The Bone Wars

Inside the Big Bone Room

0:00This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

0:05Here at 99PI, we're in the business of making dreams come true. And boy, did we ever deliver this week. Sorry, I'm in awe. We are in a back room, and I am like, what am I looking at? It's just hallowed ground. Yes, you guys. It's a cast of a T-Rex. It's a T-Rex. That's actor, reporter, and our good buddy, Galeen Jacobs. As 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.

0:39Dr. 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 store room. Oh my gosh. 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.

1:10And when I got a little older, I was even a teen docent. But as much as Galeen 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.

1:40And 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. This 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.

2:14Out 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.

The Dawn of Paleontology

2:30Although fossils are famously very, very old, paleontology as a formal science is actually pretty new. It'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.

3:11In 1812, at the age of 12, she discovered an ichthyosaurus skeleton along England's Jurassic Coast. Natural 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.

3:44And 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. A 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.

Meet Cope and Marsh

4:14And 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.

4:51This 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 himself 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 a, an exuberant theorist is how I would put it.

5:24So 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. He 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.

5:47Yeah, 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 Othniel 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.

6:18Whereas 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.

6:50Also, according to written and photographic documentation, he both looked and acted like a curmudgeonly cartoon walrus. Marsh 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, like, publications. And Marsh just must have been a terrible person at age.

7:22He just seems like just someone that you would not want to spend a lot of time around.

7:28Marsh'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. Peabody 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.

7:59George 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. In 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.

8:39This 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. These museums had multiple functions, but among other things, they were part of a PR campaign, right?

9:12The 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.

9:45What'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.

10:04Cope 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. They were both naturalists who were interested in geology, fossils, and the discoveries to come.

10:35They actually exchanged correspondence and even named fossils after one another. But that wouldn't last long at all.

The Elasmosaurus Blunder

10:42And within just a couple of years of meeting, the two began stepping on each other's toes. The real break comes with the Elasmosaurus. 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 Elasmosaurus. And this was a long, snaky, aquatic animal. The Elasmosaurus could grow to 43 feet in length, and Cope had painstakingly reconstructed the skeleton.

11:20In Cope's description to the Academy of Natural Sciences, he wrote, quote, 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 Elasmosaurus. And again, this goes back to the one-offsmanship.

11:54Marsh looked at it and said, You've got the head on the wrong end. The Elasmosaurus 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.

12:24Well, 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. Marsh, for his part, managed to acquire several copies. And he kept them as little trophies. For some reason, Cope 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.

12:55Marsh even reflected on this moment as their breaking point, writing, quote, When I informed Professor Cope 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.

13:20The Elasmasaurus incident turned them into enemies. But it would be their own ambitions that would escalate their tension into an all-out war. I think Cope 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.

13:54So taxonomists, the people being those who describe and publish new species, they are uniquely positioned in that they get to immortalize themselves. Marsh 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.

Heading West for Fossils

14:16So 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. In the 1870s, fossil discovery in the American West was not at all new.

14:50Indigenous 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.

15:23And one of those resources were fossils.

15:28Today, 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.

16:00Possessive 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. Cope 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.

16:37Marsh 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. Rhinos, 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.

17:08And 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. Cope may have been younger and less connected than Marsh, but he did have one advantage in this whole rivalry.

17:41He 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.

18:12It was just really just grinding for Cope. Joseph Lighty, 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. He 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.

The Morrison Formation Scramble

18:36Before 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.

19:07Emily 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.

19:39I 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. You 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.

20:12And 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. So part of what's interesting about the Bone Wars is that it reveals the kind of chasm that separates the way scientists often like to present from the reality, which is that it's often very petty.

20:44It'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. They 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.

21:19But 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.

22:00This 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 Cope and 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.

22:37You're going to have this happen.

Political Fallout and Bankruptcy

22:38Throughout this war, Marsh had the upper hand. He 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.

23:17In 1882, Marsh struck back hard. He used his political connections to position himself to be named chief paleontologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. And 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.

24:00Cope 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. Broke and without prospects, Cope dropped out of the Bone Wars. Cope 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.

24:34And, like, 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, like, 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. It'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.

25:05And 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.

The New York Herald Exposé

25:30Marsh wanted to pry Cope's most prized possession out of his hands. He 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.

26:00Cope 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. For 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.

