Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to bling a truck reporting and I and we're continuing on here with our discussion of the Bone Wars, which are also sometimes known as the Dinosaur Wars or the Great Dinosaur Feud. And it's the story of an intense scientific rivalry between two really talented nineteenth century paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and off Neil Charles Marsh. And they entered the field at a time when very few dinosaur species were known and competed defined fossils, name the species that those fossils belonged to, and to be the first to publish their findings. And in part one of this episode, we learned a little bit about Cope and Marsh's backgrounds and how they got to be paleontologists because they took very different paths, as we'll get into a little bit more later. And we also talked about how they started out as friends, or at least as friendly colleagues or acquaintances. I don't know if even their early friendships wud Yeah, I wouldn't categorize that as a friendship. People do friendly. Yes, they were friendly, and uh, we also talked about what exactly it was that caused this enormous riff to form between them. Yeah, and when we left them off, Cope and Marsh had just started to look west in search of fossils. In this episode, though, we're going to be talking a bit about what they found out west and these sometimes shady tactics that they employed to be the first to get credit for their discoveries. We're also going to take a look at the more official stage on which their battle played out and where it got truly truly nasty. But first we want to take a closer look at who these guys were, because it might help provide at least a little more insight as to why they were destined to clash in the first place, the clash of the dinosaur hunters. Okay, so we've already talked about the differences between Cope and Marsha's socio economic backgrounds and their educational training, which is kind of where it all started. And if you'll recall, Marsh was poor raised on a farm until his uncle, George Peabody stepped in with the financial support that Marsh needed to go to prep school. And then onto Yale. And it's Peabody's generous donation at Marsha's request that also led to the creation of a Museum of Natural Sciences at Yale, which was a move that then helped secure Marsha professorship there and it created a great resource for him while he was hunting for fossils. Yeah, he had the Yale in its corner. But all of Peabody's support did unfortunately come with a catch. According to an article by James Pannic an American Heritage, it turned out that Uncle George had a certain stipulation for anyone named in his will, and that stipulation involved marriage. When he was twenty five and a freshman at Yale, marsh received eaved a letter from his aunt indicating this stipulation, and it read quote, if any of his nephews should in any way conduct himself as to disgrace themselves and him or now mine this, should any of them form a marriage connection or even get engaged before they had the means of supporting a family, they should never have a cent of his money. He desired me to communicate this to all his nephews. Yeah, and apparently there was one other nephew who had gotten cut out of the will for marrying too soon, so Peabody was serious about put to the test. By the time March was financially independent, he was well into his thirties, so Pennett kind of suggests maybe he was too set in his ways to marry at that point, or you know, just wasn't inclined to do so, or just that he had this strange break on his life until he could be financially independent. He had some other friendly sort of issues though, Yeah, just basically the issue was he didn't have many friends. According to an article by Tom Huntington in American History, people found Marsh to be quote autocratic and petty and accused him of taking credit for the work of his assistance and for falling behind on paying his employees, never a good move. At one of his clubs, they apparently nicknamed him quote the Great dismal Swamp. That's a bad sign. He doesn't do well with the nicknames. No, she really doesn't, except for the bone wars that one is. It's a pretty great nickname for his rivalry. Cope, on the other hand, came from a very different kind of background, which we discussed on the on the last podcast. It was a more privileged beginning, if you remember in the last episode. Though he didn't have a lot of formal education. He was self taught and he was a part of this whole gentleman's world of natural science that existed in the nineteenth century. Deblina and I were talking about it earlier, how it just fascinates us that gentleman would choose to to science in some form, and there's something very romantic about it. I mean, we both talked about how it's just there's something very ideal. A little troubling too, because it ends up with you end up with personal disputes like this. But um Cope was considered to be very brilliant, considered to be a prodigy, and his life was also very different from marsh Is on a personal level too. We mentioned that he was married, he had a wife, he had a daughter named Julia. Unlike marsh to Cope was pretty charming. The friends he had seemed to really like him, really care for him, although they would agree that he could kind of be arrogant sometimes he could be quick tempered. According to Huntington's article, paleontologist William Berryman Scott, who took Cope side in the war with Marsh instead of Cope Quote, despite his greatness in some measure, indeed because of it, he had some unfortunate personal peculiarities. Was pugnacious and quarrelsome and made many enemies, so many enemies, many friends, no friends on the other side, kind of unusual guys. So when we last left off of our story, Cope had kind of broken the mold of those gentlemen naturalists that we were describing. They usually waited for things to be sent to them to study. They didn't actually go out on these great expeditions. They limit their study to the comfort of their own home exactly. And Cope, like Marsh, went out to hunt fossils, but he had a different way of traveling from Marsh. We mentioned how Marsh went out with this entourage and had guides in a military escort. Cope did not have a resource like Yale behind him, so he didn't have all these graduate assistants to come with him, so he often put together teams for his expeditions when he got wherever he was going. Also, since Cope was a Quaker, he really used a military escort because he was a pacifist, and he pretty much refused to carry a revolver, which a lot of people thought