00:00:02
Speaker 1: You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Air and Manky.
00:00:17
Speaker 2: The Victorian Age was a time of wonder. The people were experiencing things that felt nothing short of magical. They saw their cities light up with electricity. They sat for new fangled cameras and took home images of themselves on silver plates. Cable lines carried their telegrams to loved ones thousands of miles away. Their disembodied voices flowed through telephone receivers. They also witnessed the invention of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, of course, lived and died far before anyone, let alone people of the Victorian era, ever stepped foot on this planet. But it was this generation when the dinosaur's story began again. Humans had been unearthing strangely fossilized bones and other remains for centuries, but what were they, exactly where did they come from? The debate had long been heated. Some believed they were left by the devil, others thought they were remnants of Noah's flood. At the time in Europe, most didn't realize that these were the remains of creatures who had lived a very long time ago. The study of these remnants began to codify in the seventeen hundreds, as paleontology got its start. The term finds its origin in the Greek words for ancient palaeo, being anto and study ology. Curious minds began to classify and label these bits and pieces of ancient beings, trying to make sense of what they once were. Fossils supported the theories presented in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, which to the Victorian mind was either hugely exciting or hugely blasphemed. In eighteen fifty one, Britain launched their Great Exhibition, a showing of magnificent resources pillaged from their colonies. They hired a man by the name of Joseph Paxton to design and construct a showcase, and he did just that, building a massive structure of steel and glass, naming it the Crystal Palace. A British sculptor and natural history illustrator, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, was hired to fill it up. Benjamin was taken by the ideas of the natural world and had designs on giving humanity something that had never seen before. He set his sights on creating sculptures of all kinds of extinct animals and placing them among greenery. He received advice from famed paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, the fellow who had only recently coined the word dinosaur, and so Benjamin got to work. He looked at notes, diagrams, and the fossils themselves. He had a lot of parts, but not a lot of direction for how to assemble them. But he had his artistic sensibility and a vague understanding of anatomy, and knew how to take big swings. What was also true was that no one was going to know if he was wrong. Benjamin began constructing his hulking beasts with a combination of clay, brick, tiles, and cement, all supported on iron columns. Some contained thirty tons of clay. He built thirty three different creatures and placed them in the palace's green gardens. These were the first life sized models of dinosaurs ever constructed. Visitors could walk right up to a creature that supposedly existed many millions of years ago, something that seemed inconceivable to the minds of so many The sculptures ended up being wildly popular and are still on display in London today. In retrospect, Benjamin statues are rife with error, and to our modern eye, sometimes silly looking, but they represented some thing hugely important. They've acted as touchstones by which we can measure scientific progress and acknowledge our own evolutions in thought and theory. If the Victorians thought they knew a lot, then it's become more clear in contemporary times how much we simply don't know. Today paleo illustrators are constantly updating what they know about dinosaurs and trying to more accurately represent them. It's a tall order to try to perfectly recreate an animal based only on its fossils. Even still, we feel compelled to know who and what has walked before us. And for some this question has turned into a fascination, which then morphed into obsession. And where obsession arises, so often does a good story. I'm Lauren Bogelbaum. Welcome to American Shadows. When Andrew Carnegie unfolded his newspaper that morning in eighteen ninety nine, he read the front page, headlined exclaiming that the most colossal animal ever on Earth had been discovered. He knew that it had to be his. There was nothing that the richest man in the world wanted that he couldn't have. Andrew Carnegie was a product and poster boy of the Gilded Age. It was a time of glitter and gold, of ostentatious wealth and opulence. Author Mark Twain coined the term to characterize the new American aristocracy that was on the rise in the period after the Civil War. The country was hitting a growth spurt. The railroads and laws benefiting industrial production infused the country with jobs and money, But underneath that guilt veneer there was darkness and corruption. A new class of people were forged at this moment. The industrialists the money largely lined their pockets and created a system of social inequity unlike anything America had ever seen before. They wielded power unmatched by politicians and often made the rules by which others had to play. The tycoons and lawmakers scratched each other's backs and cut back room deals, amassing wealth while exploiting the working class. Every major business, from railroads to timber, meatpacking, to steel and oil to tobacco, came under the pull of these captains of industry. That money needed to go somewhere, a spending became almost a performance art, as the moneyed class erected massive homes, through lavish parties and curated exquisite collections. Carnegie was able to purchase the dinosaur that he had read about, but it fell short of his expectations. It just wasn't grand enough not to be discouraged. He commissioned his own fossil hunting team to find a dinosaur that was going to be bigger and better than anything anyone had ever