[♪♩INTRO]
The world is full of great rivalries, like
Marvel and DC, or Ali and Frazier.
Science has its fair share too—just look
at Tesla and Edison.
And in the late 19th Century, two paleontologists
named Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker
Cope entered a feud that would eventually
be known as the Bone Wars.
While trying to one-up each other, they found
and named some of today’s most famous dinosaurs,
but they also made some pretty big mistakes.
At this point in history, paleontology was
still taking its first clumsy steps.
In 1824, a British geologist named William
Buckland published a paper about some bones
that he thought were from a huge extinct lizard.
He called it a Megalosaurus.
And even though “dinosaur” wouldn’t
become a word until nearly 20 years later,
Megalosaurus was the first one to be scientifically
described.
That’s when a researcher formally writes
about what makes an animal, or a type of animal,
unique, and where it fits into the tree of
life.
A few decades later, in 1858, the first nearly
complete dinosaur skeleton was found in America.
The Hadrosaurus was described and named by
Joseph Leidy, an academic who switched from
medicine to natural history, and would play
a huge part in early paleontology.
So Marsh and Cope basically grew up alongside
the field.
Marsh was born in 1831 in New York, went to
Yale thanks to his wealthy uncle, and ended
up studying paleontology in Germany.
Meanwhile, Cope was born in 1840 to a wealthy
Quaker family.
He didn’t have as much formal scientific
training as Marsh, but thanks to jobs in museums,
he learned about natural history and published
a lot of papers.
After the American Civil War started, Cope’s
father sent him off to Europe, and he met
Marsh in Berlin in 1863.
They started out friendly.
When they went back to America, they visited
different dig sites.
And because they were rich, they could hire
excavation teams to ship fossils back to them.
Sometimes with help from other experts, Marsh
and Cope thoughtfully analyzed and published
descriptions of new specimens without stepping
on each other’s toes.
But soon, their friendship would come crashing
down.
The feud really began when Cope was describing
the marine reptile Elasmosaurus in 1868.
Instead of taking his time to reconstruct
the skeleton, he raced to get some information
out in just a few weeks.
That eventually led him to misunderstand how
the bones of its spine lined up.
He figured, like more modern lizards, Elasmosaurus
would have a long tail instead of a long neck.
So in a figure he published in 1869, he drew
its head at the wrong end of the spine.
He was publicly corrected in 1870 by Joseph
Leidy, who studied the bones and noticed some
key details that Cope overlooked.
By some accounts, Marsh insisted he caught
the mistake, or at the very least rubbed it
in.
Cope tried to save his bacon by retracting
all copies of his paper and republishing…which
didn’t exactly work.
And things got more petty from there.
The meat of the Bone Wars started around 1877,
when they fought over fossils at the same
dig sites, like Como Bluffs in Wyoming, which
was a treasure trove of specimens.
And they started playing dirty—spying, bribing
people to switch employers, chucking rocks
to start fights, or even straight-up destroying
fossils to keep them out of each other’s
hands.
Between them, Cope and Marsh claimed to have
described over 130 kinds of dinosaurs, among
other ancient animals.
But they rushed to publish and made a lot
of mistakes, like giving new names to already-discovered
dinosaurs, or counting inconclusive fragments
as a whole new animal.
For instance, when Marsh was sent the headless
skeleton of a long-necked dinosaur in 1877,
he called it Apatosaurus.
But when he tried to scientifically describe
the creature, he reconstructed it with a totally
wrong skull.
Then, a couple years later, he was sent another
Apatosaurus skeleton with a skull, and called
it Brontosaurus.
And this naming confusion has lasted to this
day.
Really, Cope and Marsh had a lot more success
when they took their time with fossils, and
worked with other scientists instead of just
feuding.
When Marsh described Triceratops, for example,
he was only sent bits of the horns at first,
so he thought it was some kind of bison.
But when the geologist who had found the skull
fossils said that it wouldn’t make sense
for a lone bison to be mixed in with all these
dinosaur fossils, Marsh reconsidered.
With more input from peers, Marsh thought
these fossils might’ve come from another
dinosaur with spikes like a Stegosaurus.
And he eventually landed on the idea of a
dinosaur with horns, which hadn’t really
been dreamt up before.
Now, eventually, Cope and Marsh were left
penniless by the Bone Wars.
And their papers had so much sniping and so
little science that journals refused to publish
them.
While they did a lot for paleontology, they
also were reckless and gave the field a bad
rep.
Their constant sabotaging even made Joseph
Leidy quit paleontology altogether in the
mid 1870s.
So it’s an interesting story, and one we’ve
hopefully learned from.
Today we have a better understanding that
science depends on things like collaboration
and sharing information—and less, y’know,
throwing rocks at each other.
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow!
And thanks especially to our President of
Space, you all know him by now…
SR Foxley!
Thank you so much SR for your continued support
of SciShow.
You rock!
If you want to hear more stories about paleontology,
and what the Earth was like when these creatures
we were talking about in this video were still
alive, you can check out our sister channel
Eons at youtube.com/eons!
[♪♩OUTRO]
