Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to bling a chokerate boarding and we had a lot of fun this year. I've had a lot of fun at least covering scientific rivalries. We've talked about horse Wells in the Gas War, and of course Tesla and Edison in 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 it's got a lot of strong support. Yeah. I was about to say that the rivalries out there, but yeah, Tesla is definitely kind of a favorite these days, I would say so. Those episodes and the Mary Annie 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 off 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 published 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 are titled today. Uh 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 a 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 that ended up damaging both of their reputations and maybe even hindered scientific progress in some respect. Yes, 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. Auth Neil Charles Marsh was born October 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 farms someday. But fortunately for Marsh, he had a very influential uncle. His His mother, who had died when he was only three years old, was the sister of the banker philanthropist George Peabody, much beloved sister luckily luckily so, of course, Peabody had one of the largest personal fortunes in the world, according to Panics article, and it was a good person to to have, especially if if Marcia's father was kind of struggling with his with his work. So around age 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 Peabody could have advanced him the money for the education further ahead of time. Yeah, you would hope so. But that did 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 earn a master's degree from Yale Sheffield School of Science a couple of 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 off the money, it's a job. Ultimately, though, he was the first professor of paleontology in North America according to Huntington's article, so a big, 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 in July 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 Merrimanning episode. He recorded his impressions of this when he was only six years old, so he was like you deplena 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 and 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 state bid and after they returned home, even though their lives did take somewhat different path. 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 Pearn, 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 lighty study of the first US dinosaur find and hadn't Field, New Jersey in eighteen fifty eight, totally changed this perception. Lightie 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 Lightie 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 Cop looked up to and learned from. If you're only going to do one year at at penn he 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 Tonius marsh I after Marsh. I mean, that's a pretty nice thing to do for your your fellow scientist, I would say. Um. 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, Um that year to 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 Mosasaurus copi. Honest, uh, that just sure didn't count for a whole lot in the long run. But still it's a gesture. 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, kind him out of the process. Hope is taking around this place, showing off what he's working on, giving him the tour supposedly, I guess, being totally open about it, not assuming that Marsh is going to backstab him. But that's exactly what happened. 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 plesiosaur, the fossilized bones of which had been shipped to him by an Army surgeon from Kansas. And this is how they receive eve to their their fossils. Sometimes this reminded me a little bit of the Merry 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 from somebody else. Yeah, when we talk about we'll talk about the bone collectors and so forth a little more in part two of this, but the sort of introduces that idea. But anyway, Cope he got these bones. He called this previously unknown pleas asur Alasmosaurus. Unfortunately, though, when Cope was reconstructing the Elasmo Sours 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 to who 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 tail, So pretty pretty bad, yeah, and light. He also discussed this air 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 embarrassed, yes, he's embarrassed in front of his colleague, and 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 Marcia'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 Jersey, 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 can't handle being wrong essentially. Uh. 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 um, he March later thought out and bought two additional copies, which he did hang on to as if he wanted to have them as some kind of ammunition. Um, seems like something that your buddy wouldn't do. 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 he did make his share of mistakes. Just one example, he once put a camera source skull on the skeleton of an apatosaurus, which, according to an article by Renee Clary, James wander c 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 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 ever 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, but likely right. But the feud between Cope and Marsh really began in earnest in the eighteen seventies, when they both headed west to hunt for fossils. Marsha's first expedition was in eighteen seventy and it was sponsored by Yale, and he had this whole entourage with him, including about a dozen Yale students and even an army escort that they acquired once they had made it to what's now the Midwest, and they explored Kansas, Wyoming, in 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 Yale 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 the 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 discussed some podcast, 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 it was number two you too, or or even lower. So we're gonna be discussing examples of some of these tactics in the next episode. Is 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 the 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, and 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, but a lot, a lot, yes, that's for sure. All right, Well, before we sign off for today, we do have a couple of pieces of the listener mail. One is an email from a listener Bill and I