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Ep. 67 Bone Wars: How Dueling Fossil Hunters Put Dinosaurs on the Map

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 67

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Join the Patreon for exclusive bonus content! Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were American paleontologists during the second half of the 19th century. Although they started as friends, they soon turned bitter enemies, competing against one another for 20 years to find and name the most fossils. This duel, often dubbed the “bone wars” led to espionage, sabotage, scandal, backstabbing, name calling, bribery, theft, and the throwing of literal rocks. It also led to a lot of mistakes made in haste. But, at the end of the day, it led to the discovery of 130 dinosaur species including Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Allosaurus, Apatosaurus (AKA Brontosaurus… I'll explain in the episode!), and more. Check out this week’s episode of History Fix to learn more, wherever you get your podcasts (or link in bio).

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This episode is about science and that probably seems like a pretty tame topic. Scientists aren’t typically dramatic characters. They certainly aren’t action heroes or depraved villains. They’re nerds, right? Nerds holed up in laboratories examining things with magnifying glasses and microscopes. Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were paleontologists, scientists, nerds. Together they discovered over 130 new dinosaur species, including Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Diplodocus, and Apatosaurus (AKA Brontosaurus… I’ll come back to that). These guys were prolific, cutting edge, leading the charge at a time when people barely knew what dinosaurs were. But they certainly weren’t tame. This episode is about science but, did you know, there will be drama? There will be espionage. There will be sabotage. There will be scandal and backstabbing and name calling and theft and bribery and the throwing of literal rocks? Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Before we get started I have a quick but huge announcement. I have officially set up a Patreon for History Fix. Patreon is basically a way to support independent podcasts like this one by subscribing for a few dollars a month in exchange for bonus content and perks. So basically, you go to patreon.com/historyfixpodcast which is linked in the description. You join the patreon. It costs $5 a month but you get exclusive bonus content every month like the Mini Fix I just put on there about Varina Davis here’s a little teaser: 


Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis and First Lady of the Confederacy played the part well. She was educated, graceful, the picture of antebellum perfection. She hosted elegant soirees at the Confederate white house in Richmond, Virginia and managed a household of around 20 workers, black and white, enslaved and free. But Varina, when examined closely, was not what she seemed. In writing, she referred to herself as a “half-breed” born of the North and of the South. Her political loyalties were suspect as she found herself torn between both causes. And her dark skin and hair. What was that about? People whispered behind closed doors. Was the First Lady of the Confederacy… could she possibly be… Black? Let’s fix that. 


So that is only for Patreon subscribers. $5 a month people. That’s the cost of one small latte a month, or a box of cheez-its, or a not even very good beer. It’s approximately 16 cents a day. You also get access to the regular weekly episodes one day early and ad free. Plus I’ve got all kinds of other fun bonus stuff in the works. Hopefully this schpeal is winning some of you over and you’ll tap that link to join the patreon. You get more content, and you get to help make History Fix sustainable well into the future. 


Okay, I am so excited to bring you this episode because this story is honestly so much juicier than I was expecting. This is like nerds gone wild and I love it. And I also love where this idea came from so I have to share it with you guys. I got an email a few weeks ago from a lovely History Fix listener named Thelma. In the email, Thelma told me that she and her 9 year old son Pablo enjoy listening to History Fix together and that he had written me a letter. And as a former 4th grade teacher who has been out of the classroom for 3 years now, getting a letter from a 9 year old was genuinely just what I needed. Here’s what Pablo wrote: I recommend the topic of the “Bone Wars” it’s about {drum roll please} ready. Few wars have been fought over fossils, but between 1870 and 1900 a battle raged in the U.S Midwest 2 rival paleontologists named Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, were bitter rivals for 20 years! Each racing to find and name the most dinosaurs. Their battles lead to the discovery of 130 dinosaurs that’s nearly a 6th of the dinosaurs we know today. They found some of the most famous fossils including: Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Camptosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Diplodocus, Nodosaurus, Ornithosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops. Marsh and Cope even spied on each other digs, sabotaged supplies, raided camps, smashed finds and even planted fake fossils to mislead the other team. Hope you make an episode about my topic. Sincerely, Pablo. I love it. I’m so impressed. This is so well written and honestly just such a good suggestion. You’re awesome Pablo and we’re doing it buddy. 


