IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey—exactly who now seems to be forgotten—found anenormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. Thebone clearly didn’t belong to any species of creature still alive, certainly not in New Jersey.
From what little is known now, it is thought to have belonged to a hadrosaur, a large duck-billed dinosaur. At the time, dinosaurs were unknown.
The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation’s leading anatomist, who described it ata meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. Unfortunately,Wistar failed completely to recognize the bone’s significance and merely made a few cautiousand uninspired remarks to the effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the chance,half a century ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Indeed, the boneexcited so little interest that it was put in a storeroom and eventually disappeared altogether.
So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
That the bone didn’t attract greater interest is more than a little puzzling, for its appearancecame at a time when America was in a froth of excitement about the remains of large, ancientanimals. The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great French naturalist theComte de Buffon—he of the heated spheres from the previous chapter—that living things inthe New World were inferior in nearly every way to those of the Old World. America, Buffonwrote in his vast and much-esteemed Histoire Naturelle , was a land where the water wasstagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or vigor, their constitutionsweakened by the “noxious vapors” that rose from its rotting swamps and sunless forests. Insuch an environment even the native Indians lacked virility. “They have no beard or bodyhair,” Buffon sagely confided, “and no ardor for the female.” Their reproductive organs were“small and feeble.”
Buffon’s observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especiallythose whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country. ADutchman named Comeille de Pauw announced in a popular work called RecherchesPhilosophiques sur les Américains that native American males were not only reproductivelyunimposing, but “so lacking in virility that they had milk in their breasts.” Such viewsenjoyed an improbable durability and could be found repeated or echoed in European texts tillnear the end of the nineteenth century.
Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jeffersonincorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in hisNotes on the State of Virginia , and induced his New Hampshire friend General John Sullivanto send twenty soldiers into the northern woods to find a bull moose to present to Buffon asproof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds. It took the men two weeks to trackdown a suitable subject. The moose, when shot, unfortunately lacked the imposing horns thatJefferson had specified, but Sullivan thoughtfully included a rack of antlers from an elk orstag with the suggestion that these be attached instead. Who in France, after all, would know?
Meanwhile in Philadelphia—Wistar’s city—naturalists had begun to assemble the bones ofa giant elephant-like creature known at first as “the great American incognitum” but lateridentified, not quite correctly, as a mammoth. The first of these bones had been discovered ata place called Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, but soon others were turning up all over. America,it appeared, had once been the home of a truly substantial creature—one that would surelydisprove Buffon’s foolish Gallic contentions.
In their keenness to demonstrate the incognitum’s bulk and ferocity, the Americannaturalists appear to have become slightly carried away. They overestimated its size by afactor of six and gave it frightening claws, which in fact came from a Megalonyx, or giantground sloth, found nearby. Rather remarkably, they persuaded themselves that the animalhad enjoyed “the agility and ferocity of the tiger,” and portrayed it in illustrations as pouncingwith feline grace onto prey from boulders. When tusks were discovered, they were forced intothe animal’s head in any number of inventive ways. One restorer screwed the tusks in upsidedown, like the fangs of a saber-toothed cat, which gave it a satisfyingly aggressive aspect.
Another arranged the tusks so that they curved backwards on the engaging theory that thecreature had been aquatic and had used them to anchor itself to trees while dozing. The mostpertinent consideration about the incognitum, however, was that it appeared to be extinct—afact that Buffon cheerfully seized upon as proof of its incontestably degenerate nature.
Buffon died in 1788, but the controversy rolled on. In 1795 a selection of bones made theirway to Paris, where they were examined by the rising star of paleontology, the youthful andaristocratic Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was already dazzling people with his genius for takingheaps of disarticulated bones and whipping them into shapely forms. It was said that he coulddescribe the look and nature of an animal from a single tooth or scrap of jaw, and often namethe species and genus into the bargain. Realizing that no one in America had thought to writea formal description of the lumbering beast, Cuvier did so, and thus became its officialdiscoverer. He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, “nipple-teeth”).
Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species ofLiving and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory ofextinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experienced global catastrophes inwhich groups of creatures were wiped out. For religious people, including Cuvier himself, theidea raised uncomfortable implications since it suggested an unaccountable casualness on thepart of Providence. To what end would God create species only to wipe them out later? Thenotion was contrary to the belief in the Great Chain of Being, which held that the world wascarefully ordered and that every living thing within it had a place and purpose, and always hadand always would. Jefferson for one couldn’t abide the thought that whole species would everbe permitted to vanish (or, come to that, to evolve). So when it was put to him that theremight be scientific and political value in sending a party to explore the interior of Americabeyond the Mississippi he leapt at the idea, hoping the intrepid adventurers would find herdsof healthy mastodons and other outsized creatures grazing on the bounteous plains.
Jefferson’s personal secretary and trusted friend Meriwether Lewis was chosen co-leader andchief naturalist for the expedition. The person selected to advise him on what to look out forwith regard to animals living and deceased was none other than Caspar Wistar.
In the same year—in fact, the same month—that the aristocratic and celebrated Cuvier waspropounding his extinction theories in Paris, on the other side of the English Channel a rathermore obscure Englishman was having an insight into the value of fossils that would also havelasting ramifications. William Smith was a young supervisor of construction on the SomersetCoal Canal. On the evening of January 5, 1796, he was sitting in a coaching inn in Somersetwhen he jotted down the notion that would eventually make his reputation. To interpret rocks,there needs to be some means of correlation, a basis on which you can tell that thosecarboniferous rocks from Devon are younger than these Cambrian rocks from Wales. Smith’sinsight was to realize that the answer lay with fossils. At every change in rock strata certainspecies of fossils disappeared while others carried on into subsequent levels. By noting which species appeared in which strata, you could work out the relative ages of rocks wherever theyappeared. Drawing on his knowledge as a surveyor, Smith began at once to make a map ofBritain’s rock strata, which would be published after many trials in 1815 and would become acornerstone of modern geology. (The story is comprehensively covered in SimonWinchester’s popular book The Map That Changed the World .)Unfortunately, having had his insight, Smith was curiously uninterested in understandingwhy rocks were laid down in the way they were. “I have left off puzzling about the origin ofStrata and content myself with knowing that it is so,” he recorded. “The whys and whereforescannot come within the Province of a Mineral Surveyor.”
Smith’s revelation regarding strata heightened the moral awkwardness concerningextinctions. To begin with, it confirmed that God had wiped out creatures not occasionally butrepeatedly. This made Him seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile. It also made itinconveniently necessary to explain how some species were wiped out while others continuedunimpeded into succeeding eons. Clearly there was more to extinctions than could beaccounted for by a single Noachian deluge, as the Biblical flood was known. Cuvier resolvedthe matter to his own satisfaction by suggesting that Genesis applied only to the most recentinundation. God, it appeared, hadn’t wished to distract or alarm Moses with news of earlier,irrelevant extinctions.
So by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapableimportance, which makes Wistar’s failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all themore unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up all over. Several otheropportunities arose for Americans to claim the discovery of dinosaurs but all were wasted. In1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through the Hell Creek formation in Montana, anarea where fossil hunters would later literally trip over dinosaur bones, and even examinedwhat was clearly a dinosaur bone embedded in rock, but failed to make anything of it. Otherbones and fossilized footprints were found in the Connecticut River Valley of New Englandafter a farm boy named Plinus Moody spied ancient tracks on a rock ledge at South Hadley,Massachusetts. Some of these at least survive—notably the bones of an Anchisaurus, whichare in the collection of the Peabody Museum at Yale. Found in 1818, they were the firstdinosaur bones to be examined and saved, but unfortunately weren’t recognized for what theywere until 1855. In that same year, 1818, Caspar Wistar died, but he did gain a certainunexpected immortality when a botanist named Thomas Nuttall named a delightful climbingshrub after him. Some botanical purists still insist on spelling it wistaria .
By this time, however, paleontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, atLyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anning—aged eleven,twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you read—found a strange fossilized seamonster, seventeen feet long and now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded in the steep anddangerous cliffs along the English Channel.