seen, and they did just that, discovering a fossil in Wyoming that was over seventy feet long and weighed more than fourteen tons. This new species was named after him, the Diplodocus carnegie Eye. Andrew Carnegie was just one of many who hopped on the prehistoric bandwagon. The rich loved their dinosaurs. They were big, they were expensive to find, they were rare, there were limited quantities of them. These qualifications created a national hunger that many would go to great lengths to satisfy. The moment leading up to Carnegie's purchase was marked by a blazing period of intense excavation, spearheaded by two men entangled in an intense rivalry off. Neil Marsh, the first professor of paleontology in the United States, and Edward Cope, a wealthy enthusiast, had long been a pair, embattled and embittered, dueling for palaeontological supremacy, power, and fame. These two men were different worlds. As individuals, they embodied the social and economic differences of the Gilded Age. Marsh was born on October twenty ninth of eighteen thirty one in Lockport, New York, to a family with little money in fewer connections. His father was a farmer and his mother was soon dead. Marsh's mother had been the younger sister of George Peabody, a wealthy banker and philanthropist. Marsh might have gone on to become a farmer like his father, but his uncle stepped in and paid for his education. He eventually made his way to Yale, where he became utterly taken by Darwin and his new ideas on evolution. This would become his life's work, and he soon went on to pursue an education at the University of Berlin. It was there, in eighteen sixty three that he met a wealthy, fiery classmate named Edward Cope. They shared similar interests and friends, though their approaches to life and study were radically different. Marsh was studious and regimented a while Cope took a more unconventional approach to his education, preferring travel, on the job, training, and mentorship. The Cope saw Darwin's origin of the species as the key to unlocking the secrets of life on Earth, whereas Marsh harbored more conventional religious beliefs and regarded life as a project and intentional gradual design. Even so, both remained in touch after they returned to the United States and kicked off their palaeontological careers. In time, they would even name some new discoveries after each other. Cope and Marsh continued their relationship via correspondence, sending manuscripts of papers they planned to write, along with fossils and photos back and forth. They could have been great collaborators, but instead, as it often does, greed got in their way. The road to success wouldn't be paved in bones for these two men, it was often paved with sabotage. The Great dinosaur Rush was about to begin. Cope and Marsh had a love hate relationship in frenemies. If you will. They respected each other's brilliance in verve, but simmering under all of that were egos that needed to be sated. Upon their returns from Berlin, Cope and Marsh worked together on many digs, celebrating and squabbling in equal measure. But one project in eighteen sixty eight would set the stage for their greatest disagreement yet. Southern New Jersey is home to a singular deposit of this strange, beautiful green sand, leftover from a time millions of years ago when the place was underwater. It's rich in glauconite, a green mineral that characterizes the deposit, and also it seems rich in fossils. A Cope wanted to dig there, and he invited Marsh to come along. They set out to New Jersey to make some discoveries, make some names, and make some money. They knew that everything that could be found there would be incredibly valuable, especially now that more people were collecting fossils than ever before. They hired teams of people to help them. The dirty business of digging up fossils required many hands and lots of organization, so it was imperative that they find the right labor to do the job. Scouts and site managers, operators and diggers were soon on site for their part. Cope and Marsh analyzed, cataloged, and then shipped these discoveries back to their offices via hired railroad workers. And because this was Cope's dig, anything that was discovered technically belonged to him. It's here in these silty green sands they unearthed all kinds of beautiful creatures, including ancient turtles and crocodiles that died over sixty six million years ago. They found dinosaur bones and giant sea bound lizards. As they broke down camp and parted ways, they shook hands amicably and wished each other well. But what Cope didn't realize was that Marsh had bribed the laborers to siphon off some of their fines back to his office in New Haven, Connecticut. And when Cope soon learned about this, he felt utterly betrayed and absolutely furious. This, however, didn't stop them from continuing to work together. They admired each other intensely, bitterly, and jealously. They each knew the other had connections, institutional resources, and smarts, which further fanned the flames of their rivalry. At times they were the best of frenemies. They would do almost anything to get a leg up on the other. Both had great personal wealth and were willing to throw money at their problems. It didn't take them long to start playing dirtier. Even though fossil hunting began on the East coast, the situation soon became the Wheiled West, a total free for all in the race for scientific glory and the money that came with truly rare and unique fines. In one instance, Marsh publicly humiliated Cope when he pointed out that his reconstruction of a water bound plesiosaur called an elasmosaurus was incorrect because in his reconstruction, Cope had put the head at the end of the short tail instead of at the end of the long neck. After they called in other experts to settle the dispute, a Cope was horrified to realize that he and everything he had recently published about his discovery was indeed incorrect. The whole field became a battleground for their squabbling as they rushed to both pull in other scientists