The Bone Wars

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1:29As you could tell, I was crawling out of my skin with excitement. I recently got sent down into the deepest depths of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Dr. Michael Novacek, curator of paleontology, was showing me a fossil vault aptly named the Big Bone Room. Oh my gosh, so can you describe this room that we're in? This is a room full of big bones. Oh my God, this is not open to the public. dinosaur storeroom. And you can see some of these bones are massive. Dinosaurs and I go way back. My mother worked at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History when I was really little. My grandmother made me a T-Rex costume for Halloween.

2:10And when I got a little older, I was even a teen docent.

2:17But as much as Gillian wanted to learn about all the dinosaurs themselves, we sent her to the American Museum of Natural History for a much different reason. Some good old-fashioned gossip. How resonant is that story with paleontologists today? Is it one that's still known, or is it kind of receding into the annals of history? Oh, every paleontologist knows this story, you know, just about, I would think. And it's well known, it's famous, it's part of the lore, it's part of the history. It's not a very noble history. They weren't very noble people. It's a scientific lore so unhinged that it has its own name, the Bone Wars.

2:56This story has everything. Backstabbing, sabotage, congressional hearings, bankruptcy, and lots and lots of dinosaur bones. It was a feud that shook paleontology to its very core and took science out of the museums and lecture halls and onto the pages of tawdry newspapers. Out of this nasty battle, paleontology came to capture the public's imagination and would become foundational to natural history museums across the country. And without it, elementary school field trips today would look very different. Although fossils are famously very, very old, paleontology as a formal science is actually pretty new.

3:38It's only around, I would say, in the 18th century that European scientists began to systematically study fossils and began using fossils as evidence for trying to understand the history of life on Earth and eventually the evolution of life on Earth. That's Lucas Rappel, associate professor of history at Brown and author of Assembling the Dinosaur. He says that Europeans dominated the field during paleontology's nascent years. And one of the most consequential and most overlooked was a British woman named Mary Anning. In 1812, at the age of 12, she discovered an ichthyosaurus skeleton along England's Jurassic Coast.

4:20Natural history was considered a respectable, pious leisure pursuit, which is to say that regular people, including working class people, were encouraged in Victorian England to study natural history. It would take a few more decades for paleontology to take off in the United States, despite North America being home to some of the most impressive prehistoric specimens in the world. And that's mostly because American scientists were seen as upstarts. So they were not taken very seriously by Europeans. And that was generally true not just for science. So the United States had kind of, I would say, a cultural inferiority complex for much of the 19th century.

5:01A lot of Americans saw themselves as being less erudite, less learned, right? Kind of a younger culture, a less sophisticated culture. And science was no exception. And in the middle of the 19th century, two men hoped to distinguish not just American paleontology, but themselves as scientifically worthy. Edward Drinker Cope was born in 1840, two years before the word dinosaur was even coined. He came from a wealthy Quaker family in Pennsylvania and took an immediate liking to natural history as a child. He even published his first scholarly article at age 19. And he just started, you know, force of personality to wage a career in science, much to his father's dismay.

5:51This is Mark Jaffe, author of The Gilded Dinosaur. He says that Cope was a bit of a wunderkind. Despite attending some university courses, Cope had very little formal training and was mainly self-taught. Well, I think it always made him self-conscious. And you felt, you know, he had to prove himself more. Cope was what you would call a gentleman scientist. He funded his work independently and was driven by his own personal curiosity. He was an exuberant theorist, is how I would put it. So he was someone who, he was kind of a dreamer in some ways. So he really enjoyed coming up with fantastic, often quite Baroque theories of evolution.

6:32He was a great opponent of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. So he had all these like very elaborate, somewhat crazy ideas about how living beings evolve. But as creative as he was, he had one fatal flaw. Yeah, he was temperamental and sort of volatile. You know, he had a really stormy personality. The personality characteristics, I think, that sort of set the table on the Cope side of the battle. On the other side of that battle was an American paleontologist named Otneil Charles Marsh. He was also a man of three names, but differed from the young ingenue Cope in many ways. For one, he had a much slower, much steadier approach to the scientific process.

7:19Whereas Cope was given to bold theorizing, Marsh was a dogged empiricist, by which I mean that his obsession was really collecting more fossils, describing those fossils, really doing the kind of painstaking work of describing the anatomy of each individual fossil in great detail. And not speculating too much about the relationship between those fossils and even less so about the kind of evolutionary history of those fossils. So he was much more, in some ways, more careful, more empirical in his approach. Also, according to written and photographic documentation, he both looked and acted like a curmudgeonly cartoon walrus.

