When most people think of the wild American West, most people think of Bill the Bison, Jesse James the Sharpshooter, and the Caravan Immigrant Army. But for paleontologists, the American West at the end of the 19th century first painted a picture: a persistent rivalry between two of America's greatest fossil hunters over dinosaur fossils, known as the Bone Wars. One of the two colleagues was Yale University professor of paleontology, Othel Challis Marsh (1831-1899, hereinafter referred to as "Marsh"), and the other was The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences' paleontologist Edward Delink Kopp (1840-1897, hereinafter referred to as "Kopp").
Marsh (left) and Kopp (right)
The "War of bones" lasted from the 1870s to the 1990s. The Battle of bones led to the discovery of hundreds of new dinosaurs, accompanied by bribery, deception, and outright theft. HBO, which has produced classic American dramas such as "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City," and "Game of Thrones," found it a good subject matter and announced plans to produce a cinematic version of "Bones Wars," starring James Gandorfini and Steve Carell. Sadly, in June 2013, Gandorfini died of a heart attack while on vacation with his family in Rome, putting the plan on hold.
Kopp developed an interest in the natural world from an early age, and after his education at the University of Pennsylvania, Kopp worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences, compiling a catalog for collections of amphibians and reptiles. In 1863, Kopp was sent to Europe by his father (supposedly to avoid military service). At the forefront of paleontological research at the time was Western Europe, not the United States. During his time in Europe, Popular Science continued to study biology and became acquainted with several famous paleontologists and anatomists, one of whom was Marsh. In 1864, Kopp and Marsh met in Berlin, Germany, and both initially had strong personalities, but their initial relationship was still very good. However, due to differences in family and educational background, a gap gradually arose between the two. Copp was born into a wealthy Quaker (a denomination of Christianity) family in Philadelphia, while Marsh's family in upstate New York was relatively poor (although he had a very wealthy uncle). Kopp doesn't have a degree, but he has published 37 papers, a paper on salamanders at the age of 19, and a fellow of the American Academy of Natural Sciences at the age of 24. Marsh holds two college degrees, but none of the publications bear his name. At the time, Marsh thought Copp was just an amateur and wasn't very serious about paleontology; Kopp thought Marsh was too rough to be a real scientist.
Young people don't talk about martial arts
Most historians date the beginning of the Great War of Bones back to 1868. Although there were differences between Marsh and Kopp, the two remained in touch when they returned home while settling in New Haven (Marsh) and Philadelphia (Kopp). Copp found the site of a platypus fossil unearthed in a Cretaceous marl pit in southern New Jersey, named after the duo's mentor, the famous paleontologist Joseph Rydy. Whether out of a desire to show off or share, Kopp invited Marsh to southern New Jersey to investigate the rich prehistoric fossils there. The invitation allowed Copp to successfully find his lifelong nemesis.
New Jersey Marl Crater (Image Network)
Since the miners regularly worked in the area and found various fossils, the wealthy Kopp did not have to dig up the silt himself, but only paid for the best fossil specimens. In 1868, Marsh was invited to the marl pit, and when he saw the great potential of the fossil specimen, the unspeakable Marsh made a higher offer, asking the workers to give him valuable discoveries instead of Kopp. When Copp learned of this, he was furious.
Marsh's hijacking of fossils in Kopp's own backyard is just the beginning. The ensuing Zhang Guanli Dai's Oolong Incident made their hostility towards each other intensify.
Shortly after the end of the American Civil War (April 1861–April 1865), a medic in western Kansas found a dinosaur fossil and gave it to Cope. In 1868, Kopp described the strange fossil as a flakyosaurus, giving it a short neck and elongated tail.
The flakes of the keel as described by Kopp (according to the network)
Embarrassingly, however, Mentor Lady noted that Coop had made a big oolong and that he had placed the skull of the flakeosaurus on its short tail vertebrae instead of the long cervical vertebrae. The flakyosaur should actually look like the long-necked, short-tailed one below.