26:39He 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 chopping around a series, three-part series, exposing Marsh. And this landed in January of 1890. This petty scientific feud had jumped from dusty academic papers to the front page of major newspapers.

27:14The headline read, Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare. And again, everybody in the scientific community was just horrified. It was like this battle that they'd suffered for years and years between the two of them. On the six o'clock news, it was, everyone just wanted it to go away. As embarrassing to the field as it was to witness, the Bone Wars were about to have consequences that would reverberate out of academic politics and into politics politics. Probably the most destructive thing they managed to do was to become so notorious for their feud that members of Congress managed to pick up on it.

27:55Congress at this time had a conservative faction that was absolutely itching to slash its funding for the sciences. And earlier that year, Marsh published a monograph that described fossils of prehistoric birds with beaks full of teeth. It was actually important research that supported Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. And it was all the ammunition one fundamentalist congressman from Alabama needed. Hillary Herbert, I believe, walked into Congress with a copy of Marsh's Birds with Teeth, Odat Harnithi's, and slammed this book down and said,

28:28Birds with Teeth. Birds with Teeth. This is where your taxpayer dollars are going. Birds with Teeth. And through those efforts, the USGS was severely defunded. When his appropriation was cut off in 1892, Marsh received a terse telegram from the director of the USGS demanding his resignation. But that wasn't even the worst of it for Marsh. So Marsh lost his funding through the survey. And more than that was ordered to send all the fossils collected by the survey down to the Smithsonian.

29:03That was like 80 tons of fossils. I think it was five or six carloads. Marsh was ultimately removed from his position. And the Bone Wars ended, seemingly with no obvious winner. And in the process, the two had taken down federal funding for scientific research with them.

29:22Cope may have won the press war, but he was still broke. He had amassed an enormous collection of fossils over his lifetime. So many that he had two houses, one for himself and one for all of his bones. He eventually sold his entire collection to cover his many debts.

29:42Yeah, the museum's pretty crowded today, I guess, because of the holidays. But this hall is always crowded. Yeah. Cope's massive collection was purchased by the American Museum of Natural History, where Dr. Michael Novacek was able to point out some of his greatest discoveries. This is Allosaurus. Oh, yeah. It's an older predator than Tyrannosaurus from the Jurassic. And it, you know, a little smaller. It's still ferocious looking.

30:14Cope died in 1897 at the age of 56. And even at the end of his life, couldn't resist taking one more swipe from beyond the grave. Cope actually challenged Mars. This is Dan Brinkman, museum assistant at the Yale Peabody Museum. So Cope gave his body to science. He wanted his brain compared with Marsh's brain to show who was the brainier of the two. Marsh did not end up taking the bait.

30:44And he died just two years later, brain unremoved, but with no family or friends by his side. It sort of reminds me of, like, the opening scene of Citizen Kane, you know.

30:59Charles Schwartz the Kane is there in bed. Yeah, except he's like, Brontosaurus. But the irony is, they're known together. You know, Cope and Marsh, Abbott and Costello. You know, it's just, can't hardly say one name without the other. I don't think they would have liked that.

31:20Combined, the two of them discovered over 25,000 new fossils. Together, they also collected and described 136 dinosaurs. The two discovered many of the most recognizable species of dinosaurs known today, including Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Diplodocus. And if you want the final score, Marsh is credited with 80 new dinosaurs to Cope's 56. In your face, Cope! However, between the two of them, only 32 of those species are considered valid today.

31:56That means roughly 76% of everything they named was either a duplicate, a misidentification, or based on such fragmentary bones that it couldn't be properly classified. It was a product of their mad rush to be on top. In the end, both men were left battered and bruised reputationally. They were considered an embarrassment by the scientific community. But ultimately, both men's work accelerated the field of paleontology from a fledgling science to something worthy of the public's attention.

32:27They also furthered the reputations of two of the most renowned natural history museums in the world. And isn't it ironic that, you know, out of this horrible kind of competition, it was more than competition, it was a fight, a feud, came this brilliant result. Dr. Michael Novacek again. It was really the big spark for the growth of those museums and the establishment of the museums. I mean, dinosaurs are popular, and giant mammal fossils are popular, and people flock to them.

