The Bone Wars: Paleontology Gets Vicious Quiz

Answer: only Marsh had a rich philanthropist uncle

Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899) was educated thanks to his rich uncle, financier and philanthropist George Peabody. Marsh was born to modest parents in Lockport, NY. He graduated from Yale, traveled the world, then moved to Connecticut to teach at Yale. A methodical paleontologist, he still managed to identify dozens of new species. But he was nicknamed "The Great Dismal Swamp" for his sour, sluggish disposition.

Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) was a young prodigy in science, bored with classes in school and publishing his first paper at 19. He was born into a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family, though nowhere near the scale of George Peabody. He chose science over becoming a gentleman farmer as his father wanted. He rejected the brand new Darwinian theory of natural selection, and leaned toward neo-Lamarckism, which claimed that creatures could pass on characteristics they acquired during their lifetimes.

Answer: coped well with fieldwork, quick-tempered, obsessed with writing

Though Cope might work himself to exhaustion in the field and sometimes took it out by getting angry at his helpers, he made numerous trips to dig and managed to successfully unearth and catalog dozens of new species in the challenging western climate.

He wrote more than a paper a week at his height of writing, though his breakneck speed of work sometime caused sloppy mistakes, fewer than one would expect though.

Answer: Marsh secretly bribed the owner of the pit to send any new fossils to him

Marl was dug up and sold as fertilizer to farmers. Marsh secretly bribed the owner of the marl pit to send any new fossils directly to Marsh at Yale, rather than showing them to Cope first. That way, Marsh would be sure to see the fossils first and could judge their importance.

The marl pits in New Jersey were known for rich scientific finds. The first and only virtually full skeleton of Hadrosaurus foulkii was found in a New Jersey marl pit and described, starting in 1858, by William Parker Foulke and Joseph Leidy, and today it is the state dinosaur of New Jersey. Marsh's underhanded trick was the start of the rivalry between the two scientists, who never reconciled.

Answer: he put the head on the tip of the tail

Army surgeon Theophilus Turner, stationed at Fort Wallace, Kansas, found large bones protruding from an eroded ravine. After much correspondence and further exploration by Dr. Turner and some soldiers with picks and shovels in the winter of 1867-68, Turner sent 1,000 pounds of bones and some attached rock to Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Cope worked steadily to assemble the bones and proudly wrote a paper on the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus platyurus. The only problem was that he put the head on the wrong end, the tip of the tail. Joseph Leidy, an expert in American plesiosaurs, had never seen such a complete skeleton -- no one had; it was an amazing discovery. But Leidy knew enough to know which end was up, so to speak. He wrote a paper in response to Cope's, and Cope realized Leidy was right.

Cope retracted his earlier paper. In 1870 the embarrassment was over, except Cope's enemy O.C. Marsh, who hadn't been involved until now, published a statement in the 1873 American Naturalist: "...after investigating a very perfect specimen for months, [Cope] placed the head on the end of the tail, and restored the animal in this position as the type of a new order, Streptosauria." Cope ignored the recounting of his mistake.

But almost twenty years later, in the January 19, 1890, New York Herald, Marsh went even further, taking personal credit for recognizing the mistake, and said: "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." The two continued to fight it out on that ground in the New York Herald, barely skimming past the truth as shown in publications of the 1870 era that proved Marsh had nothing to do with bringing the mistake to light. Apparently a chance to fight with each other was worth it. More information about the whole sorry tale can be found on the internet.

Answer: Jones

Benjamin Mudge, one of Marsh's field collectors and a professor at the Agricultural College of Kansas, sent a telegram: "Satisfactory arrangement made for two months. Jones cannot interfere." He meant that he had contracted with another professor about some bones at a site, and Cope couldn't stop the arrangement. Apparently Marsh felt such subterfuge was necessary, because he was often more remote from the site and required being informed with telegrams and letters that might fall into the wrong hands, while Cope was more apt to be on site at an excavation himself.

Answer: Cope purchased the "American Naturalist," a scientific journal

The "American Naturalist" magazine was in its eleventh year, having been founded by Alpheus S. Packard. Cope kept him on as an editor, adding himself. Packard was an entomologist, physician and had studied under Louis Agassiz at Harvard.

Ruled by Packard and Cope, the magazine published articles on biology, geology, book reviews, and reviews of meetings, keeping its standards high. But Cope did use the magazine to editorialize on his own viewpoints, such as the February 1887 editorial about the difficulty of getting funding for his work and publication of the Hayden Survey.