and flood the field with their own publishing. As they rushed, they got sloppy, Cope started pushing further west into Kansas and Wyoming, what Marsh considered his territory for finding fossils. It was a gentleman's understand that each had their own turf, but Cope decided he would no longer abide by these arbitrary rules. Any kind of warmth between them chilled in eighteen seventy two. As they pushed further and further west, they became desperate to outdo each other, pumping more and more resources into digging up the earth. They also weren't actually at the pits that were being excavated. They relied solely young collectors to get them what they wanted and to ship everything back east. It was an exercise of trust, it seems, and in the haze of paranoia around their own relationship a Cope and Marsh failed to realize the secondary duplicity at hand. You see, the market for bones and other fossils was prone to fraud. There was no established regulatory framework for how to do all this, and these vines often traveled great distances over large amounts of time. It was hard to keep track of contracts and laborers. Whatever arrived in crates was usually going to be what you got. As the railroads moved further west and explorers and colonists followed, plenty of lines were established and plenty of hands were willing to get paleontologists like Marsh and Cope what they wanted. These folks were often paid well by their scientist bosses, but the handsome pay didn't necessarily guarantee worker loyalty. Those muscling the dirt knew that their labor and their fines were in high demand, and their affections could be bought. In eighteen seventy three, Marsh wrote publicly that he believed half of his discoveries in the West were poached from him in this way. In that same year, the scientific journal The American Naturalist decided that it would stop publishing any materials from either scientist, even though Cope later had a huge ownership stake in the publication. There was one dig, though, that would prove to end all digs. It was discuss covered. The Como Bluff, Wyoming, was home to one of the richest bone quarries ever discovered. The bones and other fossils at Coma Bluff were discovered in eighteen seventy seven by geologist Arthur Lakes. It was a veritable gold mine, one of the richest deposits ever found. It would become known as the Morrison Formation, a huge span of sediment that reaches from New Mexico to Montana. It stretches back, encompassing over two hundred million years, and would go on to teach us much of what we know about the Jurassic Period. At the time, though, all Lakes knew was that this was a singular repository, and he quickly sent word back east. He tried Marsh first, but Marsh was slow to respond. Impatient, he sent some findings to Cope. When Marsh heard this, he kicked into gear. Marsh was able to send out his representatives first. They reported back that there were miles of bones right for the picking. He worked quickly to secure the site for himself with all the labor his good money could buy. He was eager to get his hands on anything that was dug up and promptly started negotiating. The specimens were enormous and numerous. Cope, for his part, thought nothing of Marsh's claim and refused to be deterred. The race was once again on from Marsian Cope and although neither was personally at the bluff, they sent workers, including former students. It didn't take long for Cope's men to start encroaching on the territory that Marsh had staked out. Marsh knew that this was where he needed to dig to outpace Cope. In truth, Marsh might not have become involved with this dig's location at all if Cope hadn't sent the team. At that point in his career, Marsh was far more interested in mammalion specimens than dinosaur bones, but once heard Cope's team had shown up, he refused to be outshined. So there they were, warring factions on a bluff under the sun, furiously digging and conducting shady dealings. Each scientist was determined to get the upper hand and started paying more money to their workers to keep them digging and keep them loyal. They worked tirelessly back east, intercepting huge wooden crates and publishing at a breakneck clip. Efforts of other paleontologists who showed up paled in comparison to these feverish and bitter operations. They planted fossils and locations where they weren't discovered to confuse the other, they bribed quarry owners to pull fossils out before they could be observed and documented. Their rivalry had become an all out war, rife with bad blood and explosions. Literally, it was reported that they had ordered the dynamiting of their completed dig sites lest any yet to be discovered bones fell into the world wrong hands. They continued to fight in the pages of academic journals and newspapers. They mutually attempted to sabotage each other's funding in efforts to slow down their respective careers and stardom. Their community was growing tired of the very public performance of their spite and called into question their ability to even do their jobs. Their work was often sloppy, rife with careless errors, and people knew about the shady dealings they were willing to engage with in order to bolster their reputations. It's said that competition breeds progress, and in one sense this rings true. This period was one of the most productive in the history of paleontology. Lay people were astounded and captivated by their very public duelings and were often inspired by their discoveries. Marti and Kpe were able to uncover some of the world's most famous dinosaurs that we know and love today include the Stegosaurus, the triceratops, the Alosaurus, and eventually one of the most fearsome of all, the Tyrannosaurus wrecks. Without their flaring tempers and growing contempt for each other, it's hard to say what we would know or not know about dinosaurs today. But for all the progress that they made, their rivalry ultimately destroyed Martian Cope. However, if we were asked to tally numbers for a winner and a loser in all of this, technically Marsh