Producer: Popular Science China
Studio: Abu
Producer: Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences
introduction
For a paleontologist, there is nothing more rewarding than personally excavating and identifying and naming one dinosaur fossil after another. But when the excavations and research of the two dinosaur experts turned into a race, it all seemed to change its flavor. In the United States in the 19th century, there were two people, and the excavation of dinosaur fossils between them changed from research to competition, and then escalated into attacks and denigrations on each other, and finally even evolved into a war!
Kopp and Marsh
Edward Drinker Cope was born in 1840, nine years younger than Othniel Charles Marsh, born in 1831, but he was already famous at a young age, becoming a member of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. In contrast, Marsh has a bit of a "late success", in his early thirties he is still a graduate student at the University of Berlin, and he has only published a paper. The two men first met in 1863, during the American Civil War. In order to escape the war, Kopp traveled to Europe for a series of academic visits, that is, at the University of Berlin, where he met marsh, an opponent he had fought all his life.
Figure 1: Edward Coop
Although Marsh is older than Kopp, he is an up-and-comer academically. By the time he had just been hired as a professor of paleontology after returning from his studies in Europe, Coop had already followed Joseph Redy, one of the top paleontologists of the time, to excavate and assemble the skeleton of the platypus. Kopp described and named a carnivorous dinosaur , " Storm dragon " ( the name " Storm " was later confirmed to be invalid , and was changed by Marsh to Dryptosaurus aquilunguis " ) .
Figure 2: Osnier Marsh
The beginning of the war
While Copp was digging up the duck-billed dragon fossil, Marsh made a special trip to visit him. At this time, Coop was still excited to introduce Marsh to the scene of his fossil excavation, completely unaware that his friends were planning a conspiracy against him. Marsh privately bought the manager of the fossil site kopp was excavating with a lot of money, and asked the manager to inform himself of all the newly discovered fossils. In this way, Kopp, who had cut off the research material, had to stop his work.
In 1868, Kopp received a set of fossilized marine reptiles. Because the animal had an extremely long neck, he mistakenly believed that the shorter tail was the neck, and put the animal's skull on the tail. After discovering this mistake, Kopp tried to hide his mistake, and Marsh was sarcastic, writing a letter to ridicule Kopp, saying that "you should name this animal Funny Dragon", which is the famous plesiosaur- Plesiosaurus. If the severance of research materials is only the beginning of the competition between the two, then because of the ridicule and sarcasm of the thin plate dragon, It completely makes Kopp and Marsh tear their faces and decide to die to the end.
Figure 3: Kopp's misrepresented thin plate dragon skeleton
Crazy competition
Copp and Marsh invariably put the direction of the competition on who could discover and name more dinosaurs. The race reached a fever pitch in the 1870s, when the two men led a team to mine fossils during excavations in the American West. Marsh, who was the first to discover the fossil remains of the Como cliff, also blocked the news to prevent Kopp from coming to excavate the local dinosaur bones.
Kopp and Marsh not only denigrated each other in research, but also made various personal attacks on each other. At each site where the fossils could be extracted, both men wanted to preemptively seize the mining rights there and find ways to make it impossible for the other to dig. Since Marsh was far more well-funded than Kopp, he took advantage of the opportunity to find and capture fossil points. And in some important places, the two teams even broke out into armed conflict, attacking each other and even stealing and destroying fossils that the other had already excavated and had not yet had time to transport!
Brilliant discoveries
Despite the many destructive means used in the competition for excavations, and the fact that many precious fossils were completely destroyed in this "war", the results of Kopp and Marsh were quite brilliant. During the 30-year fossil war, the two men discovered a total of 142 new dinosaur fossils, of which 86 were Marsh and 56 were Kopp. Among these fossils are the later famous Triceratops, Allosaurus, Diplodocus and Plesiosaurus, " Ornithosaurus " , " Orniosaurus " , and " Allosaurus " .
Figure 4: The skeleton of Allosaurus
Figure 5: Fossils of plesiosaurs
The epilogue of the two
In the history of paleontology, the fossil warfare of Kopp and Marsh, despite its brilliant results, has had a serious negative impact on the entire field of paleontology. The war ended in 1897 and was not brought to an end until the year of Cope's death. Marsh, on the other hand, eventually lost his source of research funding due to congressional budget cuts and had to mortgage his property and seek a job at Yale University to make ends meet. Two years after Copp's death, Marsh also died in his own home, and with the death of the two men, the "fossil war" finally came to an end.
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