SYMHC Classic: The Bone Wars

Published Jun 15, 2024, 6:22 PM

This 2012 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina explores the rivalry between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. The two started out as friends, but their friendship soon soured.

Happy Saturday. The Bone Wars are going to get a name drop in an upcoming episode, so we have past hosts episode on that feud as Today's Saturday Classic. This was originally a two part episode, but we are running it all together as one, so just roll with any references that you hear to things like in the next episode or last time.

Also, there's some discussion of George Peabody in this episode, and his name is pronounced differently in different regions and the Northeast people mostly say Peabody like I just said it, but in a lot of the rest of the US, it's Peabody like it's spelled, and those different pronunciations trickle down to all the various institutions named after him, much like Haldcab County, Georgia and Dekyle, Illinois are pronounced differently even though they're named after the same person. This episode was from host Sarah and Deblina and it originally came out December thirty first, twenty twelve and January ninth, twenty thirteen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of iHeartRadio.

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Dablina Chokerborny and I'm Sarah Dowdie and we have had a lot of fun this year. I've had a lot of fun at least covering scientific rivalries. We've talked about Horace Wells and the Gas War, and of course Tesla and Edison and the War of the Currents. That was one that was really popular because it was much anticipated and requested beforehand.

It stirred up a little rivalry on our Facebook page, it did, but hell, it's got a lot of strong support.

Yeah, I was about to say the rivalries out there, but yeah, Tesla is definitely kind of a favorite these days, I would say so. Those episodes and the Mary Anning Princess of Paleontology episode that we did earlier this year, got listeners clamoring for a podcast on another scientific war, one about two nineteenth century paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and oth Neil Charles Marsh. Now, Cope and Marsh duped it out over America's fossil deposits during a time when the field of paleontology was still pretty new. Their race to find fossils, named the species that they belonged to, and publish their findings about all of this came to be known by many names, including the Great Dinosaur Feud, the Dinosaur Rush, and the Bone Wars.

Our title today, And they really made an impact too. Prior to their work, there were only nine known species of North American dinosaurs, and these two men's efforts led to the classification of one hundred and thirty six new species. But Cope and Marsh's feud also resulted in a lot more than just the advancement of their field. It was kind of an embarrassment too. It was a pretty dark time in a lot of ways. It ended up damaging both of their reputations and maybe even hindered scientific progress in some respect.

Yeah, so much so that it's interesting their feud has been regarded, quote as a kind of scientific indiscretion, says James Pennic in an article in American Heritage. So we're going to kind of explore that a little bit, but in two parts. Yes we are in two parts. But to understand why these guys came to be at such odds, we first need to discuss a little bit about their backgrounds and how they came to be in their field in the first place. Because they both took very different paths to end up basically in the same competition.

So we'll start with Marsh. He's the elder of the two. Athaniel Charles Marsh was born October twenty ninth, eighteen thirty one, in Lockport, New York. His father was very poor. He was a farmer, and even though Marsh showed a lot of interest in science from a young age, his father only intended him to take over the family farm someday. But fortunately for Marsh, he had a very influential uncle. His mother, who had died when he was only three years old, was the sister of the banker philanthropist George Peabody.

A much beloved sister.

Yes luckily luckily so of course, Peabody had one of the largest personal fortunes in the world, according to Pennock's article, and it was a good person to have, especially if Marsh's father was kind of struggling with his work.

So around age twenty one, Marsh inherited some money from his uncle that had been meant for his mother's dowry, and he used this money to attend prep school at Phillips Academy. And of course, at twenty one, he was much older than the other kids there.

So you think that pewbody could have advanced him the money for the education.

Further ahead of time. Yeah, you would hope so, But that wasn't the case. That didn't happen. So according to an article by Tom Huntington in American History, his peers at prep school gave him nicknames like Daddy and Captain, which you would think would just be mortifying, but he didn't seem to care, or if he did, he didn't let it stop him. He graduated as valedictorian and then convinced his uncle to pay to send him to Yale College, where he earned an undergraduate degree in eighteen sixty. He then went on to you earn a master's degree from Yale Sheffield School of Science a couple years later.

And after that he spent a little bit of time studying in Europe and convinced uncle Peabody to donate some more money, this time to Yale for a Museum of Natural Sciences. And it was kind of a hard sell because Peabody preferred Harvard. He would have preferred to have given his money to Harvard, but marsh did get his way in the end, and he was appointed to run the Museum as curator and became a professor of paleontology at Yale. So if your uncle does pony f the money, it's you're a shoot way to get a job. Ultimately, though, he was the first professor of paleontology in North America according to Huntington's article, so a big step in his career.