just wanted to read this. It's just a couple of sentences, but I wanted to read it because he brings up Indian tear Tory. Oh your favorite place, my favorite place, he says. An old friend used to talk about his dad's birth certificate, stating Oklahoma, Indian Territory as his birthplace. He was born in a small town just north of the Red River on April one, nineteen o six, and in parentheses he put no kidding, So that was pretty cool. I bet you were. I bet you as you were born there, but you'd have to be a lot older. And yeah, I don't think I that wouldn't work out. I was kind of hoping um Cope and Marsh would head out Indian Territory way to do some fossil finding, but I guess not quite there in the range. They're in the area. But I have another message from a listener, this time a Facebook message that talks about a place where Cope and Marsh definitely did not do any exploring, at least not that I know of. Anyway. Colby sent us a note on Facebook and wanted to talk about the Gertrude Bell episode, and he had kind of an interesting point to make that I thought was worth sharing a critique of the podcast. Actually, he said, I love your podcast as a huge history geek. I think I've listened to almost everyone I know. Your podcasts aren't meant to be the super definitive statements on subjects, But the Gertrude Bell one bothered me a bit. The end painted a really rosy picture on the formation of Iraq to be overly pc It was really a Western and paternalistic view on the whole thing. I can't believe I said something like that. L O L is what he said in parentheses. The British killed thousands putting down regional, ethnic and tribal rebellions at this time in Mesopotamia. They stray villages and farms from the air and use poison gas I believe, the only Western power to do so after World War One. So an interesting point to make. I mean, I thought that we did sort of talk about how A. T. Wilson tried to squash down the Arab rebellions in part two of that podcast, but definitely wasn't a big mention, and so it's worth bringing up again. It's a good reminder. I guess this wasn't all just happy happy The Arabs were glad to go along with having the British rule them for this time. And so thank you Colby for writing in. I mean, we definitely can't cover every aspect of every episode as much in depth as we would like to so, or the or the implications of what always happens later in the century, and this is a clear example of if you could, you could keep going up until the modern day. So true. Yeah, it's always it's always a good reminder from listeners to hear what you wish we talk about next time. Yeah, and we appreciate that when people write in with critiques and point out things, and especially when they do so in such a nice way. Yeah. This great cool, So thanks again Colby, Thanks everyone who writes into us. If you'd like to send us a comment on a podcast, or maybe even just an idea suggestion for a future podcast, you can find us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook and we're on Twitter at miss in History. And as you bide your time until this part two of them words comes out, we do have a lot of paleontology articles, don't we We do, and you can find them by searching on our homepage at www dot how staff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff Works dot com. M

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to bling a chokerate boarding and we had a lot of fun this year. I've had a lot of fun at least covering scientific rivalries. We've talked about horse Wells in the Gas War, and of course Tesla and Edison in 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 it's got a lot of strong support. Yeah. I was about to say that the rivalries out there, but yeah, Tesla is definitely kind of a favorite these days, I would say so. Those episodes and the Mary Annie 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 off 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 published 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 are titled today. Uh 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 a 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 that ended up damaging both of their reputations and maybe even hindered scientific progress in some respect. Yes, 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. Auth Neil Charles Marsh was born October 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 farms someday. But fortunately for Marsh, he had a very influential uncle. His His mother, who had died when he was only three years old, was the sister of the banker philanthropist George Peabody, much beloved sister luckily luckily so, of course, Peabody had one of the largest personal fortunes in the world, according to Panics article, and it was a good person to to have, especially if if Marcia's father was kind of struggling with his with his work. So around age 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 Peabody could have advanced him the money for the education further ahead of time. Yeah, you would hope so. But that did 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 earn a master's degree from Yale Sheffield School of Science a couple of 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 off the money, it's a job. Ultimately, though, he was the first professor of paleontology in North America according to Huntington's article, so a big, 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 in July 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 Merrimanning episode. He recorded his impressions of this when he was only six years old, so he was like you deplena 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 and 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 state bid and after they returned home, even though their lives did take somewhat different path. 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 Pearn, 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 lighty study of the first US dinosaur find and hadn't Field, New Jersey in eighteen fifty eight, totally changed this perception. Lightie 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 Lightie 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 Cop looked up to and learned from. If you're only going to do one year at at penn he 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 Tonius marsh I after Marsh. I mean, that's a pretty nice thing to do for your your fellow scientist, I would say. Um. 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, Um that year to 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 Mosasaurus copi. Honest, uh, that just sure didn't count for a whole lot in the long run. But still it's a gesture. 