Answer: the US Geological Survey

The US Geological Survey was new, just founded in 1879, but Marsh hoped it would have enough influence to get government funding and contracts headed his way, rather than Cope's. Marsh immediately worked on solidifying his power in Washington, even though he wasn't the most personable fellow, and tried to cut off or minimize funding for the expensive, illustrated reports of fossils. This was exactly what Cope used the February 1887 "American Naturalist" to complain about, after Cope bought the magazine and then wrote about a lack of funding for publication of the Hayden Survey.

Answer: On the Origin of Genera

"Species" referred to the typical smallest division, while "genus" (plural "genera") was the next largest.

"On the Origin of Genera," published in 1867, included Cope's belief that the will of the Creator and his own quirky Law of Retardation and Acceleration, in addition to Darwin's natural selection, directed various creatures at the generic level. Cope believed Darwin's natural selection actually had more to do with species than genera. Cope could not entirely shake off his Quaker upbringing, and his scientific legacy suffered due to it, in the future years.

Answer: Othniel Charles Marsh

Othniel Charles Marsh discovered and named both genera, though it's possible Cope also found parts of both that he didn't recognize.

Marsh named Stegasaurus first, in 1877, after bones were recovered near Morrison, Colorado. Marsh got it incredibly wrong, though, picturing the animal as an aquatic turtle whose plates lay flat on its back like shingles on a roof. Marsh struggled with the animal's description in papers into the 1890s. Edward Drinker Cope possibly discovered Stegosaurus bones the next year, 1878, in Garden Park, Colorado, but did not recognize them, naming the animal Hypsirhophus discurus, and there is still some question whether the fragmentary dinosaur is a Stegosaurus.

Marsh continued to examine other Stegosaurus species, write papers, and by 1891, the drawing accompanying his paper could be recognized by any dinosaur-crazy fifth-grader as a Stegosaurus. What was still in question were the number of plates and whether they ran in a dual row -- questions that needed worked out by Marsh and, after his death, future paleontologists.

In 1887, Marsh received the first pair of Triceratops brow horns and part of a skull, from near Denver, Colorado. As usual, he stayed in the east and had assistants send field-work from the west. Again, he started out getting it quite wrong, dating it from the giant mammal era, the Pliocene, and named it Bison alticornis, a kind of giant mammal bison. Finally, in 1888, after seeing more horned dinosaurs, he renamed it Triceratops and reclassified it to an earlier era. More Triceratop skulls, well-preserved because of their size, were being found in South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta and Saskatchewan, in the U.S. and Canada.

In fact, there's a possibility that a broken skull found by E.D. Cope in 1872 and named Agathaumas sylvestris by him is actually a Triceratops, but there's not enough remaining for even modern scientists to properly identify it.

Answer: Othniel Charles Marsh

Marsh found 80 new species while Cope found 56 new species of dinosaurs. There was no great argument over the numbers.

There are many ways to judge who was the actual "winner" between the two. On the negative side, Marsh stayed back east and had his assistants do much of his digging, but didn't give them credit. He could be anti-social, stingy, and cruel or just awkward. Cope had the opposite reputation: he might work himself to exhaustion in the field, and take it out on his assistants, but he was there working. He also studied ichthyology and herpetology, reporting on hundreds of fish species in his lifetime, in addition to his dinosaur work for which he's famous.

Marsh agreed with Darwinian evolution and even looked further into the future, arguing that birds were descended from dinosaurs. He named Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Apatasaurus, Brontosaurus and Allosaurus. Cope only partially agreed with Darwin and was a neo-Larmackian instead, a viewpoint that is generally rejected today.

Marsh worked to get better treatment for Sioux Chief Red Cloud, in exchange for being allowed to dig on tribal land. He tried first with President Grant, then took it to the press, doing his best.

Cope considered blacks to be lesser than whites and felt that they should return to Africa, and he did not agree with women's rights, believing they should be naturally protected by men, and should not be allowed to vote.

Cope published far more papers, 1400, but because he turned them out so fast, he caused errors and his species names needed correcting. Marsh, being more methodical, made fewer mistakes, although mistakes were common for both in a field where there was little prior work done and they were alone in identifying many of the types of dinosaurs.

Marsh donated his collection to become the centerpiece of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. Cope sold his collections. Both men were out of money at the end of their lives. Though Cope had married, he was separated and lived alone, sleeping on a cot in a room with his bones. Marsh had never married and also had spent all his money on his scientific work. Both gave their time, money and effort to their beloved dinosaurs, each spurred on by the other.