won their competition. He discovered and named eighty new species, compared with copes fifty six. Even so, they never quite retired. The rivalry between the two men lasted until the day they died, when Cope made one last bet. The decades long fight between Marsh and Cope ended tragically for both of them after thirty years of public feuding. Cope lay dying surrounded by shelves full of his beloved specimens to which he had devoted his entire life. He had been sick for a long while, plagued by chronic illnesses. The nature of those were never determined, but he had found ways to self medicate. He didn't really trust doctors. Instead, he came up with an all natural cure, belladonna. In small doses, it can help with all kinds of things, but he didn't take the right doses. He took it in small amounts, but too often this ultimately would lead to his end. He worked right up until he died on April twelfth of eighteen ninety seven. However, Cope wasn't content to let the war go, and just before he passed, he sent a challenge to Marsh. He wrote in his will, I direct that after my funeral, my body shall be presented to the Anthropometric Society, and then an autopsy shall be performed on it. My brain shall be preserved in their collection of brains for future study. In effect, Cope wanted to see who had the bigger brain. Marsh died on March eighteenth of eighteen ninety nine, effectively bringing the Bone Wars to an end. He never did turn over his brain to science, so we'll never know who the winner of that final battle would have been. There's more to this story. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. After the Great Dinosaur Rush of what became known as the Bone Wars. Fossil Hunting continued to be a favorite pastime among the wealthy and educated for decades. In nineteen ten, a very aristocrat and paleontologist by the name of Ernst freher Stromer von Reichenbach set out for a dig in the Egyptian desert outside of Cairo. He partnered up with Richard mcgroff, an Austrian fossil hunter, and together they found a glorious horde of all kinds of marine creatures. But it would be two years before their most spectacular discovery of all. Sometime between sixty and one hundred million years ago, an enormous predator died. It had long spines on its back, a crocodile like jaw, and massive teeth. When Ernst came upon its skeleton all of those years later, he was stunned. In life, this creature was likely unmatched by any foe. If it was such an astounding and terrifying proposition in death, imagine what it could have been in life. Ernst named it Spinosaurus egypticus, or the Egyptian spine lizard. Ernst removed the skeleton, then brought it to Munich's Paleontological Museum, and there it was proudly on display for many years, bringing him great acclaim. It stayed there quietly as a new kind of terror rolled through Europe the Nazi Party. Ernst was nervous. His sons were fighting on the front lines, and he realized that the relentless bombing campaigns posed a threat not just to them, but to their treasured artifacts as well. He begged the head of the museum to move the fossil to safety, but the man was a Nazi sympathizer and had long ago stopped listening to anything Ernst had to say, political or otherwise. The spinosaurus was s mearily destroyed by Allied forces when they dropped a bomb on Munich. It died a second death that day, living on only in notes and drawings and Ernst's memory. He was heartbroken by the magnitude of what the war did to his family, his country, and his career, and he died soon after in nineteen fifty two. The spinosaurus was remembered in the paleontology community as something of a legend. There were so many unanswered questions about how and where it had lived, and the perfection of the fossil was wholly unmatched. It suggested a new kind of dinosaur that scientists had never considered, a semi aquatic creatures that thrived both on land and in the water. A fully constructed spinosaurus had never been discovered before, and there were questions as to whether another one ever would. For about another century, the spinosaurus drifted into oblivion. That is, of course, until a young doctoral student stepped onto the scene. In two thousand and eight. Nazarre Ibrahim was conducting research on the border of Morocco and Algeria when he met a local Bedouin fossil hunter. Nazar took a close look at the specimens he was offered and cataloged the findings in his memory. It was a year later when he was shown a newly discovered partial skeleton of a potential spinosaurus. Then he noticed something some distinct purple and yellow sediment he recognized from the year before. He was suddenly struck by the idea that he might have accidentally run into two halves of a whole dinosaurs. So he went back to Morocco, hoping to find his Bedouin friend, but with no cell phone number or email address. He hoped for good luck. For days, he looked for him, asking all around and searching the streets. It all seemed fruitless, until one day he was at a cafe and the very same man walked by. Nazarre jumped up and chased him down and convinced him to bring him to the spot where the bones he had initially seen were dug up from. He got his wish, and here began the next stage of Nazar's life work and that of the Spinosaurus. With new science and technology, Nazar has been hard at work putting together the life story of the spinosaurus and picking up where Ernst left off. We may never know the whole truth as to how these creatures lived and died, but science is allowing us to paint a more complete picture. The debates will long continue over these animals, and careers and reputations will be staked on who can make the more convincing and compelling argument. We may never know everything, but that won't stop us from trying.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: American Shadows as hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was written by Robin Miniature, researched by Ali Steed, and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit grimminmile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Air and Manky.