8:00Marsh was stocky. He was more of a loner, a confirmed bachelor, quote unquote. I never quite know exactly what to read into that. Also quite arrogant. He loved telling stories in which he was the hero of the story. Let's put it that way. Of the two, I've read a lot of their letters and publications. And Marsh just must have been a terrible person. He just seems like just someone that you would not want to spend a lot of time around. Marsh's father struggled financially and his family grew up poor. He may have had to abandon science altogether had it not been for one stroke of good fortune. He was the nephew of one of the earliest and most important financial capitalists in the history of American capitalism, George Peabody.

8:47Peabody bankrolled a Yale education for his nephew, but that wasn't all. At this time, there were very few opportunities to pursue paleontology. So Marsh got Unki George to create one for him. George Peabody ended up endowing a museum at Yale University named after him, the Peabody Museum of Natural History. But there were strings attached, so he endowed that museum on the condition that Yale University hire his nephew, give him a job as curator. So it was like Marsh was kind of the original Nepo baby, you could say. This dependence on wealthy benefactors would be a running theme through paleontology's fledgling years.

9:23In fact, paleontology as we know it today owes its existence to robber-baron capitalism. In the second half of the 19th century, wealthy guys like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan were sitting on an obscene share of America's wealth and power. This did not sit well with the rest of the population. But it's not like they were willing to pay people fairly or improve labor practices to correct that. These wealthy elites wanted to paint over the concerns about this obvious wealth gap by providing the public with the types of grand institutions one may find in Europe. Things like libraries, symphony halls, and most importantly to the field of paleontology, natural history museums.

10:06These museums had multiple functions, but among other things, they were part of a PR campaign. The other function of these museums was to legitimize and justify the tremendous concentration of wealth that was a product of American-style capitalism in the late 19th century. And so for the museum to succeed at that second function, at that kind of legitimizing function, the museums had to attract a popular audience, a working class audience. These new natural history museums would be open to the general public. And what the public wanted to see was the biggest, baddest, most awe-inspiring objects nature had to offer.

10:45What's the most spectacular thing that will draw all kinds of people from all walks of life into the natural history museum? It's these amazing fossils. With the rise of natural history museums, paleontology suddenly had a venue. They were grand, palatial halls waiting to be filled with bones. Cope and Marsh met for the first time in Berlin in the year 1864. O.C. Walrus-Faced Marsh was there studying at a German university. While the temperamental Cope was in Europe dodging the Civil War draft. Marsh and Cope, they started off as, maybe you could say like frenemies. I don't know exactly. Like they were sort of, you know, they ran in similar circles.

11:29They were both naturalists who were interested in geology, fossils, and the discoveries to come. They actually exchanged correspondence and even named fossils after one another. But that wouldn't last long at all. And within just a couple of years of meeting, the two began stepping on each other's toes. The real break comes with the Elasimosaurus. Mark Jaffe again. In 1868, Cope was curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. At the time, he was still only 28 years old. He was tasked with the restoration of a fossil of a prehistoric sea creature called the Elasimosaurus. And this was a long, snaky aquatic animal.

12:12The Elasmosaurus could grow to 43 feet in length, and Cope had painstakingly reconstructed the skeleton. In Cope's description to the Academy of Natural Sciences, he wrote, It possesses a tail of great length, which was elevated, compressed, and adapted for sculling the ponderous body through the water. And alongside the reconstruction, he published an extensive academic paper complete with detailed illustrations. He was quite proud of his work. Until he shared it with O.C. Marsh. When Marsh was visiting, Cope showed him the Elasimosaurus. And again, this goes back to the one-offsmanship. Marsh looked at it and said, you've got the head on the wrong end.

12:59The Elasimosaurus fossil either had a very, very long neck or a very, very long tail. Cope guessed it had a long tail. And he guessed wrong. Cope deferred to Joseph Leidy, the father of American paleontology, for a second opinion. He looked at it and he took the skull from the one end and walked, this is quite a long, big animal, and walked to the other and fit it right into a socket there. Well, of course, Cope was mortified. And of course, Marsh was quite happy with himself. Humiliated, Cope frantically attempted to track down every copy of the offending paper, quietly removing it from libraries across the country.

13:39Marsh, for his part, managed to acquire several copies, and he kept them as little trophies. For some reason, Kope and Marsh, for them, there was just like nothing more important than to get these details right. As scientists, they were just really, really invested in their own reputations. Marsh even reflected on this moment as their breaking point, writing, quote, When I informed Professor Kope of it, his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy. There's a funny thing about academic politics. People often say that academic politics are especially vicious because the stakes are so low.

