This is 99% invisible.
Here at 99PI, we're in the business of making dreams come true and boy did we ever deliver this week.
“Sorry, I'm in all we are in a back room and I'm like, what am I looking at?”
I'm just hollowed around. Yes, he's the cast of a T-Rex. It's a T-Rex. That's actor, reporter, and our good buddy, Galean 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. Dr. Michael Novicek, curator of paleontology, was showing me a fossil vault aptly named "The Big Bone Room."
Oh my gosh, can you describe this room there? This is a room full of big bones.
Oh my God, this is not open to the door.
It's a door like dinosaur store room 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, and when I got a little”
older, I was even a teen dosent. But as much as Galean wanted to learn about all the dinosaurs themselves, we centered 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 part of the Lord'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 few that shook paleontology to its very core and took science out of the museums and”
lecture halls and onto the pages of Taudry 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. 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 Rappell, 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 ikthiosaurus 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. 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 from much of the 19th century. A lot of Americans saw themselves as being less area-diet, less learned, right kind of a younger culture, a less sophisticated culture, and science was no exception. In the middle of the 19th century, two men hoped to distinguish not just American paleontology,
but themselves has 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, a force of personality to wage of a career in science, much to his father's dismay. This is Mark Jaffee, author of The Guild of Dinosaur. He says that Cope was a bit of a wounded kind, 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 himsel...
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, as how I would put it. So he was someone who he was kind of a dreamer in some way. 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'd always 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 copeside of the battle.”
On the other side of that battle was an American paleontologist named Otneel Charles Marsh. He was also a man of three names, but differed from the young Ongeny cope in many ways. For one, he had a much slower, much steadier approach to the scientific process. Whereas Cope was given to bold theorizing, Marsh was a dog at empiricism, 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 and a 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 and as a approach. Also, according to written and photographic documentation, he both looked and acted like a cramogenely cartoon walrus. Marsh was stalking,
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 personality. 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. 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 Uncle 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 higher has enough you,
given the job as curator. So it was like, Marsh was the kind of the original netbo 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 bearing capitalism. In the second half of the 19th century, wealthy guys like John D. Rockefeller,
“Andrew Carnegie, and JP Morgan were sitting on in a scene 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. These museums had multiple functions,
but among other things, they were part of a PR campaign. Right, the other functional 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. What's the most spectacular thing that will draw all kinds of people from all
walks of life into the naturalist 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. Cop and Marsh met for the first time in Berlin in the year 1864. O.C.
Wallace-Face Marsh was there studying at a German university.
Europe dodging the civil war draft. Marsh did cope. They started off as, maybe you could say, like,
“friend of me, I don't know exactly. 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. 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 Alaska Missaurus. Mark Jaffee again. In 1868, Cop 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 secreture called the Alaska Missaurus. And this was a long, sneaky aquatic animal. The Alaska Missaurus could grow to 43 feet in length and Cop had painstakingly reconstructed the skeleton. In Cop's description to the Academy of Natural Sciences, he wrote, quote,
“"It possesses a tale of great length, which was elevated, compressed,”
and adapted for skulling 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, Cop showed him the Alaska Missaurus. And again, this goes back to the one-upsmanship. Marsh looked at it and said, "You've got the head on the wrong end."
The Alaska Missaurus fossil either had a very, very long neck or a very, very long tail. Cop guessed it had a long tail. And he guessed wrong. Cop deferred to Joseph Lighting,
the father of American Paleontology for a second opinion. He looked at it and he took the skull
from the one end and walked as quite a long, big animal and walked to the other and fit it right into a socket there. Well, of course, Cop was mortified. And of course, Marsh was quite happy with himself. Humiliated, Cop 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, Cop 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 Cop 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. The Alasmasaurus incident turned them into enemies, but it would be their own ambitions
“that would escalate their tension into an all-out war. I think Cop and Marsh and 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. They are uniquely positioned in that they get to immortalize themselves.
Marsh and Cop 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 is mostly taken place on the East Coast of the United States. Marsh is at Yale in Connecticut, Cop 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. 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, family and tology,
which had close ties to all of these expanding interests, kind of hitched to ride along the way.
Whether it was timber or building supplies or farmland, it was sort of like t...
was poised to extract so many of these resources from native lands. And 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 terrasor. 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.
Coop 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 Bridge of Basin.”
Bridge of Basin was a site in southwestern Wyoming that was essentially a treasure trove for vertebrate fossils. Marsh was there, Coop 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 Eosene 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,
Coop 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 Coop to find, which he did. Coop 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. Coop 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 Coop finding. It was just really just grinding for Coop. Joseph Lydie, Coop'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. 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. Emily 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 Coop and soon the two began battling it out again. Both men dispatch 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. You know,
“sort of like, man, you should have just transferred to a different school. Just go to Colorado.”