This story has two main characters. The older of the two, Othniel Charles Marsh, but I’m just gonna call him Marsh, was born in 1831 on a farm in New York. His family was not wealthy. His mother died when he was only 3 years old and his father hoped he would become a field hand on the family farm. And I really wonder, if Marsh’s mother had not died, if she had lived to help raise him to adulthood, if he would have been a much different person. We’ll never know. His father wanted him to work on the farm, manual labor, but Marsh showed an early interest in science. Now, typically a poor farm boy’s interest in science was of no consequence but Marsh happened to have a very wealthy and very influential uncle, George Peabody, and this guy is honestly super impressive. He was born poor, but he worked his way up the ladder selling dry goods, like I had no idea that was a profitable business. He worked his way up. At one point he goes to London to purchase dry goods to sell in the US cause that’s what he does and while he’s there he negotiated an 8 million dollar loan to basically bail out the almost bankrupt state of Maryland. He didn’t get any sort of commission or anything he’s just like “here ya go Maryland, you’re welcome” and then he’s like “hey I’m actually really good at this whole finance thing,” and he goes into banking. He saves up 20 million dollars which is 600 some million dollars today and he uses it for like the best stuff. He is like the OG philanthropist and financier. According to Encyclopedia Britannica quote “His Baltimore institute provided a library, art gallery, and music academy. He also funded a historical museum and library in Peabody, Mass., a natural-history museum at Yale University, and a museum of archaeology at Harvard University; and he contributed to many other colleges and historical societies. His Peabody Education Fund was endowed with 3.5 million dollars to promote education of Southern children of all races.

In 1862 he gave 2.5 million dollars for the construction of apartment settlements for London’s working people.” end quote. I mean that’s just incredible. The rich people of today need to step it up. But another thing Peabody did was basically rescue his nephew, Marsh, from the inevitable fate of a field hand on the family farm. He sends him to school at Phillips Academy and then Yale and then he goes off to grad school in Germany. Okay. So we’ll leave Marsh in Germany for now. Fate will bring us back there though, don’t worry. 


Edward Drinker Cope was nine years younger than Marsh, born in 1840 to a wealthy family in Pennsylvania. He was also a natural lover of science and, because he was rich, he attended the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He published his first scholarly article when he was just 18 years old. But, alas, the Civil War breaks out and war does not care about science. So Cope’s parents are like “we gotta get him out of here. They’re gonna make him fight in this war and rich people shouldn’t have to fight in wars so we’ll just use our resources to get him out of it.” And they send him to… any guesses? Germany. They send him to Germany. Now, a couple of sources I read claimed he was sent to Germany because his parents wanted to get him away from a girl they viewed as an ill suited match. I don’t know. Maybe it was sort of both like a kill two birds with one stone sort of thing. They are clearly helicopter parenting hard and they send him to Germany and it was there, in 1863, that Cope met Marsh at some sort of scientific meeting. 


They had a lot to talk about. They were both very interested in paleontology - the study of fossils - which was a relatively new field of science. Massive bones had been uncovered that no one could really make sense of until very recently. These finds had always been the stuff of myths and legends. It wasn’t until very recently - the first dinosaur bone wasn’t discovered in North America until 1854, Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution “On the Origin of Species” in 1859 - so all of this science stuff is just really getting started and remember we’re in 1863 right now, couple of science nerds, into dinosaurs, they must have been just abuzz with excitement at the cusp of this new field taking off. They spent a few days touring the city, Berlin, together. They exchanged addresses so they could stay in touch and then they parted ways and they soon both made their way back to the United States where they stayed in touch and were friends. I mean they even named fossil finds after one another. How cute is that? Cope named an amphibian fossil Ptyonius marshii after Marsh and Marsh named a giant snake fossil Mosasaurus copeanus after Cope. Cute. 