So moving on to Cope. Unlike marsh Edward Drinker, Cope came from a wealthy Quaker family, so definitely a bit of a brighter start in life. He was born July twenty eighth, eighteen forty in Philadelphia, so nine years after Marsh, and he also showed a really early interest in science. He actually recorded his impressions of the fossils of an extinct marine reptile called Ichthyosaurus, which I think we talked about a little bit in the Marry Manning episode. He recorded his impressions of this when he was only six years old.

So he was like you du Blaina playing fossil hunter.

Yeah, I think it was probably a little more on top of it than I was. But when he was eighteen he also published a scientific paper on salamanders, and another thing that set Cope apart from Marsh, though, is that he didn't get a lot in the way of a formal education, which is kind of surprising considering he was so into science at an early age. He studied for about a year at the University of Pennsylvania, spent some time studying the herpetology collections of the Smithsonian, and he worked as a researcher at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, but definitely didn't take that sort of traditional academic path that Marsh took.

He did take a little tour through Europe eventually, though, to further his education. To to keep Cope from becoming involved in the Civil War, his father sent him abroad to study natural history in eighteen sixty three and he ended up for a time at Berlin University in Germany, and coincidentally, Marsh was there at the same time, and the two guys did become acquainted, and even though it seems really unbelievable, later they were actually friendly with each other and they continued their friendship stateside and after they returned home, even though their lives did take somewhat different paths.

Yeah, Marsh of course came back and he had this nice cush position at Yale to come into and Cope came back to marry his cousin Annie Pern, and he became a professor of zoology and botany at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. That position, however, was pretty short lived. Cope left it in eighteen sixty seven to go study a big deposit of dinosaur fossils found in New Jersey. So just a little background on the study of dinosaurs up to this point. According to Huntington's article, a British scientist named Richard Owen had coined the term dinosaur in eighteen forty one, but he had described them as these quote low slung lizard like creatures. Joseph Ldey's study of the first US dinosaur find and hadden Field, New Jersey in eighteen fifty eight totally changed this perception. Lighty worked with the bones of a Hadrosaurus and showed that it would have walked erect on two legs instead of on all fours like a lizard like most people thought, and that first Hadrosaurus, which Lighty helped reconstruct, became the first complete dinosaur skeleton to be displayed for the public. According to PBS dot Org.

Well and Lighty had a connection to one of these guys, d didn't he He did.

He had been Cope's anatomy professor at the University of Pennsylvania and was also his mentor at the Academy of Natural Sciences, So probably someone that Cope looked up to and learned from.

Yeahf way, if you're only going to do one year at penn it was good even met this guy. But ultimately Cope did go to New Jersey where this fossil quarry was, and he participated in several excavations there. So at this point, as we mentioned, Cope and Marsh were still friendly with each other, enough so that in eighteen sixty seven Cope even named an amphibian fossil Toni's Marshye after Marsh. I mean, that's a pretty nice thing to do for your fellow scientist, I would say. He also spent a week or so in eighteen sixty eight showing Marsh around the fossil quarry in New Jersey where he was working, pointing out his various collection sites, really being open about his work with Marsh. Something important to remember later on that year too, Marsh wasn't just gonna take this gift of a dinosaur name and let it go. He returned the naming compliment, and, according to PBS dot org, gave a quote new and gigantic serpent from the tertiary of New Jersey, the name Mosesaurus copianus. That just your didn't count for a whole lot in the long run, but still it's a gesture.

Yeah, So just to give you a little background of why it might not have been as sweet a gesture as it seemed. Cope later found out that Marsh had gone behind his back and made a deal with the New Jersey quarry owner that ensured that all of the fossils that were found there would go directly to Marsh first, so basically cutting Cope out of the loop, cut him out of the process.

Cope is taking him around this place, showing off what he's working on, giving them the tour.

Yes, Marsh supposedly, I guess, being totally open about it, not assuming that Marsh is going to backstab him, but that's exactly what happens. So Cope was kind of hoodwinked by this. In the same year, in eighteen sixty eight, something else happened in their relationship. In Cope and Marsha's relationship. Cope was in a big hurry to publish his findings on a new species of pleaseosaur, the fossilized bones of which had been shipped to him by an Army surgeon from Kansas, And this is how they received their their fossils.