was crazy because of the threat of hostile Native American tribes out west, among other things. Yeah, Bandit Taiwan, then all sorts of of risks he might come across, not to mention just the wildlife Pentually, um Cope did things his way, though, and he was very tough about it. Panic relates how Cope would read the Bible every night, even when he was out in the field, and if others in his camp would would laugh at him, he'd sort of stare them down until they would just uh straightened up, you know, stop laughing, stop making fun of him. Cope and Marsh did both have successes in the field that we've kind of described the way they carried about their expeditions, but they did both have successes though Marsh, of course, with his official Yale connection and his Peabody inheritance at his disposal, did have more resources to throw at the situation. However, both to some extent, Cope especially or reliant on being associated with one of several geological surveys of the West that were going on at the time. It was kind of an official backing almost Yeah. Being involved with these surveys provided economic support for their work and a vehicle for publishing their findings, and this becomes important later in our story as well. So just kind of remember that. We talked a little in the last podcast also about how Marsh and Cope started going at each other mostly by way of letters after their initial expeditions out west, when they started really competing in a sense for fossil finds out there. But they really launched into full scale warfare in eighteen seventy seven when Arthur Lakes, who was a mining teacher, wrote to Marsh saying that he discovered some fossils near Morris in Colorado. Now Marsh didn't reply, so Lakes said, well, okay, I want to do something with these, so he sent some samples to Cope. When Marsh heard that, though he sent Lakes some cash to win him over, he was like, well, I don't want Cope to get these. After that, after getting that cash, Lakes asked Cope to please send back his samples so that he could work with the Marsh And according to Huntington's part of what Marsh found among Lake's initial find were the remains the first remains of the Stegosaurus around the time. The same time, too, another teacher named O. W. Lucas also found some fossils in Colorado. He contacted Cope first about it, and Cope jumped at the chance to to check out the fossils. Overall, according to Huntington's, Cope's Colorado finds actually turned out to be better than marshes because they were bigger and they could be taken out of the surrounding rock without breaking them. Marsh, of course, so did come out on top in other situations. In the summer of eighteen seventy seven, for example, two railway workers in Como, Wyoming named William Reid and W. E. Carlin contacted Marsh about some fossils that they had discovered as a site known as Como Bluff, and marshal course and his bone collectors out there. They ended up gathering thirty tons of fossils from the Jurassic Age and shipped all the stuff back to Marsh at Yale. And it was very high quality, you know, large bones. It was well preserved. The result of of Marcia's investigation of this fine too, really speaks to how high quality it was. He discovered several new species and named um the Allosaurus, the Diplodocus, the Camptosaurus, all from those Como bluff fine and also notably he named the Brontosaurus out of those fines, one of the world's best known dinosaurs, and Sara doutis favorite dinosaur. I should mention interesting, though, that the naming of Brontosaurus is actually considered one of Marcia's biggest mistakes. After he died, scientists realized that the creature Marcia named Brontosaurus was just another example of a dinosaur Marsh had already named the Patosaurus, so the designation Brontosaurus was taken away obviously, though that's kind of an enduring yes. So it's probably clear by now that Cope and Marsh often weren't the ones actually digging in the ground, collecting fossils, or even supervising digs themselves, Hence all the talk of sending bones back east to them. They accomplished a lot of what they did through the help of bone collectors. Cope and Marsh would occasionally visit the dig sites, but the fossil collectors were sort of the foot soldiers in this battle that they were waging against each other. Too. There really was a lot of taking sides. Reid took Marsh's side and became a major collector for him. Well, Carlin switched over to Cope side, Lucas remained on Cope side, while Lakes stuck with Marsh. I was surprised by Lucas, I think, since he sort of got slighted at the beginning by Marsh. But I guess I was okay, might have been better. Yeah, I mean that means a lot. It does. Occasionally though, according to Huntington, again, the two peontologists would try to woo each other's collectors away from the other. Um. I don't know if they were attempting them with better publication of the works or money all the time. But that wasn't the most extreme of the tactics used in this war. I mean that already sounds a little bit dicey. But they also spied on each other. Marsh at least would even communicate in code with his collectors to try to keep Cope from figuring out what he was up to, what his bone collectors were up to. They referred to Cope as Jones in this Sneaky correspondence, and one of Marsha's guys was so paranoid about Cope spying on him that when a man showed up at their camp one day in eighteen seventy eight, he asked for a handwriting sample in case it was Cope in disguise. 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. According to an article by Renee Clary, James Wandersie, and Amy Capernelli in Science Scope, March was said to have planted unrelated fossils at some of Cope's dig sites to slow down his progress too. So it's not just invading the other guy's camp and the reputation for honesty there, well, I mean that that takes it to another level. So um, tampering with the with the science essentially, Yeah, I mean, and that was the really shocking part of Cope and Marks's tactics is that they just they went beyond trying to harm and hinder each other in their efforts. They actually may have harmed the field itself from maybe even hindered scientific progress in some cases. For example, if March's guy read unearthed more bones than he could use, he smashed them so that Carlin couldn't get to them. Marsh is also said to have ordered that certain sites be blown up with dynamite to keep Cope from getting to the fossils, although, according to a two thousand eight article by gen Viev Jiski, at least when it comes to one of the sites that was supposedly blown