Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare
His wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy
Edward Drinker Cope died four months shy of his 57th birthday. A lifelong Quaker, his funeral was a quiet affair. Six people were present, including friends and colleagues Henry Fairfield Osborn and William Berryman Scott. Surrounded by a selection of Cope’s fossil bounty, the men sat in complete silence, but for the scraping of his pet tortoise on the floor and his Gila monster circling its bowl.
"We all sat in perfect Quaker silence for what seemed to be an interminable length of time," Oborn would later note. Bible in-hand, he broke in with a reading from the Book of Job ending,
I know that thou canst do everything, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is thee that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
"These are the problems to which our friend devoted his life,” Osborn added, before the coffin was loaded into the hearse.
Cope left a study covered in scattered papers and specimens. Some, preserved in alcohol, were stashed in the bathroom after he’d run out of shelf space. He also left a final salvo in a decades-long war.
"I direct that after my funeral my body shall be presented to the Anthropometric Society and that an autopsy shall be performed on it,” he wrote. “My brain shall be preserved in their collection of brains, and my skeleton shall be prepared and preserved in their collection in a locked case or drawer, and shall not be placed on exhibition, but shall be open to the inspection of students of anthropology."
Cope requested that his brain be removed and weighed, challenging longtime rival Othniel Charles Marsh to do the same so the world could discover once and for all which paleontologist was smarter. Marsh, however, refused the bait. Perhaps it would have been a fitting gesture. Contemporary science held that brain size was directly proportional to intelligence. The final act would have united the two men as arch-rivals even in death.
Their relationship had begun agreeably enough more than 30 years prior. The American met in Berlin as civil war raged on at home. Marsh had a pair of degrees and two scientific papers to his name. The self-educated Cope had published 37 over the past five years. They struck up a friendship after spending three days exchanging notes in Germany and continued a correspondence after returning home.
Cope named a tetrapod species Ptyonius marshii in honor of his colleague and Marsh followed suit with Mosasaurus copeanus, "a new and gigantic serpent from the Tertiary of New Jersey.” The following year, Marsh traveled to New Jersey, where Cope had recently moved to be in close proximity to marl pits. The excavation sites had proven extremely valuable for paleontology. The pair joined forces to excavate, in spite of miserable, rainy weather. It was there that Marsh made the acquaintance of Albert Vorhees. Unbeknownst to Cope, Marsh bribed the quarry owner to have all future fossils sent to his home in Connecticut.
It was, however, a plesiosaur that marked the true beginning of the bone wars. Having successfully reconstructed the body of Elasmosaurus platyurus, Cope triumphantly submitted a sketch to the American Philosophical Society. Following its publication, Marsh pointed out that he had mistakenly placed the head on the wrong end, positioning it on the tail, rather than the neck. Cope quickly attempted to buy every issue of the magazine that contained the error.
“When I informed professor Cope of it,” Marsh later wrote, “his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy.” But Cope wasn’t the only one he had alerted about the mistake. Marsh had taken the story to the media in a bid to tarnish his colleague’s reputation.
Tensions escalated quickly. Each man attempted to bar the other from digs. The pair rushed to Morrison, Colorado, where a schoolteacher had discovered some large bones. They began frantically – and often sloppily – cataloguing and naming discoveries in a bid to outdo the other. They made errors, reclassifying named species, often times attempting to lay claim to a species the other had discovered. They had created a morass of classifications, though each man ultimately contributed a great deal to the field.
Among others, Marsh named the Brontosaurus, Apatosaurs, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Cope was responsible for Tyrannosaurus and Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus — both proto-dinosaur tetrapods. In spite of their respective successes, their tactics grew increasingly underhanded. Bones were stolen and destroyed. Marsh hired a spy and methodically begun pulling strings to have Cope’s funding cut. In a bid to begin funding his own expeditions, Cope invested in a silver mine, losing nearly all of his money in the process. He and his wife separated and he began living alone with fossils – his last remaining asset.
Cope launched an offensive in in the press, weaponizing the notes he had taken over the years that detailed Marsh’s improprieties. The New York Herald was the first to pick up the story.
Under the headline “Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare,” the paper explained,
Learned Men Come to the Pennsylvanian’s Support with Allegations of Ignorance, Plagiarism and Incompetence Against the Accused Officials.
Important collateral issue.
The National Academy of Sciences, of Which Professor Marsh is President, is Charged with being Packed in the Interests of the Survey.
Red hot denials put forth.
Heavy Blows Dealt in Attack and Defenc and Lots of Hard Nuts Provided for Scientific Digestion.
Will Congress Investigate?
Marsh — the far more methodical and deliberate of the two men — fired back, accusing Cope of sloppiness. "The thoroughness and ability with which this reply was prepared indicated that it was by no means the work of a single week, but years of preparation," Cope’s friend Osborn confessed. "Whereas Cope attacked after a truly Celtic fashion, hitting out blindly right and left with little or no precaution for guarding the rear, Marsh's reply was thoroughly of a cold-blooded Teutonic, or Nordic type, very dignified and under the cover of wounded feelings reluctantly breaking the silence of years, as if his reply had been forced upon him."
The Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times picked up the story, as the rest of the scientific community recoiled in embarrassment and horror. Congress cut the Geological Survey budget by one-fourth, firing Marsh and his team in the process. The Smithsonian forced him to hand over a portion his fossil collection. When he died two years after Cope, the once wealthy Marsh died with $186 to his name.
The Smithsonian purchased Cope’s collection, while Marsh donated his to Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Darwin cited both as major influences on his work in evolution. Cope’s skull has remained the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology collection, save for a brief detour back into the field 100 years after his death.
Photographer (and future The Cove director) Louie Psihoyos took it on his travels, much to the horror of museum officials. It features prominently in images of excavation sites published in his 1994 book, Hunting Dinosaurs. “What I thought was the most innocent thing has turned into a front-page scandal,” the photographer told the press after the museum’s curator complained to the press.
In one of the book’s photos titled “Pouring pasta into Cope’s noodle,” paleontologist Robert Bakker is seen emptying foodstuffs from a flask into the skull in a bid to measure its brain volume.
Sources:
The Gilded Dinosaur by Mark Jaffe
O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope: A Rivalry https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/dinosaur-rivalry/
This Means War! A History of the Bone Wars https://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2012/11/this-means-war-history-of-bone-wars.html
The Skull of Poor Old Cope https://www.academia.edu/36778896/The_skull_of_poor_old_Cope