Sometimes this reminded me a little bit of the Mary Anning episode, where, of course the earlier situation we were describing of Cope going to the dig side and looking himself sounds more like what you'd expect, but just having bone shipped to you from somebody else.

Yeah, and we talk about we'll talk about the bone collectors and so forth a little more in part two of this, but this sort of introduces that idea. But anyway, Cope he got these bones. He called this previously unknown pleasiosaur Elasmosaurus. Unfortunately, though, when Cope was reconstructing the Elasmosaurus skeleton, he made a pretty major error. He reversed all of the vertebrae and put its head on its tail instead of on the end of its neck.

It's pretty bad and guests who noticed. Marsh paid a visit to the Academy of Natural Sciences to check out Cope's work, and of course he did not hesitate to point out this error, and he's even said to have been the first person two pointed out to Cope. Cope called in Joseph Lady to take another look and offer up a second opinion. He confirmed the mistake, and actually, upon looking at the skeleton, Lady removed the head and placed on reversed it with what Cope had originally thought was the tale. So pretty bad.

Yeah, and Lady also discussed this error at the next meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences. So you can imagine it's just like embarrassment on top of embarrassment. First he's embarrassedor yes, he's embarrassed in front of his colleague, then he's embarrassed in front of his mentor, and then at the Academy of Natural Sciences in front of this entire meeting of scientists. And of course also it's in publication. As we mentioned before, it's already out there in the Journal of the American Philosophical Society. They had already published his findings, including a drawing of this incorrect restoration. So Cope frantically starts to try to buy back every copy of the publication that he could find. But this incident, combined with Marsh's shady dealings regarding the New Jersey quarry, really seemed to have kicked off the feud between the two, or at least started the rift and bad feelings between them. But if you really look at which of these incidents had more to do with the bad feelings between them, it really depends on which one of them that you asked, I mean, Cope would probably say it had more to do with what happened in New Jerseyscil issue, yes, and Marsh would say that he was just embarrassed and mad that he had pointed out his mistake.

Yeah.

Well, Marsh even later wrote of the incident and said that it was Cope's quote, wounded vanity that had received a shock from which it never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy. So yeah, that's Marsh saying, Oh, Cope just couldn't handle being wrong, essentially. He also later admitted that while he initially did return his copy of the publication to Cope as Cope had requested, trying to hoard all these incorrect copies, he Marche later sought out and bought two additional copies, which he did hang on to as if he wanted to have them as some kind of ammunition. Seems like something that your buddy wouldn't do you.

No, only your most bitter enemy would do that, or at least you would hope. But this is a great example of how Cope's big rush to get things published sometimes resulted in him making errors. But of course marsh although he was said to be very meticulous, wasn't immune to this either. He did make his share of mistakes. Just one example, he once put a Chemerosaurus skull on the skeleton of an Apatosaurus, which, according to an article by Renee Clary, James Wandersea, and Amy Carpinelli in Science Scope, was quote one of the longest lasting mistakes of paleontology. And we're going to discuss at least one of his other major errors later on too. But that's just to give you one example.

And so, of course, in some ways, you know, we've been talking about this rush that both of the men were constantly under. These errors were a direct result of competition between them, because not only were they trying to get their discoveries out there quickly, because the naming rights were given to whoever published a fine first. They were trying specifically to beat each other to the punch. I mean, that's not going to make great meticulous work in the end, most likely, right.

The feud between Cope and Marsh really began in earnest in the eighteen seventies, when they both headed west to hunt for fossils. Marsh's first expedition was in eighteen seventy, and it was sponsored by Yale, and he had this whole entourage with them, including about a dozen Yale students and even an army escort that they acquired once they'd made it to what's now the Midwest, and they explored Kansas, Wyoming, and Utah, and according to Huntingson's article, at one point they even had buffalo Bill Cody as their guide. But by the time they got back to Ye after that first trip, they had thirty six boxes of specimens, including bone fragments from a pterodactyl wing when no pterodactyl had been discovered before, and Marsh estimated that this giant flying reptile would have had a wingspan of twenty feet. So Cope and Marsh when they really started to butt heads was around eighteen seventy two, when Cope started exploring Wyoming Territory looking for fossils there. Huntington writes that Marsh was really angry about this because he considered the area his turf. I guess because he'd already hunted four fossils around there.