Properly assembled skeleton of Flaposaurus (according to the network)
Fragmentary Dragon Restoration Diagram (Image Network)
When Kopp discovers the error, he tries to buy and destroy every academic journal that publishes his erroneous reconstruction paper, but Marsh keeps taunting Kopp with the Oolong incident. For the rest of their lives, the two men used every opportunity to criticize and denigrate each other.
Zhang Guan Li Dai comic (according to the network)
Advance to the west
The discovery of a large number of dinosaur fossils in the western United States in the 1870s brought the Bone Wars to a climax. Some of these dinosaur fossils were discovered by chance during excavations on the Transcontinental Railway. In 1877, Marsh received a letter from Colorado teacher Arthur Lex describing the "lizard" skeleton he found while on a wandering trip. Lex sent the fossil samples to Marsh and Coop (because he didn't know if Marsh was interested).
Union Pacific Railroad (Image Network)
Marsh immediately paid Lex $100 and asked him to keep the secret. When he found out that Kopp had been informed, he sent someone west to "secure his request." Around the same time, Kopp got news of another fossil site in Colorado that Marsh tried to break in but was unsuccessful.
In 1872, Marsh (center in the back row) with his exploration team
At this time, everyone knew that Marsh and Kopp were vying for the best dinosaur fossils. Two Union Pacific Railroad workers, under pseudonyms (Reed and Carlin), informed Marsh of the many fossils they had found in the Como Cliffs area, suggesting that they might reach an agreement with Kopp if Marsh did not offer generous terms. Marsh sent people over to negotiate, hoping that they would provide him with fossils exclusively. Soon, Marsh received boxes of fossils, including the first specimens of Diplodocus, Allosaurus, and Stegosaurus.
Como Cliff (Image Network)
The two workers revealed the news to a local newspaper, exaggerating the price Marsh paid for the fossils in order to lure the wealthier Kopp into the bait, and word of the exclusive arrangement spread quickly. Soon, Kopp sent his own agent to negotiate. Probably because Kopp was unwilling to pay enough money, after the negotiations failed, Kopp instructed his exploration team to engage in fossil search under Marsh's eyes, stealing dinosaur bones from the Como Cliff site.
In 1879, Kopp found an almost complete Allosaurus skeleton at Como Cliff (according to the network)
Soon after, Because Marsh always delayed payments, Karin was extremely dissatisfied with this and turned to work for Kopp. This makes the Como Cliffs the center of the Bone Wars. At this time, both Marsh and Kopp shifted their focus to the west. In the years that followed, the rivalry became more and more intense, deliberately damaging fossils and fossil sites, spying on each other's excavations, bribing workers, and in addition to stealing fossils outright, competing workers sometimes threw stones at each other or threatened each other with guns at fossil sites.
An unwavering enemy to the death
By the 1880s, Marsh had clearly gained the upper hand in the "Bone Wars". Marsh managed to persuade his wealthy uncle George Peabody to pay $150,000 to build a museum for Yale, and the yale president was overjoyed, named the museum the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and invited Marsh to stay on as its director. With the support of his uncle, Marsh had plenty of tuition and expedition fees to hire more staff and open up more excavation sites, while Kopp was undoubtedly behind.
Eager to prove himself to be a better scientist than Marsh, Kopp hastened to publish all his findings, a practice that paleontologist Bob Barker called "taxonomic blanket bombardment." Between 1879 and 1880 alone, Kopp published 76 papers, though this is a far cry from the 1400 articles he completed in his lifetime.
In 1882, Marsh used his connections to become chief paleontologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, a brand new institution. With this position, Marsh gained not only enormous political power, but also control of federal funds. While the money was initially fought for by him and Kopp, Marsh now has the ability to completely cut off Kopp's money dealings with the federal government, and he quickly did. By 1885, Kopp had mortgaged his laboratory room and rented out his own residence.