33:03And so the Carnegie, the Peabody, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the Philadelphia Academy, and more, were all, all, you know, catalyzed by all this collection in the West of these fossils. But personally, I think the most important impact of this silly rivalry was creating generations of dinosaur kids, like me. Wow. Can I ask if these kids like dinosaurs?

33:35Yeah. While I was wandering around the Yale Peabody Museum, the place that owes its existence to this feud, I came across a couple of kids visiting with their family, and I knew exactly how they felt.

33:49How can I describe how it felt to stare up at a T-Rex skeleton when I was five years old? To feel like there's finally something in real life that matches up to your wild imagination. Their presence made the museum a magical place that I couldn't get enough of, and I wanted to know more, more, more about dinosaurs. I wanted to memorize their names and wear dinosaur pajamas and drink out of a dinosaur cup. They told me the world was full of wonder and things to be discovered.

34:22I'm reporting a podcast about dinosaurs. I wanted to ask, what do you, do you like dinosaurs? Yeah, and want me to tell you something? Yes, please. I really like saber-toothed tigers because, and pterodactors because, saber-toothed tigers, thunderdark, power, and power ranger. Uh-huh. I, I'm the yellow ranger. You are? And what do you like about dinosaurs? Some of them eat plants, and some of them are super cool because they can run fast, blend in, and also they can run fast like saber-toothed tigers.

34:56Did you know? And also fly. Yeah. What's that dinosaur? I don't know, but these people would know. A professor Marge named Brontops. Brontops. Is that your new favorite dinosaur? No. No. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I hope you have the best time at the museum today. Okay, how are you? Okay. Say bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you.

35:18Hi. Okay. A few corrections with Gillian Jacobs after this.

35:28We are back with reporter and dinosaur enthusiast Gillian Jacobs. Hey, Gillian. Hi, Roman. Am I now the official dinosaur correspondent for 99PI? You are. You are the official correspondent of many things. Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, waterways, and dinosaurs. I'm so glad it's now clear to you how much I love dinosaurs, and I'm glad the world knows. In fact, I dressed as a dinosaur on an episode of Community as a homage to my childhood love for dinosaurs. You might not have noticed or remembered because everybody said I look like Yoshi, but I was supposed to be a T-Rex.

36:00That's awesome. So as we covered in the main episode, Cope and Marsh, they advanced the field of paleontology a lot in their work, but they also made a ton of mistakes along the way. And we're here to talk about those mistakes. Yes. And I want to preface this with the fact that paleontology is a field where it is very easy to make very big errors. Paleontologists are constantly trying to correct the scientific record because constructing entire extinct ecosystems based on very, very old and broken bones is very difficult, even today.

36:35So no judgments from me. Got it. That being said, the mistakes that Cope and Marsh made definitely weren't helped by the speed in which they were working just so they could outdo each other. That's right. Some of this was self-inflicted harm. So what are some examples of the things they got wrong?

Taxonomic Mistakes and Misidentifications

36:52Okay.

Taxonomic Mistakes and Misidentifications

36:53So we know that the whole bone wars were actually kicked off by a really big slip up. Here's Mark Jaffe, author of The Gilded Dinosaur, again. The single biggest mistake in paleontology was Marsh's. He made a mistake that stood for decades. So in the thick of the bone wars, Marsh described and named the species of sauropod, which is a type of dinosaur with a very long neck and a very long tail. And he named this Apatosaurus. Well, a couple of years later, his team found the remains of another sauropod, this one much bigger, which Marsh believed belonged to an entirely new species.

37:31He had this nearly complete skeleton, again, very rare. All it lacked was a head. And they couldn't find it in the quarry that they were working in. But they found a nice complete scope at another quarry four miles away. So he said, all right, we're going to put that head on this one. And he called it the Brontosaurus. Well, there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus. What the Brontosaurus was, was an Apatosaurus body with a Camasaurus head. And sort of the irony was that for years, many paleontologists sort of, eh, that's not right.

38:10That's not right. But because it was Marsh, he said, all right, I'm not going to, I'm not going to take that on. It took almost 60 years before everybody owned up. Yeah, yeah, there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus. I've heard this before, but I think there's probably a bunch of people who don't know that Brontosaurus never actually existed. Like, it's still kind of in the top five of dinosaurs that people know. But actually, it was an Apatosaurus the whole time, which is the wrong skull. Yeah, so the actual name Brontosaurus went unused by paleontologists for around 100 years.