But, the friends would turn frenemy soon enough. And, I really blame this on Marsh. Poor guy didn’t have a mama to teach him better. Just a hardened farm dad raising him. Cope is like “cool, this Marsh guy is super cool, he named a snake after me, I’m gonna let him in on this fossil quarry I know about. Maybe we can go find some fossils together or something. It’ll be a nice bonding activity.” And Cope brings Marsh to a fossil quarry in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Cope knows about this quarry because his mentor, a guy named Joseph Leidy, had discovered one of the first dinosaur fossils in the US here. So Cope is familiar with the site. He brings Marsh there, and together, they discover 3 new dinosaur species at Haddonfield that season. They part ways, everything’s cool… or so Cope thinks. He returns alone to do some more excavating later and is stunned to learn that Marsh has gone behind his back and paid the site managers to pledge all the bones found in the area to him alone. Meaning anything Cope finds,  anything anyone finds has to be turned over to Marsh. So that’s the first attack in this war. The first sign of trouble in paradise.  


But whatever, he brushes it off. Now, around this same time, Cope receives some bones that had been shipped to his office from an army surgeon in Kansas. He assembles the bones. He names it elasmosaurus. It’s a type of aquatic dinosaur. A species of plesiosaur. And he rushes to publish the findings in the American Philosophical Society journal. He’s like “gotta get the word out before somebody else does.” Because that’s kind of how it worked in the science world. Whoever published it first was the one who got the credit. So he’s like boom, elasmosaurus. But, in his haste, he had made a big mistake. When he reassembled the bones, he put the skull at the end of the tail. So elasmosaurus, you can google a picture if you don’t know what it looks like, it has a super long neck and a pretty short tail. But Cope had put the head at the end of the tail so that it had a short neck and a long tail instead. And that’s what he went ahead and published. Marsh stops by to have a look and pretty much immediately realizes that the head’s in the wrong place. And Cope’s mentor, Joseph Leidy, confirms this. They’re like “dude, you put the head on the tail. Don’t know know the difference between a head vertebrate and a tail vertebrate?” And Cope is mortified by this mistake. He quickly published a correction and actually tried to purchase all of the copies of the American Philosophical Society journal that the original, incorrect findings were published in. Marsh later wrote about this incident 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,” end quote. So Marsh thinks all the madness that’s about to ensue is because he caught Cope’s mistake and hurt his ego. Orrr maybe cause you went behind his back and stole the fossil quarry he was nice enough to tell you about, ya jerk. But, at the same time, some experts believe that Cope’s mentor Joseph Leidy would have definitely pointed the mistake out to him first and that perhaps Cope’s arrogance got in the way of issuing a correction until Marsh got up in there and he was like “ugh, fine.” Cope would become pretty notorious for hastily publishing reports with errors in them which is not great for science or Cope’s reputation. 


By this point Marsh’s rich uncle Peabody had funded the Peabody Museum at Yale University and secured a position for Marsh as Yale’s first professor of paleontology. But the west was calling. People were discovering incredible fossil finds out west during the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1870s. In 1877, a Colorado schoolteacher named Arthur Lakes sent both Marsh and Cope letters about a supposed dinosaur bone he had found while out on a hike. Marsh paid Lakes $100 to keep the find quiet but, alas, Cope already knew about it and so the race was on. Marsh sent an agent out to secure the site before Cope could get there. But, by then, Cope had gotten intel about another site in Colorado. Marsh was becoming increasingly paranoid about Cope. According to a PBS American Experience article quote “Marsh divided his attention between recovering as many fossils as possible in the yet unexplored region and his constant dread that Cope might retrieve a share of bones of equal quantity or interest. Marsh even went so far as to have spies track Cope's progress, referring to Cope by the codename "Jones," end quote. Like, just do you boo. But no, the competition was serious at this point. 