It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the next thirty-five yearsgathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for thefamous tongue twister “She sells seashells on the seashore.”) She would also find the firstplesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls. Though noneof these was technically a dinosaur, that wasn’t terribly relevant at the time since nobody then knew what a dinosaur was. It was enough to realize that the world had once held creaturesstrikingly unlike anything we might now find.
It wasn’t simply that Anning was good at spotting fossils—though she was unrivalled atthat—but that she could extract them with the greatest delicacy and without damage. If youever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museumin London, I urge you to take it for there is no other way to appreciate the scale and beauty ofwhat this young woman achieved working virtually unaided with the most basic tools innearly impossible conditions. The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation.
Although untrained, Anning was also able to provide competent drawings and descriptions forscholars. But even with the advantage of her skills, significant finds were rare and she passedmost of her life in poverty.
It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of paleontology thanMary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was GideonAlgernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex.
Mantell was a lanky assemblage of shortcomings—he was vain, self-absorbed, priggish,neglectful of his family—but never was there a more devoted amateur paleontologist. He wasalso lucky to have a devoted and observant wife. In 1822, while he was making a house callon a patient in rural Sussex, Mrs. Mantell went for a stroll down a nearby lane and in a pile ofrubble that had been left to fill potholes she found a curious object—a curved brown stone,about the size of a small walnut. Knowing her husband’s interest in fossils, and thinking itmight be one, she took it to him. Mantell could see at once it was a fossilized tooth, and aftera little study became certain that it was from an animal that was herbivorous, reptilian,extremely large—tens of feet long—and from the Cretaceous period. He was right on allcounts, but these were bold conclusions since nothing like it had been seen before or evenimagined.
Aware that his finding would entirely upend what was understood about the past, and urgedby his friend the Reverend William Buckland—he of the gowns and experimental appetite—to proceed with caution, Mantell devoted three painstaking years to seeking evidence tosupport his conclusions. He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the greatFrenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized handsomelyfor this uncharacteristic error.) One day while doing research at the Hunterian Museum inLondon, Mantell fell into conversation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth lookedvery like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hastycomparison confirmed the resemblance. And so Mantell’s creature became Iguanodon , aftera basking tropical lizard to which it was not in any manner related.
Mantell prepared a paper for delivery to the Royal Society. Unfortunately it emerged thatanother dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire and had just been formallydescribed—by the Reverend Buckland, the very man who had urged him not to work in haste.
It was the Megalosaurus, and the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr.
James Parkinson, the would-be radical and eponym for Parkinson’s disease. Buckland, it maybe recalled, was foremost a geologist, and he showed it with his work on Megalosaurus. In hisreport, for the Transactions of the Geological Society of London , he noted that the creature’steeth were not attached directly to the jawbone as in lizards but placed in sockets in themanner of crocodiles. But having noticed this much, Buckland failed to realize what it meant:
Megalosaurus was an entirely new type of creature. So although his report demonstrated littleacuity or insight, it was still the first published description of a dinosaur, and so to him rather than the far more deserving Mantell goes the credit for the discovery of this ancient line ofbeings.
Unaware that disappointment was going to be a continuing feature of his life, Mantellcontinued hunting for fossils—he found another giant, the Hylaeosaurus, in 1833—andpurchasing others from quarrymen and farmers until he had probably the largest fossilcollection in Britain. Mantell was an excellent doctor and equally gifted bone hunter, but hewas unable to support both his talents. As his collecting mania grew, he neglected his medicalpractice. Soon fossils filled nearly the whole of his house in Brighton and consumed much ofhis income. Much of the rest went to underwriting the publication of books that few cared toown. Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex , published in 1827, sold only fifty copies and lefthim ￡300 out of pocket—an uncomfortably substantial sum for the times.
In some desperation Mantell hit on the idea of turning his house into a museum andcharging admission, then belatedly realized that such a mercenary act would ruin his standingas a gentleman, not to mention as a scientist, and so he allowed people to visit the house forfree. They came in their hundreds, week after week, disrupting both his practice and his homelife. Eventually he was forced to sell most of his collection to pay off his debts. Soon after, hiswife left him, taking their four children with her.