00:00:17
Speaker 2: The Victorian Age was a time of wonder. The people were experiencing things that felt nothing short of magical. They saw their cities light up with electricity. They sat for new fangled cameras and took home images of themselves on silver plates. Cable lines carried their telegrams to loved ones thousands of miles away. Their disembodied voices flowed through telephone receivers. They also witnessed the invention of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, of course, lived and died far before anyone, let alone people of the Victorian era, ever stepped foot on this planet. But it was this generation when the dinosaur's story began again. Humans had been unearthing strangely fossilized bones and other remains for centuries, but what were they, exactly where did they come from? The debate had long been heated. Some believed they were left by the devil, others thought they were remnants of Noah's flood. At the time in Europe, most didn't realize that these were the remains of creatures who had lived a very long time ago. The study of these remnants began to codify in the seventeen hundreds, as paleontology got its start. The term finds its origin in the Greek words for ancient palaeo, being anto and study ology. Curious minds began to classify and label these bits and pieces of ancient beings, trying to make sense of what they once were. Fossils supported the theories presented in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, which to the Victorian mind was either hugely exciting or hugely blasphemed. In eighteen fifty one, Britain launched their Great Exhibition, a showing of magnificent resources pillaged from their colonies. They hired a man by the name of Joseph Paxton to design and construct a showcase, and he did just that, building a massive structure of steel and glass, naming it the Crystal Palace. A British sculptor and natural history illustrator, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, was hired to fill it up. Benjamin was taken by the ideas of the natural world and had designs on giving humanity something that had never seen before. He set his sights on creating sculptures of all kinds of extinct animals and placing them among greenery. He received advice from famed paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, the fellow who had only recently coined the word dinosaur, and so Benjamin got to work. He looked at notes, diagrams, and the fossils themselves. He had a lot of parts, but not a lot of direction for how to assemble them. But he had his artistic sensibility and a vague understanding of anatomy, and knew how to take big swings. What was also true was that no one was going to know if he was wrong. Benjamin began constructing his hulking beasts with a combination of clay, brick, tiles, and cement, all supported on iron columns. Some contained thirty tons of clay. He built thirty three different creatures and placed them in the palace's green gardens. These were the first life sized models of dinosaurs ever constructed. Visitors could walk right up to a creature that supposedly existed many millions of years ago, something that seemed inconceivable to the minds of so many The sculptures ended up being wildly popular and are still on display in London today. In retrospect, Benjamin statues are rife with error, and to our modern eye, sometimes silly looking, but they represented some thing hugely important. They've acted as touchstones by which we can measure scientific progress and acknowledge our own evolutions in thought and theory. If the Victorians thought they knew a lot, then it's become more clear in contemporary times how much we simply don't know. Today paleo illustrators are constantly updating what they know about dinosaurs and trying to more accurately represent them. It's a tall order to try to perfectly recreate an animal based only on its fossils. Even still, we feel compelled to know who and what has walked before us. And for some this question has turned into a fascination, which then morphed into obsession. And where obsession arises, so often does a good story. I'm Lauren Bogelbaum. Welcome to American Shadows. When Andrew Carnegie unfolded his newspaper that morning in eighteen ninety nine, he read the front page, headlined exclaiming that the most colossal animal ever on Earth had been discovered. He knew that it had to be his. There was nothing that the richest man in the world wanted that he couldn't have. Andrew Carnegie was a product and poster boy of the Gilded Age. It was a time of glitter and gold, of ostentatious wealth and opulence. Author Mark Twain coined the term to characterize the new American aristocracy that was on the rise in the period after the Civil War. The country was hitting a growth spurt. The railroads and laws benefiting industrial production infused the country with jobs and money, But underneath that guilt veneer there was darkness and corruption. A new class of people were forged at this moment. The industrialists the money largely lined their pockets and created a system of social inequity unlike anything America had ever seen before. They wielded power unmatched by politicians and often made the rules by which others had to play. The tycoons and lawmakers scratched each other's backs and cut back room deals, amassing wealth while exploiting the working class. Every major business, from railroads to timber, meatpacking, to steel and oil to tobacco, came under the pull of these captains of industry. That money needed to go somewhere, a spending became almost a performance art, as the moneyed class erected massive homes, through lavish parties and curated exquisite collections. Carnegie was able to purchase the dinosaur that he had read about, but it fell short of his expectations. It just wasn't grand enough not to be discouraged. He commissioned his own fossil hunting team to find a dinosaur that was going to be bigger and better than anything anyone had ever seen, and they did just that, discovering