up, Quary ten, which is in Morris Some, Colorado, those allegations are false. Some researchers found Quarry ten in two thousand two using Lakes's field notes and determined that Lakes probably just shoved some dirt in there and then said he dynamited it to discourage the competition from checking it out. The way I sort of read that though, is maybe he had his history of dynamite things already established. Though if people were going to believe that could be well. It may have been out west that some of the more colorful war tactics were used by these two. As we hinted in the previous episode, the really decisive battleground for the Bone Wars turned out to be Washington, d c. And this is where Marsh really pulled ahead, because even though he wasn't winning any popularity contests, he was much savvier when it came to politics than Cope. Was. The first development that really set the ball rolling for Marsh had to do with those surveys out west that we talked about earlier in the late eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties or so, Congress, upon the advice of the National Academy 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. Uh So, soon Marsh became the official vertebrate paleontologist of the United States Geological Survey. Not too surprising there, if if he's the head of the National Academy of Sciences already, he knows the new head of the Geological Survey. Uh. I mean, he was certainly at this point winning the feud in terms of political clout in the science world, in terms of how his career was progressing. When Cope lost that government support, it really devastated his research too, and his publication efforts. He just didn't have any funding anymore, and his personal wealth, which he had also put toward his efforts in paleontology over all these years, was starting to dry up. Cope, looking for a get rich quick sort of scheme, tried to make up for it by investing in a silver mine in New Mexico, but that turned out to be a bust. He lost everything, and uh it really seemed at this point where that there was a clear winner and loser in this feud, but that didn't seem to be enough for Marsh. He took things a step further and tried to have Cope's fossils confiscated, claiming that they had been collected with government funds. Cope completely denied this. He said that he had used his own money to collect the fossils. And then he decided to fight back against Marsh and the only way that he could at that point, and that was through the press. He approached a writer for the New York Herald and told that writer basically every bad thing that he had ever thought or heard about Marsh, and this kicked off a very public, very brutal battle of words between Cope and Marsh that was splashed all over the pages of the New York Herald between January twelfth, eighteen eighty in January eighteen eighty under headlines like scientists wage bitter warfare. And they went way back in their relationship too. They weren't just considering the last few years as their at their ammo um. They went back to the beginning. According to hunting Kin's article, Cope said things like Marsh was quote, unable to properly classify and name the fossils his explorers secured. It's pretty damning. Uh. He said that Marsh took credit for his assistance work, and he also accused Marsh and the U S Geological Survey of corruption and Mithews of government funds, which is pretty key here. For his part, Marsh brought up how Cope rushed to get his discoveries into print, you know, before they were ready, often making errors in the process. He also brought up that embarrassing mistake with the elasmosaur, among other things. We discussed that in the in the last podcast, flipping the head and tail of the dinosaur and then having Marsh be the one to point it out. This newspaper feud didn't last long, but it was really damaging to both of their reputation, so nobody won. In this instance, Cope struggled to find a buyer for his massive fossil collection because he needed the money. Eventually he could only sell part of it, and then he hit the lecture circuit and tried to secure a paying position at a college. He didn't have that backing behind him that Marsh had at Yale. I think I saw him described in one spot as a rogue rogue scientist or a rogue paleontologist, and now he has all this bad press out too exactly, so doubly he he just doesn't have anyone to go to at that point. It just proved to be really tough to find a pain position. According to Panix article. He finally got a position though, and a small salary, at the University of Pennsylvania in eighteen eighty nine, and he turned out to be a pretty good teacher. But of course that wasn't his life school, that's not what he had really wanted. He died in eight of renal failure at age fifty six according to PBS, and not right away, but in a couple of years. Congress did investigate the u S geological surveys use of funds and ended up cutting their funding and completely doing away with the Department of Paleontology. Marsh was forced to resign, and for the first time he had to accept a salary from Yale. He died of pneumonia in eighteen nine, two years after Marsh, at the age of sixty seven. He only had a hundred and eighty six dollars in his bank account. When he died of all that Peabody money that had come to him. His collection ended up in the Smithsonian and at Yale, and part of Cope's collection ended up at the American Museum of Natural History. That's like, those are the two or the three winners in the story. I think the places in us too. You know that we can go see them today. Yeah, and that there's this interesting story for us to look into. But looking at this result there doesn't really seem to be like a winner at the end. Neither of these guys seemed to really come out on top. But of course they were both very accomplished overall, and they both made major contributions to science. If you stuck up some of their accomplishments those side by side, what does it look like? We wanted to take a look at that, So first we'll look at the naming part of it. Well, March seemed to win when it came to naming dinosaur species. He named eighty six out of thet some odd ones that they named. Total. Cope published war though according to Science Scope, his record of twelve hundred publications is still unbeaten. Wow, I mean, I guess that is not too surprising he won that side of the battle. Um Marsh notably provided evidence for the theory of evolution, to which Darwin himself called quote the best support of the theory of evolution at the time. Um He found thirty specimens, for example, that allowed him to outline