Paranoid, Marsh should refer to Coop by codenames and bribe members of Coop's team away from him. In retaliation, Coop would employ dinosaur wrestlers to excavate fossils out from under Marsh's team. They're even accounts of the two warring camps throwing rocks at one another. And one solution's allegation that one of Marsh's collectors destroyed a dig site after taking all the
Fossils he wanted from it.
the foundation for the production of war knowledge, which is basically, I mean, that's an
“athema to the 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. It's often very self-serving, that scientists are more interested in credit than they are and 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, Copen 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.
“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 in name dinosaurs such as Stegasaurus, Alasaurus, and Apatasaurus, and of course. We're standing in front of an enormous free-standing fossil of the great Longneck dinosaur brawtasaurus, 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. This is Dr. Bart Ungen Buller, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum. This history may be toadry, 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 Copen Marsh, a sudden windfall, a extraordinary treasured trove,”
opened 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. He had the Peabody Museum, he had political connections, and he could hold a wicked grudge.
But temperamental cop managed to find a way around that, because the first to publish was the
first to get credit. So cop 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 US Geological Survey and he used that power to cut cop off from any
government funding. Cop 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 cop is, he's out in the cold. Cop 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. Cop 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, cop dropped out of the bone wars. Hope was a very sympathetic 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 trained right way. And like there are these letters where he's kind of when he lost a bunch
of money. He's often the desert in New Mexico. And he like just he went out there by himself. Like by himself, right man. This is the wild West. And he's writing like he's it's night time and he's writing to his daughter. You know, he's going, I wish I could see your face. And I'm out here alone. It's cold. And I found some bones today. I'm worried about finances. All of this stuff is sort of plaintive thing to his family. And you can imagine his just being there under the stars alone thinking about his
life. And and that's, you know, it's it's it's 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.
personal life in shambles. But that wasn't enough. March wanted to pry Cope's most prized
“possession out of his hands. He wanted to take the man's bones. And this is when March finally went”
too far. On December 16, 1889, Cope was sent a letter from the secretary of the interior demanding that he turned over his personal fossil collection to the Smithsonian institution. March 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 March down for good.
For years and years, Cope had collected any complaint or possible near-do well doing by March. Mark Jaffee again. He interviewed a lot of the disgruntled assistants that stories from them, and he gathered all this stuff and he called it his Marciana. He kept it in a drawer.
“Cope had been keeping what was essentially a secret dossier full of terrible accusations against”
March. 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 Harold. Who ended up shopping around a series, a three-port series, exposing March, and this landed
in January of 1890. This petty scientific feud had jumped from dusty academic papers to the front
page of major newspapers. The headline read, "Scientists wage better 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 that 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. Congress, at this time, had a conservative faction that was absolutely itching to slash its funding for the sciences. And earlier that year, March 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 in the Congress with a copy of March's Birds With Teeth,”
O'Donnell, and slammed his bookdowns at Birds With Teeth. Birds With Teeth. This is where taxpayer dollars are going birds with teeth. And through those efforts, the USGS was severely defunded. When his appropriation was cut off in 1892, March received a cursed telegram from the director of the USGS demanding his resignation. But that wasn't even the worst of it from March. So March 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, that was like 80 tons of fossils. I think it's five or six car loads. March 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.
Cope 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. Yeah, the museum is pretty crowded today, I guess, because the holidays, but this this this
haul is always crowded. Yeah. Cope's massive collection was purchased by the American Museum
of Natural History, where Dr. Michael Novicech was able to point out some of his greatest discoveries. This is Alasaurus. Oh, yeah. It's an older predator than Tyranasaurus, from the Jurassic. And it, you know, a little smaller, it's still for rocious looking. Obviously. Cope 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.
This is Dan Brinkman, Museum Assistant at the Yale Peabody Museum.
“So Cope gave his body to science. He wanted his brain compared with Mars's brain to show”
who was the brainier of the two. Mars did not end up taking the bait and he died just two years later, brain unremoveed, but with no family or friends by a side. It sort of reminds me of like the opening scene of Citizen Kane, you know, Charles Worthy Kane is there and bed. Yeah, except he's like, "Brotosaurus." But the irony is they're known together, you know, Copen Marsh, Abbott and Costello, you know, it's just kind of hardly say one name without the other.
I don't think they would have liked that. Combined, 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 Diploticus.