Remarkably, his troubles were only just beginning.
In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, therestands a strange and forgotten sight: the world’s first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not manypeople travel there these days, but once this was one of the most popular attractions inLondon—in effect, as Richard Fortey has noted, the world’s first theme park. Quite a lotabout the models is not strictly correct. The iguanodon’s thumb has been placed on its nose,as a kind of spike, and it stands on four sturdy legs, making it look like a rather stout andawkwardly overgrown dog. (In life, the iguanodon did not crouch on all fours, but wasbipedal.) Looking at them now you would scarcely guess that these odd and lumbering beastscould cause great rancor and bitterness, but they did. Perhaps nothing in natural history hasbeen at the center of fiercer and more enduring hatreds than the line of ancient beasts knownas dinosaurs.
At the time of the dinosaurs’ construction, Sydenham was on the edge of London and itsspacious park was considered an ideal place to re-erect the famous Crystal Palace, the glassand cast-iron structure that had been the centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and fromwhich the new park naturally took its name. The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind ofbonus attraction. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominentscientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell, the man who had foundand identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table wasthe greatest star of the young science of paleontology. His name was Richard Owen and bythis time he had already devoted several productive years to making Gideon Mantell’s lifehell.
Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor.
He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowedlimbs, organs, and other parts from cadavers and took them home for leisurely dissection.
Once while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced awayfrom him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest inthe front parlor. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to ahalt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terriblyadvanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in,wordlessly retrieved the head, and rushed out again.
In 1825, aged just twenty-one, Owen moved to London and soon after was engaged by theRoyal College of Surgeons to help organize their extensive, but disordered, collections ofmedical and anatomical specimens. Most of these had been left to the institution by JohnHunter, a distinguished surgeon and tireless collector of medical curiosities, but had neverbeen catalogued or organized, largely because the paperwork explaining the significance ofeach had gone missing soon after Hunter’s death.
Owen swiftly distinguished himself with his powers of organization and deduction. At thesame time he showed himself to be a peerless anatomist with instincts for reconstructionalmost on a par with the great Cuvier in Paris. He become such an expert on the anatomy ofanimals that he was granted first refusal on any animal that died at the London ZoologicalGardens, and these he would invariably have delivered to his house for examination. Once hiswife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway. He quicklybecame a leading expert on all kinds of animals living and extinct—from platypuses,echidnas, and other newly discovered marsupials to the hapless dodo and the extinct giantbirds called moas that had roamed New Zealand until eaten out of existence by the Maoris. Hewas the first to describe the archaeopteryx after its discovery in Bavaria in 1861 and the firstto write a formal epitaph for the dodo. Altogether he produced some six hundred anatomicalpapers, a prodigious output.
But it was for his work with dinosaurs that Owen is remembered. He coined the termdinosauria in 1841. It means “terrible lizard” and was a curiously inapt name. Dinosaurs, aswe now know, weren’t all terrible—some were no bigger than rabbits and probably extremelyretiring—and the one thing they most emphatically were not was lizards, which are actually ofa much older (by thirty million years) lineage. Owen was well aware that the creatures werereptilian and had at his disposal a perfectly good Greek word, herpeton, but for some reasonchose not to use it. Another, more excusable error (given the paucity of specimens at the time)was that dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles: the bird-hipped ornithischiansand the lizard-hipped saurischians.
Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph fromhis late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorianmelodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyes—a face to frighten babies. In manner hewas cold and imperious, and he was without scruple in the furtherance of his ambitions. Hewas the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate. Even Owen’s son (who soonafter killed himself) referred to his father’s “lamentable coldness of heart.”
His undoubted gifts as an anatomist allowed him to get away with the most barefaceddishonesties. In 1857, the naturalist T. H. Huxley was leafing through a new edition ofChurchill’s Medical Directory when he noticed that Owen was listed as Professor ofComparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Government School of Mines, which rathersurprised Huxley as that was the position he held. Upon inquiring how Churchill’s had madesuch an elemental error, he was told that the information had been provided to them by Dr.