the evolutionary history of the horse, and he recognized similarities of the modern bird in extinct dinosaurs. Cope, on the other hand, because of his religious convictions, probably didn't support Darwin's theory. But as science Scope points out, he's known for Cope's rule, which is the observation that organisms of a species tend to get larger over time than the fossil records. So it just depends on what you're judging them by, which one of them one. Yeah, and and it certainly made me wonder too how much they accomplished because they did have the other one they're competing and egging him on, or whether they could have accomplished more if they had worked in better concert together than they did, not trying to sabotage each other's work as much. No, but it's interesting, just another tidbit here. Their competition continued a little bit even after the grave, about a century after Cope's death, national geographic photographer Luis Sahoyo Scott cope skull from the University of Pennsylvania. Cope had willed his body to science, so this was available, and he took the skull with him as he traveled around the world interviewing paleontologists for a book, and he referred to the skull as he was doing this as Eddie. Later, he and paleontologist Robert Baker tried to have cope skull named as the hype specimen, which means that it would have been the standard of a species to which all others are compared. He wanted to have it named as a type specimen for Homo sapiens, but it turned out that the late botanist Careless Linnaeus had already been named the type specimen for Homo sapiens. So thank goodness for Linnaeus able to to step in there with his skull and and stop this feud from continuing after death. Yeah, I read elsewhere that one reason that Cope will his body to sciences that he wanted them to compare his skull size to Marsha's after Marsh died, But Marsh didn't 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 or Marsh do you have a favorite? Terah, who do you think you would have been pals with? I? Well, I mean I don't know. Do I think the guy who didn't have any friends? I mean, odds are You're a nice person, so I could see I should have made friends with Marsh. I don't know they I found myself during this story kind of rooting for each of them, and I think that for each of them, and then thinking that they were each terrible, terrible people. So maybe I'll pass on the Yeah, okay, you're taking your pleading the fifth. Yeah, do you have a Do you have 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 that's not cool. Maybe Cop did it too, but I didn't read any evidence that he had. Okay, I'll stick to the Braunosaurus. Stick with the brontosaurus. There you go, friends, Uh, well, before we go off to too far on a dinosaur tangent. So we have a very special listener meal today, wouldn't you say, to Blina, Special and delicious, Special and delicious. It's a bottle of wine. Yeah, it's a gift we got in the mail. We got it from listener Dana. And what's it called again, It's called Brushelle Vineyards Rose. We're gonna try it out after our recording session. But um, we wanted to read Dana's note too, because she had some ideas for future podcast too. She wrote Derris to Blina and Sarah, Greetings from Paso Robless, California. My husband and I work in the wine industry out here, and we just finished a very long and grueling harvest feed sin. My husband admitted that your podcast helped him through all the brute donkey work that harvesting tails from pits to punch downs to the bottling line. So I wanted to say thank you for providing such a welcome day version during the most exhausting time of the year. Of course, we do love it. She went on to say, please accept this bottle of rose from the wine or a work at as our humble thanks. Sorry to Bolina, it isn't sweet, but I grew up in Atlanta, and I guarantee it's what my mom called a quote porch founder. That's while we're for for after the episode. Um. But she She went on to say too that she figured she would use this opportunity to say that the historic alcohol series we did with their favorite obvious reasons, but she really wanted us to revisit wine as a topic at some point, and a lot of listeners have been suggesting this lately. Um something else on wine. Her suggestions in particular were the quote cunning wealthy wine barrens of the offs child Dan dynasty or the story of why Charlemagne's wife insisted Burgundy plant more white grapes. She went on to say, it's very funny, I promise so cool idea. Thank you Dana for for some wine suggestions and for the look. We're looking forward to it, thank you so much. Yes, and it's a lovely gift and a lovely thing to enjoy, but we're unfortunately going to be partaking of it for kind of sad reasons. We're happy, happy and sad for us, but happy for our producer and editor, Lizzie, who has been with us for a long time. She's been editing this podcast for a very long time, and she's moving on to another really wonderful opportunity. Lizzie is a fabulous photographer and she's going to be pursuing that a little bit more directly, and we're gonna miss her so much. We are. Lizzie is so fun to work with. She always has good comments on on what we're talking about. It's always fun to rehash the subjects with her after recording and sort of let slip our secret opinions on certain topic and she always makes wonderful things happen in the editing process. Whenever we have any crazy idea about inserting music into the podcast or anything like that, she always helps us work it out or just cleaning us up, you know, yes, making us sound good. Um. But we are so happy for Lizzie to go off to new and better things. And um, like de Blanta just said, she's a fantastic photographer. She has a website, Lizzie photo dot com. It's Lizzie with a why as it took me way too long to why do we learn? Um, But she's great. Good luck, We will miss you. Good luck, Lizzie, you will be missed. To keep in touch with us, and um, hopefully we'll get to see a lot of your great work out there very soon. So on that note, we want to wrap it up and invite anyone who wants to to write to us with ideas, comments, questions, anything that is on your mind. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also find us on Facebook and we're on Twitter at Myston History. And as we mentioned in the last Bone Wars episode, we have so many articles on dinosaurs. We actually have a site director who loves dinosaurs, so it ensures that we are well stocked on all topics paleontology related, So go check that out. It's all in our science section on www. 