14:20The Elasmosaurus incident turned them into enemies. But it would be their own ambitions that would escalate their tension into an all-out war. I think Kope and Marsh in their frenzy wanted to just expand their own influence across the field. And the irony is that they did. This is Emily Grassley, host and writer of the PBS series Prehistoric Road Trip. She says that in the world of paleontology, the right to name a specimen is everything. The first person, the first description trumps anyone that comes afterwards. So taxonomists, the people being those who describe and publish new species, they are uniquely positioned in that they get to immortalize themselves.

15:06Marsh and Cope wanted to be the first. The first to find, the first to name, the first to get the credit. But in order to do that, they would both have to look west. So far, our story has mostly taken place on the east coast of the United States. Marsh is at Yale in Connecticut, Cope in Philadelphia. And while there were important fossil finds taking place around there, special shout out to New Jersey, the fossils that really changed the game and put the United States on the paleontological map were in the American west. The American West was home to so many and remains home to so many different kinds of fossils.

15:46In the 1870s, fossil discovery in the American West was not at all new. Indigenous populations had already been finding and interacting with dinosaur bones literally for thousands of years. But around this time, the Transcontinental Railroad, the mining industry, and Manifest Destiny brought the American spirit of extraction to the West. Paleontology, which had close ties to all of these expanding interests, kind of hitched a ride along the way. So whether it was timber or building supplies or farmland, you know, it was sort of like the government was poised to extract so many of these resources from native lands.

16:24And one of those resources were fossils. Today, we have a picture in our heads of what a scientist is. lab coats, peer review, institutional credentials, a process. But during this time, almost none of that infrastructure existed. It was essentially the Wild West of paleontology. Around the year 1870, O.C. Marsh set off from New Haven to lead a series of college expeditions of the American West on behalf of the Peabody Museum. They discovered early species of horses, toothed birds, and the remains of a pterosaur. Possessive as he was, Marsh would have staked a claim for the entirety of the West, but it was too vast to keep for just himself.

17:08Cope didn't have the financial backing of a big institution like the Yale Peabody, but he did have family money. He was able to fund his expedition privately, and he chose essentially the exact same spot where Marsh had set up shop, which is where things started to go off the rails. The quintessential story is the Bridger Basin. Bridger Basin was a site in southwestern Wyoming that was essentially a treasure trove for vertebrate fossils. Marsh was there. Cope was there. They were all working in the basin at the same time. Separately, their crews were racing to classify an entire ancient habitat of Eocene vertebrate species.

17:49Rhinos, crocodiles, camels, massive land turtles as big as grizzly bears. There were no proper protocols for publication standards. And in their mad rush to be the first, Cope and Marsh ended up claiming credit for several of the same discoveries. They found the same animals and gave them different names. And so it took years to unravel. One fossil was given seven different names during this time. And on top of that, they were also making a mess of the record by resorting to some petty scientific sabotage. One of the things that the Marsh people did was they created a false fossil. They put a bunch of bones together that came from all different things, leaving it for Cope to find, which he did.

18:34Cope may have been younger and less connected than Marsh, but he did have one advantage in this whole rivalry. He was an extraordinarily quick publisher who could churn out academic papers at a breakneck speed. Cope arrived later than Marsh and became severely ill during this time and still managed to publish 16 articles on one animal alone. But because of his speed, he also made a lot of mistakes in his work, which Marsh would gleefully point out. Marsh was relentless. He challenged every Cope finding. It was just really just grinding for Cope. Joseph Leidy, Cope's former mentor and at this point the most respected name in American paleontology, had also been working out of Bridger Basin that summer.

19:25He ended up being so appalled by how these two men of science conducted themselves that he left the field altogether. He just gave up on paleontology and studied worms. Before the dust could even settle from all the havoc they caused in Bridger Basin, another paleontological battlefield emerged. One day in 1877, a geologist and professor named Arthur Lakes was hiking through Morrison, Colorado, when he stumbled upon one of the richest deposits of absolutely enormous fossils the world had ever seen. It was a site known as the Morrison Formation. The cool thing about the Morrison Formation is it doesn't just preserve one kind of organism.

20:07Emily Grassley again. It preserves the entire environment of the Jurassic period. So everything from plants to the smallest of organisms to the largest animals that ever roamed the earth, they're all represented in the Morrison Formation. Lakes wrote to Marsh immediately about what he found. He also alerted Cope, and soon the two began battling it out again. Both men dispatched teams to roughly the same area, sometimes digging within miles of each other. I think the irony is that the Morrison formation is absolutely massive. So you would have thought that they would have been able to split up a little bit further.

20:48You know, sort of like, man, you should have just transferred to a different school. Just go to Colorado. Paranoid, Marsh would refer to Cope by codenames and bribe members of Cope's team away from him. In retaliation, Cope would employ dinosaur rustlers to excavate fossils out from under Marsh's team. There are even accounts of the two warring camps throwing rocks at one another. And one salacious allegation that one of Marsh's collectors destroyed a dig site after taking all the fossils he wanted from it. And that, of course, is destroying specimens, right? That's destroying the foundation for the production of more knowledge, which is basically, I mean, that's anathema to at least the stated ideals of the scientific community.