Owen himself. A fellow naturalist named Hugh Falconer, meanwhile, caught Owen taking credit for one of his discoveries. Others accused him of borrowing specimens, then denyinghe had done so. Owen even fell into a bitter dispute with the Queen’s dentist over the creditfor a theory concerning the physiology of teeth.
He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used hisinfluence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant whose onlycrime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. Grant was astonished to discover thathe was suddenly denied access to the anatomical specimens he needed to conduct hisresearch. Unable to pursue his work, he sank into an understandably dispirited obscurity.
But no one suffered more from Owen’s unkindly attentions than the hapless andincreasingly tragic Gideon Mantell. After losing his wife, his children, his medical practice,and most of his fossil collection, Mantell moved to London. There in 1841—the fateful yearin which Owen would achieve his greatest glory for naming and identifying the dinosaurs—Mantell was involved in a terrible accident. While crossing Clapham Common in a carriage,he somehow fell from his seat, grew entangled in the reins, and was dragged at a gallop overrough ground by the panicked horses. The accident left him bent, crippled, and in chronicpain, with a spine damaged beyond repair.
Capitalizing on Mantell’s enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expungingMantell’s contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named yearsbefore and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to try to dooriginal research but Owen used his influence at the Royal Society to ensure that most of hispapers were rejected. In 1852, unable to bear any more pain or persecution, Mantell took hisown life. His deformed spine was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeonswhere—and now here’s an irony for you—it was placed in the care of Richard Owen, directorof the college’s Hunterian Museum.
But the insults had not quite finished. Soon after Mantell’s death an arrestingly uncharitableobituary appeared in the Literary Gazette. In it Mantell was characterized as a mediocreanatomist whose modest contributions to paleontology were limited by a “want of exactknowledge.” The obituary even removed the discovery of the iguanodon from him andcredited it instead to Cuvier and Owen, among others. Though the piece carried no byline, thestyle was Owen’s and no one in the world of the natural sciences doubted the authorship.
By this stage, however, Owen’s transgressions were beginning to catch up with him. Hisundoing began when a committee of the Royal Society—a committee of which he happenedto be chairman—decided to award him its highest honor, the Royal Medal, for a paper he hadwritten on an extinct mollusc called the belemnite. “However,” as Deborah Cadbury notes inher excellent history of the period, Terrible Lizard, “this piece of work was not quite asoriginal as it appeared.” The belemnite, it turned out, had been discovered four years earlierby an amateur naturalist named Chaning Pearce, and the discovery had been fully reported ata meeting of the Geological Society. Owen had been at that meeting, but failed to mentionthis when he presented a report of his own to the Royal Society—in which, not incidentally,he rechristened the creature Belemnites owenii in his own honor. Although Owen was allowedto keep the Royal Medal, the episode left a permanent tarnish on his reputation, even amonghis few remaining supporters.
Eventually Huxley managed to do to Owen what Owen had done to so many others: he hadhim voted off the councils of the Zoological and Royal societies. As a final insult Huxleybecame the new Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons.
Owen would never again do important research, but the latter half of his career was devotedto one unexceptionable pursuit for which we can all be grateful. In 1856 he became head ofthe natural history section of the British Museum, in which capacity he became the drivingforce behind the creation of London’s Natural History Museum. The grand and belovedGothic heap in South Kensington, opened in 1880, is almost entirely a testament to his vision.
Before Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, andeven then it was difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospectivevisitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if theywere fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket—that isassuming they had passed the interview—and finally come back a third time to view themuseum’s treasures. Even then they were whisked through in groups and not allowed tolinger. Owen’s plan was to welcome everyone, even to the point of encouraging workingmento visit in the evening, and to devote most of the museum’s space to public displays. He evenproposed, very radically, to put informative labels on each display so that people couldappreciate what they were viewing. In this, somewhat unexpectedly, he was opposed by T. H.
Huxley, who believed that museums should be primarily research institutes. By making theNatural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations ofwhat museums are for.
Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personalrivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue inmemory of Charles Darwin. In this he failed—though he did achieve a certain belated,inadvertent triumph. Today his statue commands a masterly view from the staircase of themain hall in the Natural History Museum, while Darwin and T. H. Huxley are consignedsomewhat obscurely to the museum coffee shop, where they stare gravely over peoplesnacking on cups of tea and jam doughnuts.
