The Bone Wars

Podcast Transcript

The 19th century was a period of rapid advancement. New technologies such as the railroad and the telegraph radically changed civilization.

Scientific advancements were almost constant as we took great strides in understanding our universe.

One scientific field that saw incredible advances was paleontology. Much of the advancement was made by two researchers who found an incredible number of fossils…..and who totally hated each other.

Learn more about the Bone Wars and how two paleontologists advanced the science while destroying each other on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

To understand this extremely peculiar story of animosity and rivalry, you must understand what happened in the 19th century.

The 19th century was arguably the century that saw the greatest advancement in science and technology in human history. That isn’t to take away from the advances of the 20th century, but the starting point of the 19th century was closer to life in the ancient world.

In addition to discoveries in physics, chemistry, and astronomy, we also learned a great deal about our past. Our very distant past.

Fossils have been known for all of human history. However, they were usually just small things like trilobites that were found in stones. Even if a large fossil was found, they didn’t necessarily know that it could have been an animal that lived millions of years earlier.

Several things happened in the 19th century that changed our understanding of fossils.

For starters, we began digging more.

The Industrial Revolution drove people to dig deep into the Earth, as mines, canals, and railways required excavation. These large-scale construction projects often unearthed fossilized remains, leading to increased interest in what these relics represented.

People certainly did dig in the past, but the scale of excavations grew dramatically, and with the development of the steam engine, it was possible to excavate more than ever before.

All of this digging led to the discovery of fossils in places where no one had ever looked before.

As scientists began studying these fossils, they developed new ideas about Earth’s history. Geologists like James Hutton and Charles Lyell introduced theories of deep time and gradual geological change, providing a framework for understanding fossils as remnants from ancient epochs rather than mere oddities or biblical curiosities.

The concept of deep time was revolutionary; it suggested that Earth was far older than previously thought, creating a natural timescale on which fossils could be studied scientifically.

Certain discoveries captured the imagination of the public. The early 19th century saw the discovery of the first dinosaur fossils and their reconstructions.

The discovery of species like Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus, prompted scientists to realize that there was an entire class of giant reptiles that once roamed the Earth. In 1842, British anatomist Sir Richard Owen coined the term “Dinosauria,” meaning “terrible lizards,” to describe this new group of creatures.

The Victorian fascination with the natural world drove the creation of public museums and exhibitions. In Britain, the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1854 displayed reconstructions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, which fascinated the public and made paleontology a subject of popular interest.

It was in this environment of the popularization of paleontology and the increase in understanding of the distant past that this story takes place.

I need to introduce the two main characters of the story. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

Cope was born in Philadelphia and was a self-taught naturalist with a passion for classifying new species. Coming from a Quaker family, Cope was relatively wealthy and was known for his intense personality and impulsiveness. He tended to be a Lamarkanian.

Lamarckism is the discredited theory that organisms can pass on traits acquired during their lifetime to their offspring, driven by the use or disuse of specific features.

Marsh was born in New York to a family of modest means, although he did have one very wealthy relative. He was a methodical scientist who pursued a formal education and eventually held the first chair of paleontology at Yale University.

Unlike Cope, Marsh was reserved and calculated and had powerful connections with both Yale and the U.S. Geological Survey. He was eventually the head of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, which was financed by one wealthy relative, his uncle, the financier and philanthropist George Peabody.

He was a Darwinist.

Despite very different backgrounds and personalities, the one thing these men shared was a love of paleontology.

The pair met for the first time in Berlin in 1864. They hung out with each other for several days and talked paleontology. They were close enough at the start that they each named discoveries after the other. Cope named an amphibian fossil Ptyonius marshii in honor of Marsh. March returned the favor by naming a marine fossil Mosasaurus copeanus.

At the time of their first meeting, Western Europe was the hotbed of paleontology research because of the number of discoveries being made, but that soon moved to North America.

When they returned to the United States, things between them changed. It isn’t certain what caused the rift between the two men, but it stemmed from two events which took place in 1868.

The first event was a visit to a quarry in New Jersey that was an incredible fossil find. An attorney and amateur paleontologist named William Parker Foulke discovered the first full dinosaur fossil in the United States. He found the Hadrosaurus.

Cope was managing the pit, and the fossils were being sent to him for his collection.

After the visit, Marsh secretly contacted the pit manager and bribed him to send him the fossils found in the pit, not the Cope.

This made Cope furious.

The other event had to do with a large fossil that was on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where Cope was the director. It was an almost full intact skeleton of a Elasmosaurus.

The Elasmosaurus is a very long aquatic reptile with a long neck and a long tail.

Cope had put the skull of the dinosaur on the shorter of the two ends, assuming that the tail had to be the longer end.

Marsh publically humiliated Cope by pointing out that he had put the skull at the end of the tail, not the neck.

These events began a deep-seated hatred between the two men, which would last for the rest of their lives. The feud between the two in the late 19th century became known as the Bone War.