Then some Union Pacific Railroad workers in Como Bluff, Wyoming start finding fossils. But they’re not just going to hand them over. They’ve caught on to this whole dueling paleontologists situation and they intend to take advantage of it. They write to Marsh to tell him that, for the right price, they’ll send the fossils his way. But, for too low a price, they hint, they may decide to strike a deal with Cope instead. So they’re leveraging the competition with Cope to get more money out of Marsh. Pretty savvy railroad workers. Marsh is like “alright, alright, alright, I’ll pay you what you want, just don’t tell Cope” and he starts getting boxcars full of fossils delivered from Como Bluff including the very first diplodocus, allosaurus, and stegosaurus. But these savvy railroad workers are certain they can get more out of this situation. They leak word of the arrangement with Marsh to the local newspaper and exaggerate the price Marsh is paying them for the fossils. And they do this to try to draw in Cope. Cope is the rich one after all, right? The rich kid from Philadelphia. Marsh was just a poor farm boy without his rich uncle Peabody. They’re like, oh yeah, Cope is the rich one. Let’s get him in on this. And they try to sort of bait him with this tantalizing news, exaggerating what Marsh is paying so that Cope will hopefully offer them even more. Cope sends an agent west but they can’t settle on any sort of financial agreement with the railroad workers. And, according to a ThoughtCo article by Bob Strauss, he instructs his guy to just start stealing fossils from Como Bluff. 


Como Bluff becomes the epicenter of the bone wars. Marsh and Cope both move west themselves because, at this point, they had still been on the east coast, just sending guys to do their bidding. According to Strauss quote “Over the next few years, they engaged in such hijinks as deliberately destroying uncollected fossils and fossil sites (so as to keep them out of each other's hands), spying on each other's excavations, bribing employees, and even stealing bones outright. According to one account, workers on the rival digs once took time out from their labors to pelt each other with stones!” end quote. 


But it was pretty obvious that Marsh was winning the bone wars. In 1882 he became chief paleontologist of the newly formed US Geological Survey. Then he had access to federal funds and tons of resources. He was also able to cut Cope off from federal funding they had both relied on. And, I don’t know, I feel like Marsh was just really in it for the competition, the honor and glory, he was trying to be the best. I get the vibe Cope was kind of in it for the dinosaurs. The man just really loved dinosaurs. Martha Henriques reports in a BBC article quote “[Cope] would write excited letters from his expeditions back to his wife Annie Pim Cope and, when she was older, his daughter Julia Biddle Cope. From a dig in Kansas, he told Annie of the remarkable abundance of fossils in the landscape: "If the explorer searches the bottoms of rainwashes and ravines, he will doubtless come upon the fragments of a tooth or jaw, and generally find a line of such pieces leading to an elevated position on the bank or bluff where lies the skeleton of some monster of the ancient sea." Picturing these long-dead creatures was as much a part of Cope's work as analyzing their bones. When considering giant Pterodactyls, he [wrote] "these strange creatures flapped their leathery wings over the waves, and, often plunging, seized many an unsuspecting fish; or, soaring at a safe distance, viewed the sports and combats of the more powerful saurian at sea. At night-fall, we may imagine them trooping to the shore, and suspending themselves to the cliffs by the claw-bearing fingers of their wing-limbs." The awe with which Cope spoke about dinosaurs could be infectious, one of his field assistants recalled. When Cope "began to speak of the wonderful animals of the earth, those of long ago and those of today, so absorbed did he become in his subject that he talked on as if to himself, looking straight ahead and rarely turning toward me, while I listened entranced", the assistant wrote,” end quote. 


But Cope is falling behind miserably in the bone wars. Marsh is now a federal employee and Cope is still trying to fund everything himself. He’s sort of getting ganged up on by this US Geological Survey headed by Marsh. He obviously feels this because he named a fossil Anisonchus cophater. Henriques reports quote “When a friend searched Greek dictionaries to find the root of the species name, he drew a blank. "It's no use looking up the Greek derivation of cophater, because it is not classic in origin," was Cope's reply. "It is derived from the union of two English words, Cope and hater, for I have named it in honor of the number of Cope-haters that surround me." There was a reason Cope chose that particular creature to commemorate his enemies. "It was a very ugly little specimen," … "There is an underlying sense of humor to it." end quote. Paleontology jokes.