It would be reasonable to suppose that Richard Owen’s petty rivalries marked the low pointof nineteenth-century paleontology, but in fact worse was to come, this time from overseas. InAmerica in the closing decades of the century there arose a rivalry even more spectacularlyvenomous, if not quite as destructive. It was between two strange and ruthless men, EdwardDrinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.
They had much in common. Both were spoiled, driven, self-centered, quarrelsome, jealous,mistrustful, and ever unhappy. Between them they changed the world of paleontology.
They began as mutual friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other,and spent a pleasant week together in 1868. However, something then went wrong betweenthem—nobody is quite sure what—and by the following year they had developed an enmitythat would grow into consuming hatred over the next thirty years. It is probably safe to saythat no two people in the natural sciences have ever despised each other more.
Marsh, the elder of the two by eight years, was a retiring and bookish fellow, with a trimbeard and dapper manner, who spent little time in the field and was seldom very good atfinding things when he was there. On a visit to the famous dinosaur fields of Como Bluff,Wyoming, he failed to notice the bones that were, in the words of one historian, “lyingeverywhere like logs.” But he had the means to buy almost anything he wanted. Although hecame from a modest background—his father was a farmer in upstate New York—his uncle was the supremely rich and extraordinarily indulgent financier George Peabody. When Marshshowed an interest in natural history, Peabody had a museum built for him at Yale andprovided funds sufficient for Marsh to fill it with almost whatever took his fancy.
Cope was born more directly into privilege—his father was a rich Philadelphiabusinessman—and was by far the more adventurous of the two. In the summer of 1876 inMontana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little BigHorn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this wasprobably not the most prudent time to be taking treasures from Indian lands, Cope thought fora minute and decided to press on anyway. He was having too good a season. At one point heran into a party of suspicious Crow Indians, but he managed to win them over by repeatedlytaking out and replacing his false teeth.
For a decade or so, Marsh and Cope’s mutual dislike primarily took the form of quietsniping, but in 1877 it erupted into grandiose dimensions. In that year a Coloradoschoolteacher named Arthur Lakes found bones near Morrison while out hiking with a friend.
Recognizing the bones as coming from a “gigantic saurian,” Lakes thoughtfully dispatchedsome samples to both Marsh and Cope. A delighted Cope sent Lakes a hundred dollars for histrouble and asked him not to tell anyone of his discovery, especially Marsh. Confused, Lakesnow asked Marsh to pass the bones on to Cope. Marsh did so, but it was an affront that hewould never forget.
It also marked the start of a war between the two that became increasingly bitter,underhand, and often ridiculous. They sometimes stooped to one team’s diggers throwingrocks at the other team’s. Cope was caught at one point jimmying open crates that belonged toMarsh. They insulted each other in print and each poured scorn on the other’s results.
Seldom—perhaps never—has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully byanimosity. Over the next several years the two men between them increased the number ofknown dinosaur species in America from 9 to almost 150. Nearly every dinosaur that theaverage person can name—stegosaurus, brontosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops—was found byone or the other of them.
1Unfortunately, they worked in such reckless haste that they oftenfailed to note that a new discovery was something already known. Between them theymanaged to “discover” a species calledUintatheres anceps no fewer than twenty-two times. Ittook years to sort out some of the classification messes they made. Some are not sorted outyet.
Of the two, Cope’s scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakinglyindustrious career, he wrote some 1,400 learned papers and described almost 1,300 newspecies of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs)—more than double Marsh’s output in bothcases. Cope might have done even more, but unfortunately he went into a rather precipitatedescent in his later years. Having inherited a fortune in 1875, he invested unwisely in silverand lost everything. He ended up living in a single room in a Philadelphia boarding house,surrounded by books, papers, and bones. Marsh by contrast finished his days in a splendidmansion in New Haven. Cope died in 1897, Marsh two years later.