a fossil in Wyoming that was over seventy feet long and weighed more than fourteen tons. This new species was named after him, the Diplodocus carnegie Eye. Andrew Carnegie was just one of many who hopped on the prehistoric bandwagon. The rich loved their dinosaurs. They were big, they were expensive to find, they were rare, there were limited quantities of them. These qualifications created a national hunger that many would go to great lengths to satisfy. The moment leading up to Carnegie's purchase was marked by a blazing period of intense excavation, spearheaded by two men entangled in an intense rivalry off. Neil Marsh, the first professor of paleontology in the United States, and Edward Cope, a wealthy enthusiast, had long been a pair, embattled and embittered, dueling for palaeontological supremacy, power, and fame. These two men were different worlds. As individuals, they embodied the social and economic differences of the Gilded Age. Marsh was born on October twenty ninth of eighteen thirty one in Lockport, New York, to a family with little money in fewer connections. His father was a farmer and his mother was soon dead. Marsh's mother had been the younger sister of George Peabody, a wealthy banker and philanthropist. Marsh might have gone on to become a farmer like his father, but his uncle stepped in and paid for his education. He eventually made his way to Yale, where he became utterly taken by Darwin and his new ideas on evolution. This would become his life's work, and he soon went on to pursue an education at the University of Berlin. It was there, in eighteen sixty three that he met a wealthy, fiery classmate named Edward Cope. They shared similar interests and friends, though their approaches to life and study were radically different. Marsh was studious and regimented a while Cope took a more unconventional approach to his education, preferring travel, on the job, training, and mentorship. The Cope saw Darwin's origin of the species as the key to unlocking the secrets of life on Earth, whereas Marsh harbored more conventional religious beliefs and regarded life as a project and intentional gradual design. Even so, both remained in touch after they returned to the United States and kicked off their palaeontological careers. In time, they would even name some new discoveries after each other. Cope and Marsh continued their relationship via correspondence, sending manuscripts of papers they planned to write, along with fossils and photos back and forth. They could have been great collaborators, but instead, as it often does, greed got in their way. The road to success wouldn't be paved in bones for these two men, it was often paved with sabotage. The Great dinosaur Rush was about to begin. Cope and Marsh had a love hate relationship in frenemies. If you will. They respected each other's brilliance in verve, but simmering under all of that were egos that needed to be sated. Upon their returns from Berlin, Cope and Marsh worked together on many digs, celebrating and squabbling in equal measure. But one project in eighteen sixty eight would set the stage for their greatest disagreement yet. Southern New Jersey is home to a singular deposit of this strange, beautiful green sand, leftover from a time millions of years ago when the place was underwater. It's rich in glauconite, a green mineral that characterizes the deposit, and also it seems rich in fossils. A Cope wanted to dig there, and he invited Marsh to come along. They set out to New Jersey to make some discoveries, make some names, and make some money. They knew that everything that could be found there would be incredibly valuable, especially now that more people were collecting fossils than ever before. They hired teams of people to help them. The dirty business of digging up fossils required many hands and lots of organization, so it was imperative that they find the right labor to do the job. Scouts and site managers, operators and diggers were soon on site for their part. Cope and Marsh analyzed, cataloged, and then shipped these discoveries back to their offices via hired railroad workers. And because this was Cope's dig, anything that was discovered technically belonged to him. It's here in these silty green sands they unearthed all kinds of beautiful creatures, including ancient turtles and crocodiles that died over sixty six million years ago. They found dinosaur bones and giant sea bound lizards. As they broke down camp and parted ways, they shook hands amicably and wished each other well. But what Cope didn't realize was that Marsh had bribed the laborers to siphon off some of their fines back to his office in New Haven, Connecticut. And when Cope soon learned about this, he felt utterly betrayed and absolutely furious. This, however, didn't stop them from continuing to work together. They admired each other intensely, bitterly, and jealously. They each knew the other had connections, institutional resources, and smarts, which further fanned the flames of their rivalry. At times they were the best of frenemies. They would do almost anything to get a leg up on the other. Both had great personal wealth and were willing to throw money at their problems. It didn't take them long to start playing dirtier. Even though fossil hunting began on the East coast, the situation soon became the Wheiled West, a total free for all in the race for scientific glory and the money that came with truly rare and unique fines. In one instance, Marsh publicly humiliated Cope when he pointed out that his reconstruction of a water bound plesiosaur called an elasmosaurus was incorrect because in his reconstruction, Cope had put the head at the end of the short tail instead of at the end of the long neck. After they called in other experts to settle the dispute, a Cope was horrified to realize that he and everything he had recently published about his discovery was indeed incorrect. The whole field became a battleground for their squabbling as they rushed to both pull in other scientists and flood the field with their own