So Cope is getting ganged up on, he has no funding. He’s got a lot of haters. He takes drastic action and invests in a silver mining venture in New Mexico that fails and he basically loses everything. That PBS article says quote “By 1890, separated from his wife and child, Cope was living alone in a small Philadelphia apartment. His fossil collection was all he had left. Marsh then made a fatal mistake. He attempted to take Cope's fossils, claiming they had been collected with federal money and thus belonged to the government. Cope fought back, producing evidence that he had paid for almost all of his collecting out of his own pocket. Then, he set out to destroy Marsh,” end quote. Cope is like “enough is a freaking nough dude. I have nothing left. Why are you still messing with me?” 


But, you see, Cope had been collecting basically a laundry list of all of Marsh’s mistakes throughout the years. He called this his Marshiana and he stored it in the bottom right drawer of his desk. He once told a friend quote “In these papers I have a full record of Marsh's errors from the very beginning which at some future time I may be tempted to publish,” end quote. This is like a paleontologist burn book. For real this is like Mean Girls. Mean Paleontologists. Somebody make that movie. And so the time has come. Cope is going to destroy Marsh with this Marshiana burn book he’s been collecting. 


According to PBS quote “For years, Cope had been collecting information -- records of nefarious, underhanded dealings and accusations of scientific impropriety -- to use against Marsh. He turned them over to a freelance journalist at The New York Herald, an eager purveyor of scandals. The headline, "SCIENTISTS WAGE BITTER WARFARE," set off a firestorm. The public battle lasted for two weeks, as the professors fired accusations at each other. Marsh and his allies in the U.S. Geological Survey were publicly accused of corruption, incompetence and misuse of government funds. Congress investigated and eventually slashed funding for the Survey, eliminating the department of paleontology along with Marsh's position, power, and most of his income. As a final indignity, the Smithsonian demanded that Marsh turn over a large part of his own fossil collection, some of which had, in fact, been collected with government funds,” end quote. 


And after that they were pretty much both ruined professionally and financially. Which is just so silly because it’s like, okay I have a very physical 3 year old boy who, all he wants to do is wrestle with his older brother who is like thinking about black holes or the periodic table and could care less about wrestling. But the little one just wants to wrestle. He wants to fight. And sometimes he gets way too into it and he head butts his brother and then they’re both hurt and crying. And it’s like, well what did you think would happen? Did you not realize that was going to hurt you too? Slamming your head into someone else’s head? And I feel like this is symbolically what Marsh and Cope did, they headbutted each other and they both went down. By the time they died, Cope first in 1897 at the age of 56 and Marsh two years later at the age of 67, they were both basically penniless. Marsh, once a wealthy man, had just $186 in his bank account and Cope had lost all of his family fortune in that failed silver mining venture. 


It’s safe to say that Cope and Marsh greatly impacted the field of paleontology. According to PBS quote “the amount and quality of bones they each collected became the foundation of paleontology in America. Cope left behind 13,000 specimens, and Marsh's comparable collection proved to be "the best support of the theory of evolution," according to a personal letter from Charles Darwin himself,” end quote. Strauss says quote “So eager were Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope to one-up each other that they discovered many more dinosaurs than if they'd merely engaged in a friendly rivalry… The fossils discovered by Marsh and Cope… helped to feed the American public's increasing hunger for new dinosaurs. Each major discovery was accompanied by a wave of publicity, as magazines and newspapers illustrated the latest amazing finds. The reconstructed skeletons slowly but surely made their way to major museums, where they still reside to the present day. You might say that popular interest in dinosaurs really began with the Bone Wars,” end quote. 