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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to bling a truck reporting and I and we're continuing on here with our discussion of the Bone Wars, which are also sometimes known as the Dinosaur Wars or the Great Dinosaur Feud. And it's the story of an intense scientific rivalry between two really talented nineteenth century paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and off Neil Charles Marsh. And they entered the field at a time when very few dinosaur species were known and competed defined fossils, name the species that those fossils belonged to, and to be the first to publish their findings. And in part one of this episode, we learned a little bit about Cope and Marsh's backgrounds and how they got to be paleontologists because they took very different paths, as we'll get into a little bit more later. And we also talked about how they started out as friends, or at least as friendly colleagues or acquaintances. I don't know if even their early friendships wud Yeah, I wouldn't categorize that as a friendship. People do friendly. Yes, they were friendly, and uh, we also talked about what exactly it was that caused this enormous riff to form between them. Yeah, and when we left them off, Cope and Marsh had just started to look west in search of fossils. In this episode, though, we're going to be talking a bit about what they found out west and these sometimes shady tactics that they employed to be the first to get credit for their discoveries. We're also going to take a look at the more official stage on which their battle played out and where it got truly truly nasty. But first we want to take a closer look at who these guys were, because it might help provide at least a little more insight as to why they were destined to clash in the first place, the clash of the dinosaur hunters. Okay, so we've already talked about the differences between Cope and Marsha's socio economic backgrounds and their educational training, which is kind of where it all started. And if you'll recall, Marsh was poor raised on a farm until his uncle, George Peabody stepped in with the financial support that Marsh needed to go to prep school. And then onto Yale. And it's Peabody's generous donation at Marsha's request that also led to the creation of a Museum of Natural Sciences at Yale, which was a move that then helped secure Marsha professorship there and it created a great resource for him while he was hunting for fossils. Yeah, he had the Yale in its corner. But all of Peabody's support did unfortunately come with a catch. According to an article by James Pannic an American Heritage, it turned out that Uncle George had a certain stipulation for anyone named in his will, and that stipulation involved marriage. When he was twenty five and a freshman at Yale, marsh received eaved a letter from his aunt indicating this stipulation, and it read quote, if any of his nephews should in any way conduct himself as to disgrace themselves and him or now mine this, should any of them form a marriage connection or even get engaged before they had the means of supporting a family, they should never have a cent of his money. He desired me to communicate this to all his nephews. Yeah, and apparently there was one other nephew who had gotten cut out of the will for marrying too soon, so Peabody was serious about put to the test. By the time March was financially independent, he was well into his thirties, so Pennett kind of suggests maybe he was too set in his ways to marry at that point, or you know, just wasn't inclined to do so, or just that he had this strange break on his life until he could be financially independent. He had some other friendly sort of issues though, Yeah, just basically the issue was he didn't have many friends. According to an article by Tom Huntington in American History, people found Marsh to be quote autocratic and petty and accused him of taking credit for the work of his assistance and for falling behind on paying his employees, never a good move. At one of his clubs, they apparently nicknamed him quote the Great dismal Swamp. That's a bad sign. He doesn't do well with the nicknames. No, she really doesn't, except for the bone wars that one is. It's a pretty great nickname for his rivalry. Cope, on the other hand, came from a very different kind of background, which we discussed on the on the last podcast. It was a more privileged beginning, if you remember in the last episode. Though he didn't have a lot of formal education. He was self taught and he was a part of this whole gentleman's world of natural science that existed in the nineteenth century. Deblina and I were talking about it earlier, how it just fascinates us that gentleman would choose to to science in some form, and there's something very romantic about it. I mean, we both talked about how it's just there's something very ideal. A little troubling too, because it ends up with you end up with personal disputes like this. But um Cope was considered to be very brilliant, considered to be a prodigy, and his life was also very different from marsh Is on a personal level too. We mentioned that he was married, he had a wife, he had a daughter named Julia. Unlike marsh to Cope was pretty charming. The friends he had seemed to really like him, really care for him, although they would agree that he could kind of be arrogant sometimes he could be quick tempered. According to Huntington's article, paleontologist William Berryman Scott, who took Cope side in the war with Marsh instead of Cope Quote, despite his greatness in some measure, indeed because of it, he had some unfortunate personal peculiarities. Was pugnacious and quarrelsome and made many enemies, so many enemies, many friends, no friends on the other side, kind of unusual guys. So when we last left off of our story, Cope had kind of broken the mold of those gentlemen naturalists that we were describing. They usually waited for things to be sent to them to study. They didn't actually go out on these great expeditions. They limit their study to the comfort of their own home exactly. And Cope, like Marsh, went out to hunt fossils, but he had a different way of traveling from Marsh. We mentioned how Marsh went out with this entourage and had guides in a military escort. Cope did not have a resource like Yale behind him, so he didn't have all these graduate assistants to come with him, so he often put together teams for his expeditions when he got wherever he was going. Also, since Cope was a Quaker, he really used a military escort because he was a pacifist, and he pretty much refused to carry a revolver, which a lot of people thought