217-The Bone Wars
Futility Closet
Greg Ross
4.8 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2018
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The end of the Civil War opened a new era of fossil hunting in the American West -- and a bitter feud between two rival paleontologists, who spent 20 years sabotaging one another in a constant struggle for supremacy. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Bone Wars, the greatest scientific feud of the 19th century.
We'll also sympathize with Scunthorpe and puzzle over why a driver can't drive.
Intro:
Nepal's constitution contains instructions for drawing its flag.
The tombstone of Constanze Mozart's second husband calls him "the husband of Mozart's widow."
Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
Sources for our feature on the Bone Wars:
David Rains Wallace, The Bonehunters' Revenge, 1999.
Mark Jaffe, The Gilded Dinosaur, 2000.
Elizabeth Noble Shor, The Fossil Feud, 1974.
Hal Hellman, Great Feuds in Science, 1998.
Tom Huntington, "The Great Feud," American History 33:3 (August 1998), 14.
Richard A. Kissel, "The Sauropod Chronicles," Natural History 116:3 (April 2007), 34-38.
Keith Stewart Thomson, "Marginalia: Dinosaurs as a Cultural Phenomenon," American Scientist 93:3 (May-June 2005), 212-214.
Genevieve Rajewski, "Where Dinosaurs Roamed," Smithsonian 39:2 (May 2008), 20-24.
James Penick Jr., "Professor Cope vs. Professor Marsh," American Heritage 22:5 (August 1971).
Alfred S. Romer, "Cope versus Marsh," Systematic Zoology 13:4 (December 1964), 201-207.
Renee Clary, James Wandersee, and Amy Carpinelli, "The Great Dinosaur Feud: Science Against All Odds," Science Scope 32:2 (October 2008), 34-40.
Susan West, "Dinosaur Head Hunt," Science News 116:18 (Nov. 3, 1979), 314-315.
P.D. Brinkman, "Edward Drinker Cope's Final Feud," Archives of Natural History 43:2 (October 2016), 305-320.
Eric J. Hilton, Joseph C. Mitchell and David G. Smith, "Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897): Naturalist, Namesake, Icon," Copeia 2014:4 (December 2014), 747-761.
John Koster, "Good to the Old Bones: Dreaming of Dinosaurs, Digging for Dollars," Wild West 25:2 (August 2012), 26-27.
Daniel Engber, "Bone Thugs-N-Disharmony," Slate, Aug. 7, 2013.
Walter H. Wheeler, "The Uintatheres and the Cope-Marsh War," Science, New Series 131:3408 (April 22, 1960), 1171-1176.
Lukas Rieppel, "Prospecting for Dinosaurs on the Mining Frontier: The Value of Information in America's Gilded Age," Social Studies of Science 45:2 (2015), 161-186.
Michael J. Benton, "Naming Dinosaur Species: The Performance of Prolific Authors," Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 30:5 (2010), 1478-1485.
Cary Woodruff and John R. Foster, "The Fragile Legacy of Amphicoelias fragillimus (Dinosauria: Sauropoda; Morrison Formation-Latest Jurassic)," PeerJ PrePrints 3 (2014), e838v1.
Paul Semonin, "Empire and Extinction: The Dinosaur as a Metaphor for Dominance in Prehistoric Nature," Leonardo 30:3 (1997), 171-182.
Jennie Erin Smith, "When Fossil-Finding Was a Contact Sport," Wall Street Journal Asia, June 10, 2016, A.11.
Adam Lusher, "The Brontosaurus Is Back After 150 Million Years... At Least in Name," Independent, April 8, 2015, 10.
Will Bagley, "Rivals Fought Tooth and Nail Over Dinosaurs," Salt Lake Tribune, March 25, 2001, B1.
Clive Coy, "Skeletons in the Closet," Ontario National Post, Jan. 22, 2000, 10.
Rose DeWolf, "Philly Is Facile With Fossils," Philadelphia Daily News, March 27, 1998, D.6.
Mark Jaffe, "Phila. and Fossils Go Way Back," Philadelphia Inquirer, March 22, 1998, 2.