But, their antics caused some problems as well. Strauss explains quote “First, paleontologists in Europe were horrified by the crude behavior of their American counterparts. This left a lingering, bitter distrust that took decades to dissipate. And second, Cope and Marsh described and reassembled their dinosaur finds so quickly that they were occasionally careless. For example, a hundred years of confusion about Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus can be traced directly back to Marsh, who put a skull on the wrong body — the same way Cope did with Elasmosaurus, the incident that started the Bone Wars in the first place!” end quote. So, you know how back in the day, when I was in elementary school at least, we learned about a dinosaur called Brontosaurus? He was like a long necked dinosaur. Like Littlefoot from the Land Before Time he was a Brontosaurus. Well, turns out Brontosaurus isn’t actually a thing. If you have delved into dinosaurs more recently you may have noticed this. Like, my kids have some books about dinosaurs and there is no Brontosaurus in those books. Which at first I was like, weird Brontosaurus was like one of the main dinosaurs right it was like stegosaurus, triceratops, T-Rex, and brontosaurus, those were the main guys. Brontosaurus is gone. And that’s because there never really was a Brontosaurus, it was always Apatosaurus. According to an article for WTTS which is a Chicago based PBS station quote “When Marsh discovered a long-necked dinosaur in 1877, he named it Apatosaurus. But the incomplete specimen was missing its skull, so Marsh guessed that a skull found elsewhere belonged with the Apatosaurus. Unfortunately, it was actually the skull of a Camarasaurus. When he examined another long-necked fossil a couple of years later, he named that one Brontosaurus. But it was actually just an Apatosaurus, this time with the correct skull. Despite the fact that other paleontologists discovered and corrected his error a few decades later, both names stuck, which is why you might still hear both today,” end quote. So Marsh mistook a second apatosaurus find as a new dinosaur and gave it a new name, brontosaurus. But this apparently happened a lot. Henriques explains quote “The duo's haste to one-up each other led to a taxonomic tangle that would take their successors years to unpick, with many species given half a dozen different names that then had to be painstakingly pruned out of use,” end quote. Because, think about it, they’re both finding bones, naming them and publishing it as fast as they can to try to beat out the other. They aren’t communicating their finds with one another. If anything they are trying to keep their finds secret until they can be published. So they’re finding some of the same animals and naming them different things. Which also, how crazy is it that these guys just got to make up the names for all these animals? And like silly stuff like cophater. Could have named them anything - marshsucksasaurus. 


But honestly this immaturity is the lesser of their transgressions. Because the whole time they were making a war zone out of the west, they were also encroaching on Native American lands, taking fossils from those lands, which had monetary value but also had significance to the Native American people there. The fossils were part of their creation stories, passed down for generations. They had religious significance and Marsh and Cope were carting them away by the boxcar. But, that likely didn’t give them any pause because Marsh and Cope, as 19th century scientists, were pretty inherently racist. Strauss says in that BBC article quote “both Cope and Marsh subscribed to popular racist ideas of the time that held the white male to be the pinnacle of evolution. In one letter, Cope eagerly described robbing a Native American grave to examine the human remains in this light. Marsh, too, would plunder graves for the same reason,” end quote. And remember this is right after Darwin published his theory of evolution, these are the first stirrings of the eugenics movement which suggested that white people were superior, more evolved than other races. I have a whole episode about that, episode 46. But Marsh and Cope definitely subscribed to this line of thinking. 


In fact, after Cope died, he donated his body to science, his whole body but specifically his head. He wanted the American Anthropometric Society to dissect his head after he died to determine the size of his brain. I did say he was arrogant, didn’t I? They never actually did though and his bones were passed on to the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Anthropology in 1966 where they just sat on a shelf in a box for a while. It was there that distinguished anthropology professor Loren Eiseley snagged them and took them back to his office I guess to keep him company, I don’t know. He reportedly toasted the box of bones which he called “Eddie,” with sherry, bought him a birthday present, and decorated the box for Christmas. This is the box with Edward Cope’s bones in it. But weirdo Eiseley goes even further and he tells his nephew that he wants to be buried with Cope’s bones after he dies. So he dies, and the nephew gets the box of bones out of his office and takes it to the funeral home where his Uncle’s body is being prepared for burial. He gets there and he’s like “yeah there’s no way I can pull this off. How am I supposed to get these bones in his coffin without anyone noticing?” So he takes them back to the museum. 