21:32So part of what's interesting about the Bowen Wars is that it reveals the kind of chasm that separates the way scientists often like to present from their reality, which is that it's often very petty, it's often very self-serving, that scientists are more interested in credit than they are in actually developing new theories and so on and so forth. While it was their fossil collectors on the ground in Wyoming who were doing the physical fighting, Cope and Marsh were creating an absolute spectacle in academic papers. They accused each other of fabricating discovery dates, of plagiarism, of spying.

22:06They were essentially brawling in front of all of their scientific peers in print. It was to the point that one prominent scientific publication actually had to ban them from criticizing each other. But both despite and because of this fierce competition in the West, today we have some of the most famous dinosaurs on record. Marsh described and named dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Apatosaurus. And of course... We're standing in front of an enormous freestanding fossil of the great long-necked dinosaur Brontosaurus, the thunder lizard. This was an animal named by Marsh, and it was one of the first dinosaur fossils ever discovered that showed just how titanic these animals could become.

23:00This is Dr. Bart Unjan-Buller, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum. This history may be tawdry, but the Yale Peabody Museum has a lot of its fossil collection thanks to this historic beef. I mean, wherever there are people, wherever there are ambitious people, there is competition. And in the case of Copenmarsh, Marsh, a sudden windfall, an extraordinary treasure trove, open for the first time, there for the taking, two men, intelligent, ambitious, and equipped to do it. You're going to have this happen. Throughout this war, Marsh had the upper hand.

23:44He had the Peabody Museum, he had political connections, and he could hold a wicked grudge. But temperamental Cope managed to find a way around that, because the first to publish was the first to get credit. So Cope ended up using his personal money to purchase a prominent scientific journal called The American Naturalist to fast-track his publications. Between 1879 and 1880 alone, he published 76 papers, attempting to overwhelm Marsh with the sheer volume. In 1882, Marsh struck back hard. He used his political connections to position himself to be named chief paleontologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.

24:27And he used that power to cut Cope off from any government funding. Cope lost out on the surveys. And what the surveys gave Marsh was money for exploration, money for publication. And this was, again, you know, poor Cope. He's out in the cold. Cope, unfortunately, had spent much of his money purchasing the American naturalist and had a hard time finding employment thanks to Marsh's allies in higher education and also because of his terrible personality. Cope invested what remained of his inheritance in silver prospects in the West, but those investments failed. His largest remaining asset was his personal fossil collection.

25:11Broke and without prospects, Cope dropped out of the Bone Wars. Hope was a very sympathetic kind of guy. I mean, in a way, you know. He was also ruthless and a womanizer and many other things. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that part. But he's compelling in this sort of heroic and also train wreck way. And there are these letters where he's, kind of when he lost a bunch of money, he's off in the desert in New Mexico, and he just went out there by himself. Like, by himself, right, man? This is the Wild West. And he's writing, like, it's nighttime, and he's writing to his daughter, you know, and he's going, I wish I could see your face, and I'm out here alone.

25:53It's cold. I found some bones today. I'm worried about finances, all of this stuff, this sort of plaintive thing to his family. And you can imagine his just being there under the stars alone, thinking about his life. And that's, you know, it's interesting. His career was ruined, his money was gone, and his wife had left him. You know, on account of him being a womanizer. Cope was at his lowest point. The Bone Wars could have ended there, with Marsh on top and Cope's professional and personal life in shambles. But that wasn't enough. Marsh wanted to pry Cope's most prized possession out of his hands.

26:34He wanted to take the man's bones. And this is when Marsh finally went too far. On December 16th, 1889, Cope was sent a letter from the Secretary of the Interior demanding that he turn over his personal fossil collection to the Smithsonian Institution. Marsh had alleged that Cope's fossils had been collected using federal money and thus needed to be seized and turned over to the government. Cope was able to provide meticulous financial records proving that he personally funded the majority of his expeditions. He was allowed to keep his fossil collection, but now he was pissed. And Cope was ready to finally take Marsh down for good.

27:16For years and years, Cope had collected any complaint or possible near-do well-doing by Marsh. Mark Jaffe again. He interviewed a lot of the disgruntled assistants, got stories from them, and he gathered all this stuff, and he called it his Marshiana. He kept it in a drawer. Cope had been keeping what was essentially a secret dossier full of terrible accusations against Marsh. It included allegations of plagiarism and abusing federal funds, specifically with those national surveys. And he handed all of it over to a journalist for the New York Herald. who ended up shopping around a series, three-part series, exposing Marsh.