Cope and Marsh: Dinosaur Wars
-Chrissie
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Listeners may know that I was going to be a paleontologist when I grew up, but then I ran into Calc three and Mineralogy, in the same semester. So, I decided to focus on slightly more recent history, but I still love dinosaurs.
Fossils of megafauna (giant animals) have been found throughout human history. We know this from descriptions of such things that show up as oddities in chronicles and other writing as well as from mythology. It doesn’t take much of a leap to see how dinosaur bones prompted the idea of dragons or griffons or unicorns.
The first find we can say with certainty is a dinosaur was in 1677, though the man who found it, Robert Plot, believed it to be evidence of an extinct species of giants. The fossil was kept at Oxford University, allowing it to be identified in 1824 as a Megalosaurus, based on a more complete find from 1815 that matched Plot’s fossil. This, in tandem with Mary Ann Mantell’s discovery of Iguanodon and Sir Richard Owen’s creation of the term “dinosaur,” started the dinosaur craze that, while it has ebbed and flowed in the larger public over the decades, does seem to be found in all small children.
The western part of the United States is a rich ground in which to dig for dinosaurs. As these areas were colonized, particularly under the auspices of the Homestead Act of 1862, fossil hunting went right always with it. Two of the most prominent paleontologists of the nineteenth century were Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. The two met while studying in Germany in 1863 and became friends. On returning to the U.S., Cope began work with the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Marsh worked for the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale (an institution funded by his uncle, George Peabody). They worked in tandem for a few years, even giving each other’s names to newly identified species. The relationship began to sour when Marsh privately arranged to have fossils from a quarry at which they both worked to only be sent to him. Marsh also publicly humiliated Cope on the occasion of the unveiling of his reconstructed Elasmosaurus by pointing out that Cope had mistakenly put the head at the end of the tail.
After this, the two conducted a rivalry in scientific journals, each doing their best to discover and name more species of dinosaurs than the other. In the 1870s, both worked in areas of Wyoming and Colorado, frantically sending telegrams to their institutions roughly describing their finds and naming them. Proper analysis and cataloging later revealed that they separately found and named many examples of the same species. Many of Marsh’s identifications were deemed first and correctly identified, giving him the credit over Cope. It is from this rush to publish that we get the most famous of the alternately named dinosaurs: the Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, both identified by Marsh in 1877 and 1879, respectively.
Between the late 1870s and 1892, both men led excavations as well as paid others to send them specimens. Marsh gained the permission of Sioux Chief Red Cloud to dig in the Black Hills of the Dakotas by promising payment and advocating on the tribe’s behalf with the Grant administration. Around the same time, Cope personally purchased the scientific journal the American Naturalist to assure publication of his finds.
In 1877, both men were contacted by a man who found fossils in the Morrison formation in Colorado, and both paid for digs in the area. Cope was first to the find, prompting Marsh to push one of his students to begin a dig nearby. One of Marsh’s dig sites collapsed, nearly killing the workers and almost killing Marsh’s studies. However, Marsh received a letter from two men working on the Transcontinental Railroad about fossils in Wyoming at Como Bluff. He contracted the men to dig for him and to keep the find secret, but the poor pay he offered prompted them to sell information about the find to the Laramie Daily Sentinel. Over the next fifteen years, the two men funded excavations in and around Como Bluff. Literal tons of fossils were shipped east over the course of the summers, which were then catalogued, analyzed, and published over the winters. Their rivalry spread to their teams as well, with each group taking steps to make sure the other would not have access to the “good” finds. They poached workers from each other and paid each other’s men to spy and/or sabotage their rival. At points, both sides went so far as to destroy fossils and dig sites in order to prevent the other from benefitting from the finds. At least once, this led to violence, with men from each side throwing stones at each other.
As the 1880s wore on, other paleontologists had begun to work in and around the areas claimed by Cope and Marsh, reducing what was available to them. They had also caused a great deal of embarrassment to their colleagues and institutions because their rivalry was widely reported in newspapers. By 1890, both men had expended their personal fortunes on the work. Cope was forced to sell most of his personal fossil collection to survive in his last years, dying in 1897. Marsh mortgaged his house and had to beg for an emeritus salary from Yale to continue his work. Marsh died in 1899.
By pure numbers, Marsh was the victor in the Bone Wars, having named 80 species to Cope’s 56. Cope, however, published around 14,000 articles, greatly expanding knowledge of both his own finds and existing species. The real winners, however, are we lovers of dinosaurs, who get to enjoy and appreciate the results of their work.
A modern myth is wrapped up in this story: it has been said that Marsh was the first to give a scientific name to fossilized feces, coprolite, deriving the name from that of his rival. It is not true, though; coprolite was named by William Buckland in 1824 and is derived from the Greek words for dung, “kopros” and stone “lithos.”
The coda of this story is entirely in keeping with the rest of it: Cope arranged for his body to be donated to the University of Pennsylvania for research. He invited Marsh to do the same, and left instructions that their craniums be measured and compared, in hopes that Cope would have the last bit of vindication by having the larger brain. Marsh declined.