However, the results were not due to any further good cooperation. On the contrary. The two men were bitter rivals, both wanting to be leaders in their fields – at all costs.
Only a few species were known
It started otherwise promisingly when the two men met for the first time in Berlin in the winter of 1863. The then 23-year-old Edward Cope came from a well-to-do family in Philadelphia. He had gained an interest in animal life from the family’s many trips to zoological parks – one of the new inventions of the time.
When Cope was about to choose a profession, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied natural sciences. In 1863 he traveled to Europe. The goal was to carry out a kind of study trip and possibly avoid being drafted as a soldier in the American Civil War, which had broken out two years earlier.
His compatriot Charles Marsh, nine years his senior, already had a degree from the prestigious Yale University, but had traveled to Berlin to study with German scientists who were among the world’s leading naturalists. Marsh, unlike Cope, came from a modest middle class family.
Marsh would never have been able to afford either the education or the study tour, had it not been for his relative George Peabody. Peabody had made good money in trading and banking, and since he never had a son himself, he took Marsh under his wing.
Happy to have met a compatriot abroad, the two men began to talk to each other. They spent many days together during Marsh’s visit and soon realized they shared the same burning interest: prehistoric animal species.
Research on prehistoric animals was at that time a completely new field. Findings of fossils of unknown animal species were already described in antiquity, but more modern, scientific investigations of fossils only began to be done in the 19th century.
At the time, the large, unknown animals were called “large fossil lizards”, until the British paleontologist Sir Richard Owen named the species Dinosauria in 1841. He formed the name from the Greek words deinos and sauros, which mean terrible and lizard, respectively.
Owen and his European colleagues discovered and explored parts of fossils from e.g. Megalosaurus, a large carnivore that lived around 166 million years ago, and the around five meter long herbivore Hylaeosaurus, which lived around 136 million years ago.
So far, however, the findings have been limited to a few species. In the United States, paleontology was largely as unexplored as the prairie soil of the West. Marsh and Cope would soon change that.
Field studies led to enmity
Cope returned home to Philadelphia in 1864, and in the years that followed he and Marsh frequently exchanged manuscripts and photographs. They also sent fossils to each other, so they could discuss the findings. In 1867, Cope confirmed the collaboration by naming a fossil, Ptyonius marshii, after Marsh.
The colleague did the same when the following year he presented “a new giant reptile from the Tertiary period (the geological time period that lasted from 65 to 1.8 million years ago, red.anm)” namnet ”Mosasaurus copeanus”.
But beneath the surface, a strong jealousy hid. In 1868, it erupted when Cope invited Marsh to take a closer look at a marl tomb located near Cope’s hometown of Haddonfield, in southern New Jersey. The marl pit contained lots of large skeletal parts.
Cope had already seized some of them. He had decided with the owner of the marl pit that those who worked at the site would send all fossil finds to him.
After the visit, Marsh decided to do the same. He consulted with the landowner and asked him to send fossils to him instead of to Cope – with the promise of a higher payment, of course.
Cope was furious when he learned what Marsh had done. “I invited him to New Jersey and showed him the finds. Shortly afterwards when I was going to collect fossils from these places I found that everything was closed to me and promised to Marsh with the help of money,” he wrote bitterly many years later.
Shortly thereafter, Marsh sprinkled more salt in the wounds. An army doctor in Kansas had sent Cope pieces of bone from a giant long-necked sea creature.
Cope carefully reconstructed the large skeleton and named the animal Elasmosaurus platyurus. The skeleton was put on display at the Museum of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, where Cope proudly showed it to Marsh.
Marsh regarded the animal with its short neck and extraordinarily long tail in amazement—until it dawned on him that Cope had put the skeleton together incorrectly. The head sat where the tail should sit and vice versa.
The incident took a toll on the already strained friendship. “When I informed Professor Cope of it, his pride received a thorn that never went away, and since then he has been my bitter enemy,” Marsh later wrote.
Lots of bones were found in the ground
In the years that followed, the two men fought intensely to be the first to find, name and describe new dinosaur species.
They were fully occupied. When the American Civil War ended in 1865, the United States rapidly expanded westward. Settlers, gold diggers and railroad builders flocked to the new land and turned the dry prairie soil upside down. Lots of prehistoric animals were unearthed.
In 1872, Cope heard that fossils had been found in Wyoming, then an almost completely newly established American territory. He immediately began digging – and Marsh followed.
The two men competed to get the best workers for the fundraiser, but discovered to their dismay that some worked for both of them.
When on one occasion one of the collectors accidentally sent fossils intended for Marsh to Cope, the animosity between the two rivals reached a level that reverberated throughout the scientific world.
When, in January 1873, Cope returned the fossils sent in error, the rival coldly replied: “Then where are the rest?” Cope responded with counter-accusations of theft. “A certain person” had stolen his fossil, he pointed out.
Cope did not hesitate to address one of the letters with “O See” Marsh – a pun on Marsh’s initials, OC – which can best be translated as “Oh, look!”, because Marsh’s occasionally haughty appearance.