was crazy because of the threat of hostile Native American tribes out west, among other things. Yeah, Bandit Taiwan, then all sorts of of risks he might come across, not to mention just the wildlife Pentually, um Cope did things his way, though, and he was very tough about it. Panic relates how Cope would read the Bible every night, even when he was out in the field, and if others in his camp would would laugh at him, he'd sort of stare them down until they would just uh straightened up, you know, stop laughing, stop making fun of him. Cope and Marsh did both have successes in the field that we've kind of described the way they carried about their expeditions, but they did both have successes though Marsh, of course, with his official Yale connection and his Peabody inheritance at his disposal, did have more resources to throw at the situation. However, both to some extent, Cope especially or reliant on being associated with one of several geological surveys of the West that were going on at the time. It was kind of an official backing almost Yeah. Being involved with these surveys provided economic support for their work and a vehicle for publishing their findings, and this becomes important later in our story as well. So just kind of remember that. We talked a little in the last podcast also about how Marsh and Cope started going at each other mostly by way of letters after their initial expeditions out west, when they started really competing in a sense for fossil finds out there. But they really launched into full scale warfare in eighteen seventy seven when Arthur Lakes, who was a mining teacher, wrote to Marsh saying that he discovered some fossils near Morris in Colorado. Now Marsh didn't reply, so Lakes said, well, okay, I want to do something with these, so he sent some samples to Cope. When Marsh heard that, though he sent Lakes some cash to win him over, he was like, well, I don't want Cope to get these. After that, after getting that cash, Lakes asked Cope to please send back his samples so that he could work with the Marsh And according to Huntington's part of what Marsh found among Lake's initial find were the remains the first remains of the Stegosaurus around the time. The same time, too, another teacher named O. W. Lucas also found some fossils in Colorado. He contacted Cope first about it, and Cope jumped at the chance to to check out the fossils. Overall, according to Huntington's, Cope's Colorado finds actually turned out to be better than marshes because they were bigger and they could be taken out of the surrounding rock without breaking them. Marsh, of course, so did come out on top in other situations. In the summer of eighteen seventy seven, for example, two railway workers in Como, Wyoming named William Reid and W. E. Carlin contacted Marsh about some fossils that they had discovered as a site known as Como Bluff, and marshal course and his bone collectors out there. They ended up gathering thirty tons of fossils from the Jurassic Age and shipped all the stuff back to Marsh at Yale. And it was very high quality, you know, large bones. It was well preserved. The result of of Marcia's investigation of this fine too, really speaks to how high quality it was. He discovered several new species and named um the Allosaurus, the Diplodocus, the Camptosaurus, all from those Como bluff fine and also notably he named the Brontosaurus out of those fines, one of the world's best known dinosaurs, and Sara doutis favorite dinosaur. I should mention interesting, though, that the naming of Brontosaurus is actually considered one of Marcia's biggest mistakes. After he died, scientists realized that the creature Marcia named Brontosaurus was just another example of a dinosaur Marsh had already named the Patosaurus, so the designation Brontosaurus was taken away obviously, though that's kind of an enduring yes. So it's probably clear by now that Cope and Marsh often weren't the ones actually digging in the ground, collecting fossils, or even supervising digs themselves, Hence all the talk of sending bones back east to them. They accomplished a lot of what they did through the help of bone collectors. Cope and Marsh would occasionally visit the dig sites, but the fossil collectors were sort of the foot soldiers in this battle that they were waging against each other. Too. There really was a lot of taking sides. Reid took Marsh's side and became a major collector for him. Well, Carlin switched over to Cope side, Lucas remained on Cope side, while Lakes stuck with Marsh. I was surprised by Lucas, I think, since he sort of got slighted at the beginning by Marsh. But I guess I was okay, might have been better. Yeah, I mean that means a lot. It does. Occasionally though, according to Huntington, again, the two peontologists would try to woo each other's collectors away from the other. Um. I don't know if they were attempting them with better publication of the works or money all the time. But that wasn't the most extreme of the tactics used in this war. I mean that already sounds a little bit dicey. But they also spied on each other. Marsh at least would even communicate in code with his collectors to try to keep Cope from figuring out what he was up to, what his bone collectors were up to. They referred to Cope as Jones in this Sneaky correspondence, and one of Marsha's guys was so paranoid about Cope spying on him that when a man showed up at their camp one day in eighteen seventy eight, he asked for a handwriting sample in case it was Cope in disguise. 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. According to an article by Renee Clary, James Wandersie, and Amy Capernelli in Science Scope, March was said to have planted unrelated fossils at some of Cope's dig sites to slow down his progress too. So it's not just invading the other guy's camp and the reputation for honesty there, well, I mean that that takes it to another level. So um, tampering with the with the science essentially, Yeah, I mean, and that was the really shocking part of Cope and Marks's tactics is that they just they went beyond trying to harm and hinder each other in their efforts. They actually may have harmed the field itself from maybe even hindered scientific progress in some cases. For example, if March's guy read unearthed more bones than he could use, he smashed them so that Carlin couldn't get to them. Marsh is also said to have ordered that certain sites be blown up with dynamite to keep Cope from getting to the fossils, although, according to a two thousand eight article by gen Viev Jiski, at least when it comes to one of the sites that was supposedly blown