Taste of his own medicine there, I have to say, but this ultimately kicked off a really nasty sort of letter writing campaign between the two. It reminds me of the pamphlet Wars we sometimes discuss some podcasts, but there were tactics were not just limited towards either. They employed everything from espionage to theft in their battle to be known as the best in the field, and I think to a certain extent to make sure the other guy was number two to or even lower. So we're gonna be discussing examples of some of these tactics in the next episode, as well as what happens when Cope and Marsh finally take their fight to what turned out to be the ultimate battleground for them. And it was not some fossil ground, it was Washington.

D C. Yeah, so lots of interesting things to cover in part two, including I think we'll talk a little bit more just about their personalities too, in their personal lives, because I think it gives some interesting insight as to maybe some more of the root of the animosity. It wasn't necessarily all about dinosaur bones. Not all about it, no, but a lot, a lot, yes, that's for sure.

When we left them off, Cope and Marsh had just started to look west in search of fossils. In this episode, though, we're gonna be talking a bit about what they found out west and the 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 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 Marsh's socioeconomic backgrounds and their educational training, which is kind of where it 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 its Peabody's generous donation at Marsha's request. That also led to the creation of a Museum of Natural Sciences at Yale, which was a move that then helped secure marshall professorship there and it created a great resource for him while he was hunting for fossils, so.

He had Yale in his corner. But all of Peabody's support did, unfortunately come with a catch. According to an article by James Pennock in American Heritage, it turned out that Uncle George had a certain stipulation for anyone named in his will, and that stipulation involved marriage. When he was twenty five in a freshman at Yale, marsh received 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 him or now mind 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 will for marrying too soon, So Peabody was serious about that.

Put to the test.

By the time Marsh was financially independent, he was well into his thirties, so Penneck 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.

Right.

He had some other friendly sort of issues though.

Yeah, just basically the issue was that 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 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, he really.

Doesn't, except for the bone Wars. That one is a pretty great nickname for his rivalry. Cope, on the other hand, came from a very different kind of background, which we discussed 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. Dublina and I were talking about it earlier, how it just fascinates us that gentlemen would choose to pursue science in some form, and.

There's something very romantic about it. I mean, we both talked about how it just there's something very ideal about it.

A little troubling too, because it ends up with you end up with personal disputes like this. But Cope was considered to be very brilliant, considered to be a prodigy, and his life was also very different from Marsh's. On a personal level too. We mentioned that he was married, he had a wife, he had a daughter named Julia. Unlike Marsh, too, 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, who took Cope's 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 with our story, 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'd limit their study to the comfort of their own home exactly.

And Cope, like Marsh, went out to hunt fossils, but he had a different way of traveling from Marsh. We mentioned how Marsh went out with the entourage and had guides and 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, since Cope was a Quaker, he rarely 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 thread of hostile Native American tribes out west. Among other things, yeah, bandits, highwaymen, all sorts of risks he might come across, not to mention just.

The wildlife potentially exactly. Cope did 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 straighten up, you know, stop laughing, stop making fun of him. Cope and Marsh did have successes in the field 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, were reliant on being associated with one of several geological 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 Martian Cope started going at 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'd discovered some fossils near Morris and Colorado. Now Marsh didn't reply, so Lake's 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 them 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 Marsh, and according to Huntington, part of what Marsh found among Lake's initial find were the remains the first remains of a 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 check out the fossils. Overall, according to Huntington, Cope's Colorado finds actually turn out to be better than Marsh's because they were bigger and they could be taken out of the surrounding raw without breaking them. Marsh, of course, 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. Carlin contacted Marsh about some fossils that they had discovered as a site known as Como Bluff, and Marsh of course sent 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 Marsh's investigation of this fine, too, really speaks to how high quality it was. He discovered several new species and named the Alosaurus, the Diplodocus, the Campedsaurus, all from those Como Bluff finds.

And also notably he named the Brontosaurus out of those fines, one of the world's best known dinosaurs and Sarah's favorite dinosaur. I should mention interesting, though, that the naming of Brontosaurus is actually considered one of Marsh's biggest mistakes. After he died, scientists realized that the creature Marsh had named Brontosaurus was just another example of a dinosaur Marsh had already named the Patosaurus, so the designation Brontosaurus was taken away. Obviously, though that's kind of an endurance. And 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. 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, while Carlin switched over to Cope side. Lucas remained on Cope side while Lake's 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 might have been better.

