The Bone Wars

99% Invisible - Roman Mars

This episode of 99% Invisible explores the dramatic and often scandalous rivalry between two 19th-century paleontologists, Edward Drinker Co

Key takeaways

The Bone Wars were a pivotal moment in the history of science, blending personal rivalry with scientific discovery.
Paleontology's rise in America was heavily influenced by capitalist patronage from figures like George Peabody and J.P. Morgan.

Main topics

The Bone Wars rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and O.C. Marsh
The role of wealthy benefactors in funding early American paleontology

Notable quotes

"It's a scientific lore so unhinged that it has its own name. The Bone Wars."

"Without the Bone Wars, elementary school field trips today would look very different."

Conclusion

The Bone Wars may have been fueled by ego and rivalry, but they ultimately transformed paleontology into a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Speaker 1 (0:05) Here at 99PI, we're in the business of making dreams come true. And boy, did we ever deliver this week. Speaker 2 (0:13) Sorry, I'm in awe. We are in a back room and I am like, what am I looking at? It's just Speaker 5 (0:19) hollowed ground. Yes. You guys. Speaker 2 (0:22) It's a Speaker 5 (0:23) cast of a T-Rex. Speaker 1 (0:24) It's a T-Rex. That's actor, reporter, and our good buddy, Galeen Jacobs. Speaker 2 (0:29) 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 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? Speaker 5 (0:50) This is a room full of big bones. Oh Speaker 2 (0:52) my god, this is not open to the public. Speaker 5 (0:55) Dinosaur storeroom. And you can see some of these bones are massive. Speaker 2 (1:00) 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 docent. Speaker 1 (1:17) But as much as Gillian 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. Speaker 2 (1:27) 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, Speaker 5 (1:36) every paleontologist knows this story, you know, just about. I would think. And 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. Speaker 8 (1:50) It's Speaker 5 (1:50) a Speaker 8 (1:50) 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. Speaker 2 (2:04) 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. 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. Speaker 1 (2:30) Although fossils are famously very, very old, paleontology as a formal science is actually pretty new. It's Speaker 4 (2:38) 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. Speaker 2 (2:54) 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. In 1812, at the age of 12, she discovered an ichthyosaurus skeleton along England's Jurassic coast. Speaker 4 (3:20) 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. Speaker 8 (3:33) It Speaker 4 (3:34) would take a few more Speaker 8 (3:35) 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 Speaker 4 (3:49) they were not taken very seriously by Europeans. And that was generally true, not just for science. 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... Speaker 4 (4:06) less erudite, less learned, right? Kind of a younger culture, a less sophisticated culture. And science was no exception. And Speaker 8 (4:14) in the middle of the 19th century, two men hoped to distinguish not just American paleontology, but themselves as scientifically worthy. Speaker 2 (4:24) 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. Speaker 3 (4:40) And he just started, you know, a force of personality to wage a career in science, much to his father's dismay. Speaker 2 (4:51) This 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. Speaker 3 (5:03) Well, I think it always made him self-conscious. And you felt, you know, he had to prove himself more. Speaker 2 (5:12) Cope was what you would call a gentleman scientist. He funded his work independently and was driven by his own personal curiosity. Speaker 4 (5:20) He was an exuberant theorist, is how I would put it. So 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. Speaker 2 (5:41) But as creative as he was, he had one fatal flaw. Speaker 3 (5:46) 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 Cope side of the battle. Speaker 8 (6:01) On the other side of that battle was an American paleontologist named Otneil 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 Speaker 1 (6:17) process. Speaker 4 (6:18) Whereas 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 Speaker 1 (6:50) approach. Also, according to written and photographic documentation, he both looked and acted like a curmudgeonly cartoon walrus. Speaker 4 (6:59) 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 publications, and Marsh just must have been a terrible person. He just seems like just someone that you would not want to spend a lot of time around. Speaker 1 (7:28) 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 Speaker 4 (7:40) 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 Speaker 8 (7:50) that wasn't all. At this time, there were very few opportunities to pursue paleontology. So Marsh got Unky George to create one for him. George Speaker 4 (7:59) 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. Speaker 2 (8:17) 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. Speaker 8 (8:29) 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. 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. Speaker 2 (8:48) 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. Speaker 4 (9:05) These museums had multiple functions, but among other things, they were part of a PR campaign. The 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 Speaker 1 (9:32) 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. Speaker 4 (9:45) What'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. Speaker 2 (9:53) With the rise of natural history museums, paleontology suddenly had a venue. They were grand palatial halls waiting to be filled with bones. Speaker 8 (10:04) Cope 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. Speaker 2 (10:14) While the temperamental Cope was in Europe dodging the Civil War draft. Speaker 4 (10:18) 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. Speaker 2 (10:29) 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. Speaker 8 (10:40) 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. Speaker 3 (10:47) The real break comes with the Elasmosaurus. Mark Speaker 2 (10:51) 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