And if you want the final score, Mars 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. That 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. They also furthered the reputations of two of the most renowned natural history museums in the world. And it is ironic that out of this horrible kind of competition, it was more in competition, it was a fight, a feud, came this brilliant result. Dr. Michael Novicek again. It was really the big spark for the growth of those museums
and the establishment of museums. I mean, dinosaurs are popular, a giant mammal fossils are popular, and people flock to them, and so the carnage, the Peabody, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the Philadelphia Academy, and more were all 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? 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. How 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. I'm reporting a podcast about dinosaurs. I wanted to ask, what do you do you like dinosaurs? Yeah, and want me a case and things? Yeah, I really like to say
with two tigers, because Antio-Dactors, because Cabetus-Tac, phintonito, power and power windows. Uh-huh.
“I, on the yellow windows. You are, and what do you like about dinosaurs?”
Some of them eat plants and some of them are super cool because they can one-thats blend in and also, they can one-fast I say because Cabetus-Tac. Did you know of flies? Yeah. What's that dinosaur? I don't know, but these people would know. Confess the virus 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 with the museum today.
Okay. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Hi. Okay. A few corrections with Gillian Jacobs after this.
We are back with a reporter and dinosaur enthusiast Gillian Jacobs.
Am I now the official dinosaur correspondent for 99 P.I.? 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. That'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. So no judgments for me. 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? Okay, so we know that the whole bone wars were actually kicked off by a really big slip-up. Here's Mark Jaffee author of The Guild at Dinosaur again. The single biggest mistake in paleontology was marshes. He made a mistake that stood for decades. So in the thick of the bone wars, Marsh described a name the species of Sarapod, which is a type of dinosaur with a very long neck and a very long tail. And he named this
a patasaurus. Well, a couple of years later, his team found the remains of another Sarapod, this one much bigger, which Marsh believed belonged to an entirely new species. He had this nearly complete cellar again, very rare. All it lacked was a head. And he couldn't, 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 Brantosaurus. Well, there's no such thing as a Brantosaurus. What the Brantosaurus was wasn't a patasaurus body with a camosaurus head. And the sort of the irony was that for years, many paleontologists sort of, and that's not right. That's not right. But because it was Marsh, is all right. I'm not going to take that on. It took almost 60 years before everybody owned up.
“Yeah, there's no such thing as a Brantosaurus. I've heard this before, but I think there's probably”
a bunch of people who don't know that Brantosaurus never actually existed. Like it's still kind of
in the top five of dinosaurs that people know, but actually it was not patasaurus the whole time, which is the wrong skull. Yeah. So the actual name Brantosaurus went unused by paleontologists for around 100 years. And 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 Brantosaurus 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 Brantosaurus? Is like one of the big five. Yeah, that was my favorite dinosaur. Yeah, I love that. We're writing 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 a patasaurus and Brantosaurus to distinguish it as a separate genus and that the name Brantosaurus should be revived.
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, but watch yourself. The
“comment section is 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. And then Brantosaurus, told me about a mistake he made. That was more of a clerical error than a taxonomic error as he was rushing to beat March to publication. Cope had kind of poor handwriting that alone when he's writing by a lamplight at camp. But a porch litre for her in black-viewed Wyoming got this such line description that he was
to telegraph back to Philadelphia. Cope had intended to name one of his animals. It's not still often done, which means Beast requested to. But the port to Ligerford trying to make it out,
Faster-dized it into Lepha Lepha Dunn, which is pure gibberish.
us, I think. Absolutely. I'm glad I can spell my own name some days. The next one is actually
“a double oopsie from March. So March, first described Stegosaurus in 1877, Pop Quiz Roman,”
"What does a Stegosaurus look like?" Yeah, I know exactly what Stegosaurus looks like. You can't, you 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, the bony sails, like a, like a mohawk on, on its spine, and 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 March pictured the bony plates lying flat across the animals back, like proof shingles or, like, a suit of armor, which 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. 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 March theorized about the Stegosaurus was that it possibly had two brains and one of those brains was in its butt.
“I do remember this now that you mentioned it, like a walnut size brain in his butt.”
Why did he think this? So he noticed that the neural canal running through the sacrum, which is the fused vertebrate, 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 in the spike tail. Like kind of how it was 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's awesome. Okay, I have to be serious.
“Like I said, paleontology is hard and none of this is meant to dunk on Copen March 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 that it being just a hoisted on their own guitar. We'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, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swanry Al, fact checking by Graham Haitia. Special thanks this week to Leslie M. M. Bloom. Kathy two is our executive producer Kirk Cole State is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our
senior editor. The rest of team includes Chris Brube, Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Furjonson, Moshmadan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Talon and Rain Stradley and me Roman Morris. That 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the series XM podcast family. Now, headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful. Uptown. Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sciences well as our own discord server.
There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.