In 1884, after Congress began investigating the U.S. Geological Survey, Kopp asked some of Marsh's employees to testify against him. But to Kopp's dismay, under Marsh's manipulation, none of the allegations were reported in the newspapers of the time.
But in 1890, Marsh went even further. Marsh claimed that Kopp's fossils were collected with federal funds and therefore belonged to the government, and he tried to confiscate Kopp's fossil collection. Kopp easily demonstrated how he paid for most of the fossil collection out of his own pocket. Determined to ruin Marsh's career, Kopp contacted a reporter for the New York Herald. For years, Kopp has tracked Marsh's wrongdoing, and in a diary he kept for 20 years detailed Countless felonies, misdemeanors and scientific errors that he provided to the reporter. Although "Battle of the Bones" had been published in scientific journals for a long time, on January 12, 1890, reports titled "Scientists Wage Fierce War" made their controversy public. Marsh published a rebuttal in the same newspaper, making similar allegations against Kopp.
Finally, the disclosure of the scandal is not good for either party. Marsh was asked to resign from his high-paying position in the Geological Survey. After a brief success (he was appointed president of the National Association for the Advancement of Science), Kopp was in poor health and had to sell his hard-won fossil collection and spend the rest of his life struggling financially. By the time of Cope's death in 1897, the two had squandered considerable possessions.
Let history judge
Although the Bones Wars may occasionally seem vulgar, unseemly, and even extremely absurd, they have had a profound impact on American paleontology. The absurdity of these two people still led to the discovery of more than 100 different new dinosaurs. According to statistics, Kopp discovered 56 new dinosaur genera and species, while Marsh found at least 80. Newly discovered dinosaurs include some of the earliest lepidosaurs, allosaurs, triceratops, and stegosaurs.
Stegosaurus skeleton drawn by Marsh in 1896 (image network)
The two men also left behind an astonishing collection of specimens, with Kopp's specimens alone estimated at nearly 13,000. Meanwhile, Marsh's collection of at least 80 tons was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution (even after many of his fossils were found to have actually belonged to the government), and the vast majority of the collection was left to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.
While developing their expertise, Marsh and Kopp are also responsible for recruiting and training "those who will become America's next generation of paleontologists." Marsh and Kopp's constant discoveries of fossils were always accompanied by propaganda, which helped satisfy the growing desire of the American public for new dinosaurs. Marsh was also one of the first to suggest that dinosaurs and birds had a common ancestral connection.
The Bone Wars also have some negative effects. In order to prevent the other side from finding the fossils, Marsh and Kopp even used explosives to destroy some of the excavation sites they did not have the opportunity to reach, so that when they left, the opponent could not find anything useful in the rubble. European paleontologists were horrified by the rude behavior of their American counterparts. As a result, it took decades for both sides to dispel the lingering, painful mistrust. Second, Kopp and Marsh described and reconstructed the dinosaurs they found so quickly that they focused only on quantity rather than quality. The many descriptions that Kopp and Marsh hastily wrote have left a whole bunch of messy scientific names that still haunt scientists today, for example, the century-long confusion about The Confused Dragon and Thunder Dragon can be traced directly back to Marsh, who put the skull on the wrong body – just as Kopp did to the Flake Dragon!
The battle of bones sparked by the competition between these two hot-tempered men could be as bad as the benefits of scientific discovery.
The ultimate challenge
For Marsh and Kopp, even death did not end the war between the two, and Kopp was unwilling to concede defeat. In the spring of 1897, Copp's last request before his death was to dissect his brain to determine its size. Because it is widely believed that brain volume is related to intelligence. Apparently, he was convinced that his brain capacity was larger than Marsh's.
Marsh wisely refused the challenge, and when he died in 1899, he was buried in a cemetery near the Peabody Museum at Yale University. Meanwhile, most of Kopp's body was cremated and placed at the Vesta Institute in Philadelphia. However, his brain was kept in a warehouse at the University of Pennsylvania. Until 2020, Kopp's brain has reportedly not been examined.
Source: thoughtco.com, grunge.com