Beyond the events of 1868, there were major personal differences between the two that fueled the rivalry. Cope, being the wealthier of the two and having a better upbringing, didn’t think that Marsh was much of a gentleman.

Marsh, with the superior education of the two, didn’t think that Cope was a very good scientist.

Much of the competition between the two took place in the American West.

Both Cope and Marsh organized separate expeditions to fossil-rich regions in the American West, such as Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska. The newly expanding railways allowed for easier access to these areas, and both men hired teams to dig up as many fossils as possible. Marsh initially hired Cope’s diggers away from him by offering them higher wages, an early example of the cutthroat tactics that would characterize the Bone Wars.

One of the most infamous and destructive episodes of the Bone Wars unfolded during the expeditions at Como Bluff, a prominent ridge between Rock River and Medicine Bow in Wyoming. The area had been reported to contain massive fossil deposits, drawing the attention of both Marsh and Cope.

Informants initially tipped off Marsh about the site, and in response, he paid them for exclusive information. However, the informants felt coerced into the deal and were further frustrated when Marsh’s payment—a check made out to their pseudonyms instead of their real names—could not be cashed.

Despite this rocky start, Marsh sent his team to the area, where they, alongside the informants, uncovered fossils of dinosaurs now iconic to modern audiences, including Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Allosaurus.

Marsh attempted to keep the discovery of Como Bluff under wraps, but news quickly leaked, eventually reaching Cope. One of Marsh’s disgruntled informants, embittered by his dealings with Marsh, switched sides and began working for Cope. This sparked a fierce rivalry, with both paleontologists organizing multiple summer expeditions to the site.

Accounts suggest the teams frequently sabotaged each other’s work, hid or buried dig sites after use to prevent further excavation by rivals, and even destroyed smaller fossils to ensure the other could not benefit from them.

The competition between the two men spilled into the pages of academic journals.

Both scientists frequently published rushed descriptions of new species to claim priority. The competition for naming rights resulted in numerous errors and misidentifications. For example, Marsh put a Brachiosaurus’s head on a Brontosaurus skeleton.

This rush to publish also led to public disputes, with each accusing the other of mistakes, fraud, and misconduct. Their feuds were often aired in scientific journals and popular press, diminishing their credibility among peers.

Cope tried to buy up every copy of the journal, where Marsh corrected his mistake with the Elasmosaurus.

In 1873, the journal The American Naturalist banned both men because they no longer wanted to take part in their public feud. They wrote, “The controversy between the authors in question has come to be a personal one, and [because] the Naturalist is not called upon to devote further space to its consideration, the continuance of the subject will be allowed only in the form of an appendix at the expense of the author.”

In 1878, Cope just bought the journal so he could use it as his own private platform where Marsh would be banned.

By the 1880s, Marsh was clearly winning the war between the two men. Despite Cope originally having a larger fortune, he had spent almost everything in the pursuit of getting fossils and competing with Marsh.

Marsh, on the other hand, now had the sizable endowment of the Peabody Museum and Yale University behind him. He was able to outspend Cope, opening more dig sites and hiring more men. In addition to these two, other players, including Harvard, entered the picture.

While Marsh might have taken the lead in their competition in the 1880s, that didn’t stop the fighting. They continued to take potshots at each other in public and in private.

By 1890, the feud had started to gain the attention of the greater media. The New York Herald that year wrote a story titled ‘Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare’.

What had been a fight inside the paleontology community and now spilled out into the public and had become an embarrassment for the entire discipline. Many people in the field began to disassociate themselves from both men.

Perhaps the oddest chapter in this story is what happened upon the death of Cope in 1897.

Edward Drinker Cope’s will contained a peculiar and final challenge to his lifelong rival, Othniel Charles Marsh. Cope, always eager to prove his intellectual superiority, left instructions for his skull to be donated to science, with the suggestion that his brain size be measured and compared to Marsh’s, should Marsh agree to do the same.

Cope believed that brain size correlated with intelligence and wanted to prove, even in death, that he was Marsh’s superior.

Cope’s skull was donated to the University of Pennsylvania, where it remains to this day.

Marsh, for his part, declined to take part in the post-mortem brain weighing and was buried after his death in 1899.

The Bone Wars left a complicated legacy. On the one hand, the two men contributed significantly to the early field of paleontology by unearthing vast numbers of fossils that provided the foundation for future research. 136 new species of dinosaur were discovered between the two men.

In no small part, many of the discoveries were made because of the competition between the two men.

However, their personal vendetta also led to scientific errors, wasted resources, and damage to important fossil sites. In some cases, rare and valuable fossils were destroyed so they couldn’t fall into the hands of the other.

Today, the Bone Wars serve as both a cautionary tale and an early chapter in the story of paleontology, illustrating the dangers of unchecked competition instead of cooperation and the importance of ethical standards in scientific research.