But, the adventures of Cope’s box of bones has just begun. In the 1990s when Jurassic Park mania hit and everyone was obsessed with dinosaurs, a photographer named Louie Psihoyos caught wind that Cope’s bones were at the museum. So he showed up asking for them and they were I guess like “sure, here you go.” and Psihoyos actually took Cope’s bones on the road with him. According to Keith Plocek in a Mental Floss article, Psihoyos and collaborator John Knoebber quote “started treating Cope like one of the crew. Knoebber made a velvet-lined mahogany box for the skull, which they didn’t like leaving in the van, so “Do you have Ed?” became a common refrain every time they left a diner,” end quote. Like, what is happening? But apparently having this box with Cope’s bones in it got them in to talk to paleontologists that they interviewed for the book they were writing called Hunting Dinosaurs. They were like “we have Edward Drinker Cope’s bones in a box in our van, wanna chat?” And I guess that worked. But after 3 years on the road, the museum finally caught on. They were like “hey that guy never brought the box of bones back that we just gave to him no questions asked.” They get up with him and he has to bring the bones back to the museum where they remain to this day, just sitting on a shelf. 


But the reason I bring all that up is because it’s very likely Cope viewed himself as the “type specimen” and that’s why he wanted to be examined after his death. So every time a new species is classified, one really solid example is declared to be the “type specimen.” Right, like this is a perfect example of this species, anything else is an aberration. But with humans, when Carl Linneaus who is considered the father of modern taxonomy, when he named homo sapiens, us, as a species in 1758, he didn’t try to look for a type specimen, right, there’s too much baggage there. Instead he just said “know thyself.” But there were those in the field that believed in this whole type specimen thing and if there were type specimens of all the other species, surely there should be a type specimen homo sapien. So some people believe that Edward Drinker Cope viewed himself as the type specimen and that’s why he donated his body to begin with. Psihoyos says in that Mental Floss article quote “The legend I heard was that Cope wanted to be the type specimen… This is the dark part of the history. Cope was part of a group of scientists back then who were trying to set forth the idea that the Caucasian race is superior, and they were using brain case size and all these notions to legitimize it. Well, that never came to fruition,” end quote. Though some question that legend pointing to the fact that Cope had few teeth left at the end of his life and that teeth were an important part of any specimen, being able to examine the teeth of a species, Cope would have known, was important. So some argue he wouldn’t have donated himself as the type specimen because a type specimen would need all its teeth. I don’t know. I suppose being the type specimen would have been just one more way to best his rival, Marsh. Like “okay whatever Marsh found more dinosaurs but I’m the perfect human specimen so take that.” Maybe Cope was hoping Marsh would donate his own brain when he died and they’d have their final showdown there on the dissection table, brain to brain, continuing the bone wars even after death. Marsh did not donate his body to science and Cope’s bones remain in that velvet lined box on a shelf at the Penn Museum. 


So there you have it, the bone wars. Two scientists who contributed tremendously to the field of paleontology while also, somewhat cheapening it. Because it became so much about this competition, this rivalry between Marsh and Cope, that the science itself almost got left by the wayside. The accuracy was sacrificed. Reports were hasty and full of errors. They sabotaged each other to the point where they were also sabotaging potential fossil finds. And yet, without that rivalry, our understanding of, appreciation for dinosaurs would not be what it is today. Because, think about it, dinosaurs are a big deal. Especially for kids. You ask a little boy. Dinosaurs are a big deal. They’re plastered all over lunch boxes, backpacks, water bottles, pajamas. There are toys, and cartoons, and movies, and books, and theme parks. Dinosaurs are a big deal and that really is thanks to the bone wars. 


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. And thank you to Pablo for suggesting this topic. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. Also, check out the Patreon. There is an exclusive bonus mini fix there right now waiting for you. That $5 a month, 16 cents a day, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  


Information used in this episode was sourced from PBS American Experience, BBC, Encyclopedia Britannica, ThoughtCo, WTTW, Berkeley University, and Mental Floss. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.