up, Quary ten, which is in Morris Some, Colorado, those allegations are false. Some researchers found Quarry ten in two thousand two using Lakes's field notes and determined that Lakes probably just shoved some dirt in there and then said he dynamited it to discourage the competition from checking it out. The way I sort of read that though, is maybe he had his history of dynamite things already established. Though if people were going to believe that could be well. It may have been out west that some of the more colorful war tactics were used by these two. As we hinted in the previous episode, the really decisive battleground for the Bone Wars turned out to be Washington, d c. And this is where Marsh really pulled ahead, because even though he wasn't winning any popularity contests, he was much savvier when it came to politics than Cope. Was. The first development that really set the ball rolling for Marsh had to do with those surveys out west that we talked about earlier in the late eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties or so, Congress, upon the advice of the National Academy 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. Uh So, soon Marsh became the official vertebrate paleontologist of the United States Geological Survey. Not too surprising there, if if he's the head of the National Academy of Sciences already, he knows the new head of the Geological Survey. Uh. I mean, he was certainly at this point winning the feud in terms of political clout in the science world, in terms of how his career was progressing. When Cope lost that government support, it really devastated his research too, and his publication efforts. He just didn't have any funding anymore, and his personal wealth, which he had also put toward his efforts in paleontology over all these years, was starting to dry up. Cope, looking for a get rich quick sort of scheme, tried to make up for it by investing in a silver mine in New Mexico, but that turned out to be a bust. He lost everything, and uh it really seemed at this point where that there was a clear winner and loser in this feud, but that didn't seem to be enough for Marsh. He took things a step further and tried to have Cope's fossils confiscated, claiming that they had been collected with government funds. Cope completely denied this. He said that he had used his own money to collect the fossils. And then he decided to fight back against Marsh and the only way that he could at that point, and that was through the press. He approached a writer for the New York Herald and told that writer basically every bad thing that he had ever thought or heard about Marsh, and this kicked off a very public, very brutal battle of words between Cope and Marsh that was splashed all over the pages of the New York Herald between January twelfth, eighteen eighty in January eighteen eighty under headlines like scientists wage bitter warfare. And they went way back in their relationship too. They weren't just considering the last few years as their at their ammo um. They went back to the beginning. According to hunting Kin's article, Cope said things like Marsh was quote, unable to properly classify and name the fossils his explorers secured. It's pretty damning. Uh. He said that Marsh took credit for his assistance work, and he also accused Marsh and the U S Geological Survey of corruption and Mithews of government funds, which is pretty key here. For his part, Marsh brought up how Cope rushed to get his discoveries into print, you know, before they were ready, often making errors in the process. He also brought up that embarrassing mistake with the elasmosaur, among other things. We discussed that in the in the last podcast, flipping the head and tail of the dinosaur and then having Marsh be the one to point it out. This newspaper feud didn't last long, but it was really damaging to both of their reputation, so nobody won. In this instance, Cope struggled to find a buyer for his massive fossil collection because he needed the money. Eventually he could only sell part of it, and then he hit the lecture circuit and tried to secure a paying position at a college. He didn't have that backing behind him that Marsh had at Yale. I think I saw him described in one spot as a rogue rogue scientist or a rogue paleontologist, and now he has all this bad press out too exactly, so doubly he he just doesn't have anyone to go to at that point. It just proved to be really tough to find a pain position. According to Panix article. He finally got a position though, and a small salary, at the University of Pennsylvania in eighteen eighty nine, and he turned out to be a pretty good teacher. But of course that wasn't his life school, that's not what he had really wanted. He died in eight of renal failure at age fifty six according to PBS, and not right away, but in a couple of years. Congress did investigate the u S geological surveys use of funds and ended up cutting their funding and completely doing away with the Department of Paleontology. Marsh was forced to resign, and for the first time he had to accept a salary from Yale. He died of pneumonia in eighteen nine, two years after Marsh, at the age of sixty seven. He only had a hundred and eighty six dollars in his bank account. When he died of all that Peabody money that had come to him. His collection ended up in the Smithsonian and at Yale, and part of Cope's collection ended up at the American Museum of Natural History. That's like, those are the two or the three winners in the story. I think the places in us too. You know that we can go see them today. Yeah, and that there's this interesting story for us to look into. But looking at this result there doesn't really seem to be like a winner at the end. Neither of these guys seemed to really come out on top. But of course they were both very accomplished overall, and they both made major contributions to science. If you stuck up some of their accomplishments those side by side, what does it look like? We wanted to take a look at that, So first we'll look at the naming part of it. Well, March seemed to win when it came to naming dinosaur species. He named eighty six out of thet some odd ones that they named. Total. Cope published war though according to Science Scope, his record of twelve hundred publications is still unbeaten. Wow, I mean, I guess that is not too surprising he won that side of the battle. Um Marsh notably provided evidence for the theory of evolution, to which Darwin himself called quote the best support of the theory of evolution at the time. Um He found thirty specimens, for example, that allowed him to outline