
him great acclaim. It stayed there quietly as a new
kind of terror rolled through Europe the Nazi Party. Ernst
was nervous. His sons were fighting on the front lines,

(24:17):
and he realized that the relentless bombing campaigns posed a
threat not just to them, but to their treasured artifacts
as well. He begged the head of the museum to
move the fossil to safety, but the man was a
Nazi sympathizer and had long ago stopped listening to anything
Ernst had to say, political or otherwise. The spinosaurus was

(24:38):
s mearily destroyed by Allied forces when they dropped a
bomb on Munich. It died a second death that day,
living on only in notes and drawings and Ernst's memory.
He was heartbroken by the magnitude of what the war
did to his family, his country, and his career, and
he died soon after in nineteen fifty two. The spinosaurus

(25:01):
was remembered in the paleontology community as something of a legend.
There were so many unanswered questions about how and where
it had lived, and the perfection of the fossil was
wholly unmatched. It suggested a new kind of dinosaur that
scientists had never considered, a semi aquatic creatures that thrived
both on land and in the water. A fully constructed

(25:24):
spinosaurus had never been discovered before, and there were questions
as to whether another one ever would. For about another century,
the spinosaurus drifted into oblivion. That is, of course, until
a young doctoral student stepped onto the scene. In two
thousand and eight. Nazarre Ibrahim was conducting research on the
border of Morocco and Algeria when he met a local

(25:46):
Bedouin fossil hunter. Nazar took a close look at the
specimens he was offered and cataloged the findings in his memory.
It was a year later when he was shown a
newly discovered partial skeleton of a potential spinosaurus. Then he
noticed something some distinct purple and yellow sediment he recognized
from the year before. He was suddenly struck by the

(26:08):
idea that he might have accidentally run into two halves
of a whole dinosaurs. So he went back to Morocco,
hoping to find his Bedouin friend, but with no cell
phone number or email address. He hoped for good luck.
For days, he looked for him, asking all around and
searching the streets. It all seemed fruitless, until one day

(26:30):
he was at a cafe and the very same man
walked by. Nazarre jumped up and chased him down and
convinced him to bring him to the spot where the
bones he had initially seen were dug up from. He
got his wish, and here began the next stage of
Nazar's life work and that of the Spinosaurus. With new

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science and technology, Nazar has been hard at work putting
together the life story of the spinosaurus and picking up
where Ernst left off. We may never know the whole
truth as to how these creatures lived and died, but
science is allowing us to paint a more complete picture.
The debates will long continue over these animals, and careers

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and reputations will be staked on who can make the
more convincing and compelling argument. We may never know everything,
but that won't stop us from trying.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
American Shadows as hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was
written by Robin Miniature, researched by Ali Steed, and produced
by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Mankey,
Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show,
visit grimminmile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit

(27:51):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.