Malcolm W. Browne, "Dinosaurs Still Star in Many Human Dramas and Dreams," New York Times, Oct. 14, 1997.
John Noble Wilford, "Horses, Mollusks and the Evolution of Bigness," New York Times, Jan. 21, 1997.
Jerry E. Bishop, "Bones of Contention: Should Dr. Cope's Be The Human Model?" Wall Street Journal, Nov. 1, 1994, A1.
"Dinosaur Book Has Museum Aide Losing His Head," Baltimore Sun, Oct. 17, 1994, 6A.
"The Bricks of Scholarship," New York Times, Jan. 21, 1988.
Dick Pothier, "Fossil Factions: Dinosaur Exhibit Points Out a Battle in Science," Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 9, 1986, B.14.
Rose DeWolf, "Dinosaurs: Bone in the USA," Philadelphia Daily News, Jan. 24, 1986, 52.
William Harper Davis, "Cope, a Master Pioneer of American Paleontology," New York Times, July 5, 1931.
George Gaylord Simpson, "Mammals Were Humble When Dinosaurs Roved," New York Times, Oct. 18, 1925.
"A Prehistoric Monster," Hartford Republican, Sept. 1, 1905.
"The Scientists' New President," Topeka State Journal, Oct. 9, 1895.
Listener mail:
David Mack, "This Woman With a 'Rude' Last Name Started the Best Thread on Twitter," BuzzFeed News, Aug. 29, 2018.
Natalie Weiner, Twitter, Sept. 6, 2018.
Wikipedia, "Scunthorpe Problem" (accessed Sept. 6, 2018).
Declan McCullagh, "Google's Chastity Belt Too Tight," CNET, April 23, 2004.
Daniel Oberhaus, "Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name is 'Butts,'" Motherboard, Aug. 29, 2018.
Matthew Moore, "The Clbuttic Mistake: When Obscenity Filters Go Wrong," Telegraph, Sept. 2, 2008.
This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener David Malki.
You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss.
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Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.
If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Futility Closet Podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. |
| 0:14.1 | Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from Nepal's flag to an unflattering tombstone. |
| 0:23.9 | This is episode 217. I'm Greg Ross. |
| 0:29.7 | And I'm Sharon Ross. The end of the Civil War opened a new era of fossil hunting in the American West and a bitter feud between two rival paleontologists who spent 20 years sabotaging one |
| 0:35.6 | another in a constant struggle for supremacy. |
| 0:38.5 | In today's show, we'll tell the story of the Bone Wars, the greatest scientific feud |
| 0:43.0 | of the 19th century. We'll also sympathize with Scunthorpe and puzzle over why a driver can't |
| 0:49.8 | drive. |
| 1:00.8 | In episode 204, we described how Mary Anning helped to lay the foundations of British paleontology in the 1820s. |
| 1:13.0 | Half a century later, the discipline was expanding in America, and two of its main practitioners were Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, and Othneill Charles Marsh of Yale. The two men had very different backgrounds. Cope came from a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia, and Marsh had grown |
| 1:17.6 | up poor in upstate New York and ascended with the backing of a rich uncle. But they met while |
| 1:22.3 | attending Berlin University in Europe in 1863 and became friends. Early in their careers, they |
| 1:27.1 | both worked on fossils |
| 1:28.0 | from the Atlantic coast in the Midwest, and they even named species after each other. At the |
| 1:32.4 | end of the Civil War, the Western U.S. opened up, and both of them saw the enormous potential |
| 1:36.1 | in exploring it for fossils, both for their intrinsic value and for the light they might throw on Darwin's |
| 1:40.5 | theory of evolution. With that huge field open before them, there should have been |
| 1:44.4 | plenty of room for both men to succeed or even cooperate, but they were doomed by an odd |
| 1:48.7 | factor, their temperaments. Cope was pugnacious and quarrelsome. He told one class, if any man |
| 1:53.9 | leaves this room or enters after I have closed that door, he will be shot. He published almost |
| 1:58.9 | 1,400 titles in his lifetime, but his hastiness led to constant |
| 2:02.3 | mistakes. Marsh was nine years older, but he was ambitious and egotistical. His colleagues |
... |
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