Marsh also accused Cope of falsifying the dates on some of the scientific articles he had had published in the “Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society”. Cope had backdated the treatises to be sure of being the first to record the findings, Cope claimed.
The discussion took place in articles in the Philosophical Society’s respected journal, and the writings finally became so embarrassing that the editors informed both men that future articles on the subject would be printed as special editions – paid for by the authors themselves.
Employees sabotaged each other
The demand for payment prompted Marsh and Cope to settle the battle in the journal. But on the ground, the rivalry continued. Neither of the two men shied away from using crude methods. In 1877, a school teacher named Arthur Lakes found some large fossils near the town of Morrison, Colorado.
Lakes sent some of the skeletal parts to Marsh, but since Marsh did not immediately respond to the shipment, he also sent some to Cope. Shortly thereafter, Marsh made the discovery public. When he found out that Lakes had also contacted Cope, he offered Lakes $100 for the first right to all the skeletal parts he found.
Lakes immediately sent a letter to Cope, asking him to forward the pieces of bone he had already received to Marsh.
When Cope later conducted excavations in Colorado, Marsh had his workers camp next to Cope’s workers. He also tried to bribe the finder of the skeletal parts, but without success.
In 1877, Marsh received a letter from two railroad workers in Wyoming, Reed and Carlin. They told of an interesting fossil find at Como Bluff in Wyoming, and Marsh hired Reed as an assistant. Colleague Carlin was employed by Cope.
The two railway workers took it upon themselves to continue their respective employers’ struggle, which thus only became more bitter.
Carlin sabotaged Reed’s shipments of fossils to Marsh by locking Reed out of the local train station. The result was that Reed, in the bitter cold, was forced to pack fossils into boxes out on the platform.
When Reed left some fossils behind, he gave the order on Marsh’s behalf that any skeletal parts that remained should be blown up with dynamite. “Professor Marsh indirectly asked me to destroy the fossils so they wouldn’t fall into your hands,” Samuel Williston, one of Marsh’s closest men, admitted to Cope.
Cope was on the brink of poverty
The inheritance of the relative George Peabody, who died in 1869, had made Marsh stormy. Prosperity gave him more money to dig for, and by the 1880s it was clear that, measured by the number of fossils found, he was leading the race to be the leading dinosaur hunter.
The money also gave him power and influence, and in 1882 Marsh was hired as head of paleontological work at the scientific institution US Geological Survey.
The appointment brought him a substantial annual salary and not only made Marsh America’s leading paleontologist. The job also gave him the power to withdraw Cope’s share of the government funds they both previously benefited from, e.g. in the form of grants to issue illustrated reports on their fossils.
The financial measure was a severe blow to Cope. At one point, his financial situation was so desperate that he began investing in risky gold and silver mines in the southwestern United States to get cash.
The risky venture ended badly. “I had hoped to be able to increase my income. I did that too for a while. But it came to nothing,” he wrote in April 1884 wistfully to his wife, Annie.
In 1890, however, Marsh made a big mistake. He tried to seize Cope’s fossil collection, the only thing of value the rival possessed at the time.
The rationale was that Cope had found the fossils while working for a time with a government-employed paleontologist, and the skeletal parts therefore belonged to the authorities – which Marsh represented.
Cope was furious. Now he had had enough.
The rivals lost everything
Revenge had been prepared for a long time. For years, Cope had collected all the negativity he could find about Marsh. Records of bribery, shady dealings and scientific dishonesty filled an entire drawer, he had previously revealed to a friend.
Now Cope was ready to contact the press. “When an injustice needs to be corrected, the press is the best and most honest medium. It replaces old weapons like gun and bullets and is much better,” he wrote belligerently in his notes.
Cope shared what he knew with The New York Herald magazine, which published the story over eight days. “Scientists in bitter struggle,” read the headline. Marsh responded to the speech and a two-week exchange of bitter recriminations ensued.
Marsh’s influential superiors supported him as long as the feud lasted. Then it ended.
Cope himself had been guilty of many of the things he accused Marsh of, but the authorities could not overlook the allegations of corruption and misuse of public funds.
The result was that Congress closed the Department of Paleontology. Marsh was fired and also had to give up part of his fossil collection, as Congress deemed the collection to be paid for with government funds.
The humiliating demand pleased Cope who had previously been subjected to the same treatment by Marsh.
The newspaper battle was the last lap of the two men’s race. Measured by the number of species found, Marsh won with 80 to Cope’s 56. But both men were losers in terms of finances and health.
An economic crisis in the 1890s quickly reduced Marsh’s fortune. He was forced to take out loans and cancel expensive hunts for fossils, and like Cope, he had to spend his old age in simple conditions.
Cope died aged 56 in 1897, and two years later Marsh died aged 67.
But their legacy as perhaps the world’s most important paleontologists lives on to a great extent. The two rivals together discovered more than 130 new dinosaur species, and the fruit of their destructive rivalry was a quantum leap in paleontology never seen since.
2023-07-09 06:02:25
#Mortal #enemies #brought #dinosaurs #life