publishing. As they rushed, they got sloppy, Cope started pushing further west into Kansas and Wyoming, what Marsh considered his territory for finding fossils. It was a gentleman's understand that each had their own turf, but Cope decided he would no longer abide by these arbitrary rules. Any kind of warmth between them chilled in eighteen seventy two. As they pushed further and further west, they became desperate to outdo each other, pumping more and more resources into digging up the earth. They also weren't actually at the pits that were being excavated. They relied solely young collectors to get them what they wanted and to ship everything back east. It was an exercise of trust, it seems, and in the haze of paranoia around their own relationship a Cope and Marsh failed to realize the secondary duplicity at hand. You see, the market for bones and other fossils was prone to fraud. There was no established regulatory framework for how to do all this, and these vines often traveled great distances over large amounts of time. It was hard to keep track of contracts and laborers. Whatever arrived in crates was usually going to be what you got. As the railroads moved further west and explorers and colonists followed, plenty of lines were established and plenty of hands were willing to get paleontologists like Marsh and Cope what they wanted. These folks were often paid well by their scientist bosses, but the handsome pay didn't necessarily guarantee worker loyalty. Those muscling the dirt knew that their labor and their fines were in high demand, and their affections could be bought. In eighteen seventy three, Marsh wrote publicly that he believed half of his discoveries in the West were poached from him in this way. In that same year, the scientific journal The American Naturalist decided that it would stop publishing any materials from either scientist, even though Cope later had a huge ownership stake in the publication. There was one dig, though, that would prove to end all digs. It was discuss covered. The Como Bluff, Wyoming, was home to one of the richest bone quarries ever discovered. The bones and other fossils at Coma Bluff were discovered in eighteen seventy seven by geologist Arthur Lakes. It was a veritable gold mine, one of the richest deposits ever found. It would become known as the Morrison Formation, a huge span of sediment that reaches from New Mexico to Montana. It stretches back, encompassing over two hundred million years, and would go on to teach us much of what we know about the Jurassic Period. At the time, though, all Lakes knew was that this was a singular repository, and he quickly sent word back east. He tried Marsh first, but Marsh was slow to respond. Impatient, he sent some findings to Cope. When Marsh heard this, he kicked into gear. Marsh was able to send out his representatives first. They reported back that there were miles of bones right for the picking. He worked quickly to secure the site for himself with all the labor his good money could buy. He was eager to get his hands on anything that was dug up and promptly started negotiating. The specimens were enormous and numerous. Cope, for his part, thought nothing of Marsh's claim and refused to be deterred. The race was once again on from Marsian Cope and although neither was personally at the bluff, they sent workers, including former students. It didn't take long for Cope's men to start encroaching on the territory that Marsh had staked out. Marsh knew that this was where he needed to dig to outpace Cope. In truth, Marsh might not have become involved with this dig's location at all if Cope hadn't sent the team. At that point in his career, Marsh was far more interested in mammalion specimens than dinosaur bones, but once heard Cope's team had shown up, he refused to be outshined. So there they were, warring factions on a bluff under the sun, furiously digging and conducting shady dealings. Each scientist was determined to get the upper hand and started paying more money to their workers to keep them digging and keep them loyal. They worked tirelessly back east, intercepting huge wooden crates and publishing at a breakneck clip. Efforts of other paleontologists who showed up paled in comparison to these feverish and bitter operations. They planted fossils and locations where they weren't discovered to confuse the other, they bribed quarry owners to pull fossils out before they could be observed and documented. Their rivalry had become an all out war, rife with bad blood and explosions. Literally, it was reported that they had ordered the dynamiting of their completed dig sites lest any yet to be discovered bones fell into the world wrong hands. They continued to fight in the pages of academic journals and newspapers. They mutually attempted to sabotage each other's funding in efforts to slow down their respective careers and stardom. Their community was growing tired of the very public performance of their spite and called into question their ability to even do their jobs. Their work was often sloppy, rife with careless errors, and people knew about the shady dealings they were willing to engage with in order to bolster their reputations. It's said that competition breeds progress, and in one sense this rings true. This period was one of the most productive in the history of paleontology. Lay people were astounded and captivated by their very public duelings and were often inspired by their discoveries. Marti and Kpe were able to uncover some of the world's most famous dinosaurs that we know and love today include the Stegosaurus, the triceratops, the Alosaurus, and eventually one of the most fearsome of all, the Tyrannosaurus wrecks. Without their flaring tempers and growing contempt for each other, it's hard to say what we would know or not know about dinosaurs today. But for all the progress that they made, their rivalry ultimately destroyed Martian Cope. However, if we were asked to tally numbers for a winner and a loser in all of this, technically Marsh won their competition. He discovered and