Yeah, I mean that means a lot.

It does. Occasionally though, according to Huntington, again, the two paleontologists would try to woo each other's collectors away from the other. I don't know if they were tempting 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 he was up to. What his bone collectors were up to. They referred to Cope as Jones in this Sneaky Correspondence, And one of Marsh'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. 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 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.

Maybe not Yeah. According to an article by Renee Clary, James Wandersey, and Amy Capernellian Science Scope. Marsh 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.

A reputation for honesty there.

Well, I mean that takes it to another level, that does tampering with the science essentially.

Yeah, I mean, and that was the really shocking part of Cope and Marsh'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 or maybe even hindered scientific progress in some cases. For example, if Marsh's 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 dynamite to keep COPE from getting to the fossils, although, according to a two thousand and eight article by Jean Viev Rujuski, at least when it comes to one of the sites that was supposedly blown up, Krey ten, which is in Morrison, Colorado, those allegations are false. Some researchers found Corey ten in two thousand and two using Lake'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 I sort of read that, though, is maybe he had his history of dynamiting 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, DC. And 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, and 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 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 head of one of the defunct surveys Marsh had been affiliated with, was named as the director. So soon Marsh became the official vertebrate paleontologist of the United States Geological Survey. Not too surprising there. If he's the head of the National Academy of Sciences already, he knows the new head of the Geological Survey. I mean, 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. In his personal wealth, which he had also put toward his 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 it really seemed at this point that there was a clear winner and loser in this feud.

But that didn't seem to be enough for Mars. 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 in the only way that he could at that point, and that was through the press. 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 and January twenty sixth, eighteen eighty under headlines like scientists wage bitter warfare.

And they went way back in their relationship too, And they weren't just considering the last few years as there as their ammo. They went back to the beginning According to Huntington's article, Cope said things like Marsh was quote unable to properly classify and name the fossils his explorers secured. It's pretty damning. He said that Marsh took credit for his assistant's work, and he also accused Marsh and the US Geological Survey of corruption and misuse of god 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 mistake with the elasmosaur, among other things. We discussed that 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 reputations, so nobody won. In this instance, Cope struggled to find 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 palaeontologist.

And now he has all this bad press out.

Too exactly, so doubly 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 Pennock's 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 that wasn't his life's goal. That's not what he had really wanted. He died in eighteen ninety seven of renal failure at age fifty six.

According to PBS, and not right away, but in a couple of years. Congress did investigate the US Geological Survey's use of funds and ended up cutting their funding and completely doing away with the Department 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 ninety nine, two years after Marsh, at the age of sixty seven, he only had one hundred and eighty six dollars in his bank account when he died. Of all that Peabody money that had come to 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 and 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 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 stack up some of their accomplishments though 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, Marsh seemed to win when it came to naming dinosaur species. He named eighty six out of the one hundred and thirty 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 Who's surprising he won that side of the battle. Marsh notably provided evidence for the theory of evolution two, which Darwin himself called quote the best support of the theory of evolution at the time. 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, 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 in the fossil records. So it just depends on what you're judging them by. Which one of them won.

Yeah, and it certainly made me wonder too, how much they accomplished because they did have the other one there 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. Their competition continued a little bit even after the grave. About a century after Cope's death, national geographic photographer Luis si Joios got Cope's 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 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 type 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 the type specimen for Homo sapiens, but it turned out that the late botanist Caroless Linaeus had already been named the type specimen for Homo sapiens.

So thank goodness for Linnaeus able to step in there with his skull and stop this feud from continuing after death.

Yeah, I read elsewhere that one reason that Cope willed his body to science is that he wanted them to compare his skull size to Marsh's after Marsh died, But Marsh didn't 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 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, Er, Marsh, do you have a favorite?

Sarah?

Who do you think you would have been pals with? I?

Well, I mean, I don't know. Do I pick the guy who didn't have any friends? I mean, odds are You're a nice person, so I could see they could have made friends with Marsh. I don't know they I found myself during this story kind of rooting for each of them, and that for each of them, and then thinking that they were each terrible, terrible people. So maybe I'll pass on this.

Yeah, Okay, you're taking you're pleading the fifth.

Yeah, do you have a Do you have 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 dig sites. I didn't like that at all, So it's not cool.

Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over so media at Missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

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