In his final years, Cope developed one other interesting obsession. It became his earnestwish to be declared the type specimen forHomo sapiens —that is, that his bones would be theofficial set for the human race. Normally, the type specimen of a species is the first set of1The notable exception being the Tyrannosaurus rex, which was found by Barnum Brown in 1902.
bones found, but since no first set of Homo sapiens bones exists, there was a vacancy, whichCope desired to fill. It was an odd and vain wish, but no one could think of any grounds tooppose it. To that end, Cope willed his bones to the Wistar Institute, a learned society inPhiladelphia endowed by the descendants of the seemingly inescapable Caspar Wistar.
Unfortunately, after his bones were prepared and assembled, it was found that they showedsigns of incipient syphilis, hardly a feature one would wish to preserve in the type specimenfor one’s own race. So Cope’s petition and his bones were quietly shelved. There is still notype specimen for modern humans.
As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope orMarsh. Buckland ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wreck in alunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crippling accident.
Mantell’s twisted spine remained on display at the Hunterian Museum for nearly a centurybefore being mercifully obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz. What remained ofMantell’s collection after his death passed on to his children, and much of it was taken to NewZealand by his son Walter, who emigrated there in 1840. Walter became a distinguished Kiwi,eventually attaining the office of Minister of Native Affairs. In 1865 he donated the primespecimens from his father’s collection, including the famous iguanodon tooth, to the ColonialMuseum (now the Museum of New Zealand) in Wellington, where they have remained eversince. The iguanodon tooth that started it all—arguably the most important tooth inpaleontology—is no longer on display.
Of course dinosaur hunting didn’t end with the deaths of the great nineteenth-century fossilhunters. Indeed, to a surprising extent it had only just begun. In 1898, the year that fellbetween the deaths of Cope and Marsh, a trove greater by far than anything found before wasdiscovered—noticed, really—at a place called Bone Cabin Quarry, only a few miles fromMarsh’s prime hunting ground at Como Bluff, Wyoming. There, hundreds and hundreds offossil bones were to be found weathering out of the hills. They were so numerous, in fact, thatsomeone had built a cabin out of them—hence the name. In just the first two seasons, 100,000pounds of ancient bones were excavated from the site, and tens of thousands of pounds morecame in each of the half dozen years that followed.
The upshot is that by the turn of the twentieth century, paleontologists had literally tons ofold bones to pick over. The problem was that they still didn’t have any idea how old any ofthese bones were. Worse, the agreed ages for the Earth couldn’t comfortably support thenumbers of eons and ages and epochs that the past obviously contained. If Earth were reallyonly twenty million years old or so, as the great Lord Kelvin insisted, then whole orders ofancient creatures must have come into being and gone out again practically in the samegeological instant. It just made no sense.
Other scientists besides Kelvin turned their minds to the problem and came up with resultsthat only deepened the uncertainty. Samuel Haughton, a respected geologist at Trinity Collegein Dublin, announced an estimated age for the Earth of 2,300 million years—way beyondanything anybody else was suggesting. When this was drawn to his attention, he recalculatedusing the same data and put the figure at 153 million years. John Joly, also of Trinity, decidedto give Edmond Halley’s ocean salts idea a whirl, but his method was based on so manyfaulty assumptions that he was hopelessly adrift. He calculated that the Earth was 89 millionyears old—an age that fit neatly enough with Kelvin’s assumptions but unfortunately not withreality.
Such was the confusion that by the close of the nineteenth century, depending on whichtext you consulted, you could learn that the number of years that stood between us and thedawn of complex life in the Cambrian period was 3 million, 18 million, 600 million, 794million, or 2.4 billion—or some other number within that range. As late as 1910, one of themost respected estimates, by the American George Becker, put the Earth’s age at perhaps aslittle as 55 million years.
Just when matters seemed most intractably confused, along came another extraordinaryfigure with a novel approach. He was a bluff and brilliant New Zealand farm boy namedErnest Rutherford, and he produced pretty well irrefutable evidence that the Earth was at leastmany hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more.
Remarkably, his evidence was based on alchemy—natural, spontaneous, scientificallycredible, and wholly non-occult, but alchemy nonetheless. Newton, it turned out, had not beenso wrong after all. And exactly how that came to be is of course another story.
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