38:43And it actually wasn't even until 1979 that the Carnegie Museum corrected the head on its own skeleton. But I am sure that there are some listeners out there who are dinosaur enthusiasts. And when Brontosaurus came up in the main story, thought, that's not even a real dinosaur. Right. And there's probably a few who were like, what are you talking about? Brontosaurus is like one of the big five. Yeah, that was my favorite dinosaur. Yeah, I love that one. Rewriting my childhood. Exactly. And I'm about to make it even more complicated. Because in 2015, there was a study that concluded that there were enough differences between Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus to distinguish it as a separate genus.

39:18And that the name Brontosaurus should be revived. Oh my God. It's still being debated within paleontology. Emily Grassley described it as the Pluto of the dinosaur world. That sounds like a very apt metaphor where people are fighting over something with great fervor that probably doesn't matter all that much. Watch yourself. The comment section's about to light up. Okay. So what else do these two guys get wrong? So the next one came from Cope. So Cope was known for being an incredibly fast writer, and he would just fire off paper after paper after paper.

39:53And Dan Brinkman at the Peabody Museum told me about a mistake he made that was more of a clerical error than a taxonomic error as he was rushing to beat Marsh to publication. Cope had kind of poor handwriting, let alone when he's writing by a lamplight at camp. But a poor telegrapher in Black Butte, Wyoming, got this six-line description that he was to telegraph back to Philadelphia. Cope had intended to name one of these animals Loxalafidon, which means beast with crested tooth.

40:26But the poor telegrapher trying to make it out bastardized it into Lephalafidon, which is pure gibberish. Well, that's happened to all of us, I think. Absolutely. I'm glad I can spell my own name some days. The next one is actually a double oopsie from Marsh. So Marsh first described Stegosaurus in 1877. Pop quiz, Roman. What does a Stegosaurus look like? Yeah, I know exactly what a Stegosaurus looks like.

40:56You cannot stump me here. It is the, you know, four-footed dinosaur. It's one of the big, sort of like one of the big humpback. And it has the bony sails, like a mohawk on its spine. And it has a spiky tail that it uses to, like, fight other dinosaurs with. Ding, ding, ding. Exactly correct. So it's got those plates that stick up all the way down its back and down the tail, like you said, kind of like a mohawk. But Marsh pictured the bony plates lying flat across the animal's back, like roof shingles or like a suit of armor,

41:31which is actually where the name Stegosaurus comes from because it means roofed lizard. And it took years of later analysis and better fossil evidence for paleontologists to work out that the plates almost certainly stood upright in two staggered rows down the spine, not flat, not armor, more likely for display or temperature regulation. Yeah. I'm glad they corrected it to be upright because that looks way cooler. Yeah, you're right. It is so much cooler. But my favorite mistake that Marsh theorized about the Stegosaurus was that it possibly had two brains and one of those brains was in its butt.

42:10I do remember this now that you mention it, like a walnut-sized brain in his butt. But why did he think this? So he noticed that the neural canal running through the sacrum, which is the fused vertebra at the hip, widened into a large empty cavity in its bottom half that no one could explain. And he also noted that the Stegosaurus had an unusually tiny brain for its body. So it was possible that the second cavity could be some kind of secondary nerve center that could help coordinate the mass of hind legs and the spiked tail.

42:42Like kind of how those big fire trucks have like two drivers, like one at the front and one at the back just to make sure that you can make a tight corner. Yes, exactly that. That's awesome. Okay. I have to be serious. Like I said, paleontology is hard and none of this is meant to dunk on Copenhagen specifically. And paleontology corrects itself constantly. That's the whole point of science. But the way these two guys acted, that could probably use a little humbling. That's right. That's right. A lot of this is they're being sort of hoisted on their own petard.

43:15We're not making fun of general science, which involves a lot of, you know, discussion and conflict and people fighting over ideas and revision. And it's good when people revise things. That's the whole story of science. Exactly. So thank you so much for bringing us the amazing story of the Bone Wars. It's fun to geek out about dinosaurs with you. I don't think I could enjoy anything more. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Gillian Jacobs and edited by Vivian Lay with additional production by Jacob Medina Gleason.

43:50Mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Heysha. Special thanks this week to Leslie M.M. Bloom. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Walsh Medan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. That 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephen Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building, in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

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