named eighty new species, compared with copes fifty six. Even so, they never quite retired. The rivalry between the two men lasted until the day they died, when Cope made one last bet. The decades long fight between Marsh and Cope ended tragically for both of them after thirty years of public feuding. Cope lay dying surrounded by shelves full of his beloved specimens to which he had devoted his entire life. He had been sick for a long while, plagued by chronic illnesses. The nature of those were never determined, but he had found ways to self medicate. He didn't really trust doctors. Instead, he came up with an all natural cure, belladonna. In small doses, it can help with all kinds of things, but he didn't take the right doses. He took it in small amounts, but too often this ultimately would lead to his end. He worked right up until he died on April twelfth of eighteen ninety seven. However, Cope wasn't content to let the war go, and just before he passed, he sent a challenge to Marsh. He wrote in his will, I direct that after my funeral, my body shall be presented to the Anthropometric Society, and then an autopsy shall be performed on it. My brain shall be preserved in their collection of brains for future study. In effect, Cope wanted to see who had the bigger brain. Marsh died on March eighteenth of eighteen ninety nine, effectively bringing the Bone Wars to an end. He never did turn over his brain to science, so we'll never know who the winner of that final battle would have been. There's more to this story. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. After the Great Dinosaur Rush of what became known as the Bone Wars. Fossil Hunting continued to be a favorite pastime among the wealthy and educated for decades. In nineteen ten, a very aristocrat and paleontologist by the name of Ernst freher Stromer von Reichenbach set out for a dig in the Egyptian desert outside of Cairo. He partnered up with Richard mcgroff, an Austrian fossil hunter, and together they found a glorious horde of all kinds of marine creatures. But it would be two years before their most spectacular discovery of all. Sometime between sixty and one hundred million years ago, an enormous predator died. It had long spines on its back, a crocodile like jaw, and massive teeth. When Ernst came upon its skeleton all of those years later, he was stunned. In life, this creature was likely unmatched by any foe. If it was such an astounding and terrifying proposition in death, imagine what it could have been in life. Ernst named it Spinosaurus egypticus, or the Egyptian spine lizard. Ernst removed the skeleton, then brought it to Munich's Paleontological Museum, and there it was proudly on display for many years, bringing him great acclaim. It stayed there quietly as a new kind of terror rolled through Europe the Nazi Party. Ernst was nervous. His sons were fighting on the front lines, and he realized that the relentless bombing campaigns posed a threat not just to them, but to their treasured artifacts as well. He begged the head of the museum to move the fossil to safety, but the man was a Nazi sympathizer and had long ago stopped listening to anything Ernst had to say, political or otherwise. The spinosaurus was s mearily destroyed by Allied forces when they dropped a bomb on Munich. It died a second death that day, living on only in notes and drawings and Ernst's memory. He was heartbroken by the magnitude of what the war did to his family, his country, and his career, and he died soon after in nineteen fifty two. The spinosaurus was remembered in the paleontology community as something of a legend. There were so many unanswered questions about how and where it had lived, and the perfection of the fossil was wholly unmatched. It suggested a new kind of dinosaur that scientists had never considered, a semi aquatic creatures that thrived both on land and in the water. A fully constructed spinosaurus had never been discovered before, and there were questions as to whether another one ever would. For about another century, the spinosaurus drifted into oblivion. That is, of course, until a young doctoral student stepped onto the scene. In two thousand and eight. Nazarre Ibrahim was conducting research on the border of Morocco and Algeria when he met a local Bedouin fossil hunter. Nazar took a close look at the specimens he was offered and cataloged the findings in his memory. It was a year later when he was shown a newly discovered partial skeleton of a potential spinosaurus. Then he noticed something some distinct purple and yellow sediment he recognized from the year before. He was suddenly struck by the idea that he might have accidentally run into two halves of a whole dinosaurs. So he went back to Morocco, hoping to find his Bedouin friend, but with no cell phone number or email address. He hoped for good luck. For days, he looked for him, asking all around and searching the streets. It all seemed fruitless, until one day he was at a cafe and the very same man walked by. Nazarre jumped up and chased him down and convinced him to bring him to the spot where the bones he had initially seen were dug up from. He got his wish, and here began the next stage of Nazar's life work and that of the Spinosaurus. With new science and technology, Nazar has been hard at work putting together the life story of the spinosaurus and picking up where Ernst left off. We may never know the whole truth as to how these creatures lived and died, but science is allowing us to paint a more complete picture. The debates will long continue over these animals, and careers and reputations will be staked on who can make the more convincing and compelling argument. We may never know everything, but that won't stop us from trying.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: American Shadows as hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was written by Robin Miniature, researched by Ali Steed, and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit grimminmile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