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, kind him out of the process. Hope is taking around this place, showing off what he's working on, giving him the tour supposedly, I guess, being totally open about it, not assuming that Marsh is going to backstab him. But that's exactly what happened. 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 plesiosaur, the fossilized bones of which had been shipped to him by an Army surgeon from Kansas. And this is how they receive eve to their their fossils. Sometimes this reminded me a little bit of the Merry 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 from somebody else. Yeah, when we talk about we'll talk about the bone collectors and so forth a little more in part two of this, but the sort of introduces that idea. But anyway, Cope he got these bones. He called this previously unknown pleas asur Alasmosaurus. Unfortunately, though, when Cope was reconstructing the Elasmo Sours 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 to who 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 tail, So pretty pretty bad, yeah, and light. He also discussed this air 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 embarrassed, yes, he's embarrassed in front of his colleague, and 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 Marcia'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 Jersey, 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 can't handle being wrong essentially. Uh. 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 um, he March later thought out and bought two additional copies, which he did hang on to as if he wanted to have them as some kind of ammunition. Um, seems like something that your buddy wouldn't do. 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 he did make his share of mistakes. Just one example, he once put a camera source skull on the skeleton of an apatosaurus, which, according to an article by Renee Clary, James wander c 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 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 ever 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, but likely right. But the feud between Cope and Marsh really began in earnest in the eighteen seventies, when they both headed west to hunt for fossils. Marsha's first expedition was in eighteen seventy and it was sponsored by Yale, and he had this whole entourage with him, including about a dozen Yale students and even an army escort that they acquired once they had made it to what's now the Midwest, and they explored Kansas, Wyoming, in 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 Yale 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 the 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 discussed some podcast, 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 it was number two you too, or or even lower. So we're gonna be discussing examples of some of these tactics in the next episode. Is 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 the 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, and 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, but a lot, a lot, yes, that's for sure. All right, Well, before we sign off for today, we do have a couple of pieces of the listener mail. One is an email from a listener Bill and I just wanted to read this. It's just a couple of sentences, but I wanted to read it because he brings up Indian tear Tory. Oh your favorite place, my favorite place, he says. An old friend used to talk about his dad's birth certificate, stating Oklahoma, Indian Territory as his birthplace. He was born in a small town just north of the Red River on April one, nineteen o six, and in parentheses he put no kidding, So that was pretty cool. I bet you were. I bet you as you were born there, but you'd have to be a lot older. And yeah, I don't think I that wouldn't work out. I was kind of hoping um Cope and Marsh would head out Indian Territory way to do some fossil finding, but I guess not quite there in the range. They're in the area. But I have another message from a listener, this time a Facebook message that talks about a place where Cope and Marsh definitely did not do any exploring, at least not that I know of. Anyway. Colby sent us a note on Facebook and wanted to talk about the Gertrude Bell episode, and he had kind of an interesting point to make that I thought was worth sharing a critique of the podcast. Actually, he said, I love your podcast as a huge history geek. I think I've listened to almost everyone I know. Your podcasts aren't meant to be the super definitive statements on subjects, But the Gertrude Bell one bothered me a bit. The end painted a really rosy picture on the formation of Iraq to be overly pc It was really a Western and paternalistic view on the whole thing. I can't believe I said something like that. L O L is what he said in parentheses. The British killed thousands putting down regional, ethnic and tribal rebellions at this time in Mesopotamia. They stray villages and farms from the air and use poison gas I believe, the only Western power to do so after World War One. So an interesting point to make. I mean, I thought that we did sort of talk about how A. T. Wilson tried to squash down the Arab rebellions in part two of that podcast, but definitely wasn't a big mention, and so it's worth bringing up again. It's a good reminder. I guess this wasn't all just happy happy The Arabs were glad to go along with having the British rule them for this time. And so thank you Colby for writing in. I mean, we definitely can't cover every aspect of every episode as much in depth as we would like to so, or the or the implications of what always happens later in the century, and this is a clear example of if you could, you could keep going up until the modern day. So true. Yeah, it's always it's always a good reminder from listeners to hear what you wish we talk about next time. Yeah, and we appreciate that when people write in with critiques and point out things, and especially when they do so in such a nice way. Yeah. This great cool, So thanks again Colby, Thanks everyone who writes into us. If you'd like to send us a comment on a podcast, or maybe even just an idea suggestion for a future podcast, you can find us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook and we're on Twitter at miss in History. And as you bide your time until this part two of them words comes out, we do have a lot of paleontology articles, don't we We do, and you can find them by searching on our homepage at www dot how staff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff Works dot com. M