the evolutionary history of the horse, and he recognized similarities of the modern bird in extinct dinosaurs. Cope, on the other hand, because of his religious convictions, probably didn't support Darwin's theory. But as science Scope points out, he's known for Cope's rule, which is the observation that organisms of a species tend to get larger over time than the fossil records. So it just depends on what you're judging them by, which one of them one. Yeah, and and it certainly made me wonder too how much they accomplished because they did have the other one they're competing and egging him on, or whether they could have accomplished more if they had worked in better concert together than they did, not trying to sabotage each other's work as much. No, but it's interesting, just another tidbit here. Their competition continued a little bit even after the grave, about a century after Cope's death, national geographic photographer Luis Sahoyo Scott cope skull from the University of Pennsylvania. Cope had willed his body to science, so this was available, and he took the skull with him as he traveled around the world interviewing paleontologists for a book, and he referred to the skull as he was doing this as Eddie. Later, he and paleontologist Robert Baker tried to have cope skull named as the hype specimen, which means that it would have been the standard of a species to which all others are compared. He wanted to have it named as a type specimen for Homo sapiens, but it turned out that the late botanist Careless Linnaeus had already been named the type specimen for Homo sapiens. So thank goodness for Linnaeus able to to step in there with his skull and and stop this feud from continuing after death. Yeah, I read elsewhere that one reason that Cope will his body to sciences that he wanted them to compare his skull size to Marsha's after Marsh died, But Marsh didn't 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 or Marsh do you have a favorite? Terah, who do you think you would have been pals with? I? Well, I mean I don't know. Do I think the guy who didn't have any friends? I mean, odds are You're a nice person, so I could see I should have made friends with Marsh. I don't know they I found myself during this story kind of rooting for each of them, and I think that for each of them, and then thinking that they were each terrible, terrible people. So maybe I'll pass on the Yeah, okay, you're taking your pleading the fifth. Yeah, do you have a Do you have 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 that's not cool. Maybe Cop did it too, but I didn't read any evidence that he had. Okay, I'll stick to the Braunosaurus. Stick with the brontosaurus. There you go, friends, Uh, well, before we go off to too far on a dinosaur tangent. So we have a very special listener meal today, wouldn't you say, to Blina, Special and delicious, Special and delicious. It's a bottle of wine. Yeah, it's a gift we got in the mail. We got it from listener Dana. And what's it called again, It's called Brushelle Vineyards Rose. We're gonna try it out after our recording session. But um, we wanted to read Dana's note too, because she had some ideas for future podcast too. She wrote Derris to Blina and Sarah, Greetings from Paso Robless, California. My husband and I work in the wine industry out here, and we just finished a very long and grueling harvest feed sin. My husband admitted that your podcast helped him through all the brute donkey work that harvesting tails from pits to punch downs to the bottling line. So I wanted to say thank you for providing such a welcome day version during the most exhausting time of the year. Of course, we do love it. She went on to say, please accept this bottle of rose from the wine or a work at as our humble thanks. Sorry to Bolina, it isn't sweet, but I grew up in Atlanta, and I guarantee it's what my mom called a quote porch founder. That's while we're for for after the episode. Um. But she She went on to say too that she figured she would use this opportunity to say that the historic alcohol series we did with their favorite obvious reasons, but she really wanted us to revisit wine as a topic at some point, and a lot of listeners have been suggesting this lately. Um something else on wine. Her suggestions in particular were the quote cunning wealthy wine barrens of the offs child Dan dynasty or the story of why Charlemagne's wife insisted Burgundy plant more white grapes. She went on to say, it's very funny, I promise so cool idea. Thank you Dana for for some wine suggestions and for the look. We're looking forward to it, thank you so much. Yes, and it's a lovely gift and a lovely thing to enjoy, but we're unfortunately going to be partaking of it for kind of sad reasons. We're happy, happy and sad for us, but happy for our producer and editor, Lizzie, who has been with us for a long time. She's been editing this podcast for a very long time, and she's moving on to another really wonderful opportunity. Lizzie is a fabulous photographer and she's going to be pursuing that a little bit more directly, and we're gonna miss her so much. We are. Lizzie is so fun to work with. She always has good comments on on what we're talking about. It's always fun to rehash the subjects with her after recording and sort of let slip our secret opinions on certain topic and she always makes wonderful things happen in the editing process. Whenever we have any crazy idea about inserting music into the podcast or anything like that, she always helps us work it out or just cleaning us up, you know, yes, making us sound good. Um. But we are so happy for Lizzie to go off to new and better things. And um, like de Blanta just said, she's a fantastic photographer. She has a website, Lizzie photo dot com. It's Lizzie with a why as it took me way too long to why do we learn? Um, But she's great. Good luck, We will miss you. Good luck, Lizzie, you will be missed. To keep in touch with us, and um, hopefully we'll get to see a lot of your great work out there very soon. So on that note, we want to wrap it up and invite anyone who wants to to write to us with ideas, comments, questions, anything that is on your mind. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also find us on Facebook and we're on Twitter at Myston History. And as we mentioned in the last Bone Wars episode, we have so many articles on dinosaurs. We actually have a site director who loves dinosaurs, so it ensures that we are well stocked on all topics paleontology related, So go check that out. It's all in our science section on www. Dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.