History time!: Not everybody can be Mary Anning
Okay, so you guys, you know how Mary Anning was awesome and Tatiana Proskouriakoff is better than you? Well, not everybody can be Mary Anning or Tatiana Proskouriakoff. And like, sometimes you try your hardest and things just get worse. And I want to say “That’s okay, hon, you did your best, and that’s what everybody’s going to remember,” but that’s a lie. Sometimes, what everybody remembers is the absolute motherfucking tear you went on and the basic running gun-battle you got into with another academic because Jesus Christ, you guys both maybe had a little too much riding on this. Sometimes the life-lesson is “Dreams are nice, but maybe take a breather and get some perspective on this?”.
Our two patron saints of this particular parable are Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.
Those of you who recognize these names are probably already going “Oh, shit, son” to yourselves. As you should be.
Anyway, Cope and Marsh were both paleontologists working in the same area of the world, on the same sort of things, at the same time, for different institutions. As you can probably guess from the previous text, they were not bros. They were, in fact, bitter rivals. And because the “same time” under discussion is the mid-to-late 1800s, and the “same area of the world” is the American West, the bitter rivalry involved some actual gang fights. Like, they never challenged each other to duels or anything, but their dudes shot at each other without much provocation. Because they pretty much hired Yosemite Sam and General Custer. And then they’d poach workers from each other’s digs and sabotage each other’s digs and you probably get the idea by now.
As you probably could figure out from the fact that they were academics rather than like warlords, they didn’t confine themselves to shooting at people. They also attempted, and largely succeeded in, destroying each other professionally, by being terrible at each other in both the popular press and professional journals. Internecine non-fiction writing, you guys. Totally a fucking thing.
So basically these two dudes spent the 1870s and 1880s in a huge paleo-beef with each other over sites and who discovered what first and who maybe swiped whose foreman and stole half of whose fossil just to fuck who over. Shit was so confused that Marsh’s dudes were known to accidentally mail shit collected for Marsh to Cope, presumably because “King Dick Paleontologist” was a title in some dispute, and therefore the post office was just using their best judgment there.
Because of the thing where whoever publishes a taxonomical description of a new species first gets to name it, the pair of them fucking flooded the market with hack-job descriptions of mangled specimens and half-jumbled bone-sets in order to get naming rights. In the process, they muddied the waters so badly that taxonomists were still going through records a hundred years later trying to undo everything they did. Like, it wasn’t all bad. The competition and the energy they poured into it resulted in sort of an archaeological Great Leap Forward, between what they found and the public interest they generated.
But.
I mean.
The biggest illustration of the huge “down side” to this came when Cope put together a really wacky elasmosaurus. I mean, like this thing had a stubby little neck and just the biggest fuck-off tail ever and Cope was like “Whaaaaaaaat?”. Which usually when a paleontologist is like “Whaaaaaaat?”, it’s like “Oh, shit, get this into print now.” Which he did! Taking careful time to note that, magically, in this one animal, the vertebrae were turned the wrong way around.
Only, uh, it turns out, maybe that was kind of an error.
Above: Elasmosaurus. Note which part of the animal is crazy-long and which part of the animal is comparatively, ridiculously stubby.
This wouldn’t have been such a big thing, but if you know what you’re doing and aren’t downing a fifth of Jack every day, necks and tails are kind of different, and vertebrae are directional, and maybe double-check where everything goes if you’re putting them in the wrong direction and know it. Whoops! But no big, right? Cope could just quietly retract his work and fix his mistakes and ha ha we all know where this is going.
Marsh is the one who discovered the error. And not like, “He read the bulletin and thought ‘This is funky.’ discovered the error.” He was there in person.
In a letter to the New York Herald, 1890:
The skeleton itself was arranged in the Museum of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, according to this restoration, and when Professor Cope showed it to me and explained its peculiarities I noticed that the articulations of the vertebrae were reversed and suggested to him gently that he had the whole thing wrong end foremost. His indignation was great, and he asserted in strong language that he had studied the animal for many months and ought at least to know one end from the other. It seems he did not, for Professor Leidy in his quiet way took the last vertebra from the end of the tail, as Cope had placed it, and found it to be the atlas and axis, with the occipital condyle of the skull in position.
Cope responded to this intergalactic burn by blaming Leidy, with whom he was kind of frenemies, and attempting to buy every last print copy of the publication where he initially described it. (See above photoset for proof of his failure to buy every last print copy of the publication where he initially described it.) You can actually go see this fucking thing, if you want. It’s of course put together right, but it’s still in the Inland Sea exhibit in Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences.
But before we get all
about this, I feel like I need to bring up a sore point of everybody’s childhoods.
You remember how you maybe found out that the brontosaurus wasn’t real?
If that’s something you’re just now learning because of this: sorry, bro. Brontosaurus ain’t a real thing. And not like “Pluto ain’t a planet.” That’s definitional bullshit. Pluto is a planet, and so are like another thirty things in the solar system, bring it, astronomy. We’re gonna be a federation.
Brontosaurus, on the other hand, is what happened when Marsh maybe got a little too yolo on the job. See, he found an apatosaurus skeleton that was in fantastic shape and really awesome and let’s do this, you guys, let’s fucking display this thing…as soon as we find the head.
And when he didn’t find the head, he just kind of…grabbed a camarasaurus head from a dig four fucking miles away, stuck it on the apatosaurus body, and called it a day. And also a brontosaurus. Because fuck other people having named it first, he’s also gonna name it.
Paleontologists realized he’d fucked up sometime around 1915, but they just didn’t bother fixing it (I guess that’s a thing you can do in paleontology, if you want?) until 1979, because dream-killers.
Above: Apatosaurus.
Above: The camarasaurus, unless I guess you’re really high and just want to pack this shit up and go home.
You can also still go see the thing Marsh initially called a brontosaurus. It’s still there, in the Great Hall of Yale’s Peabody Museum. Just like, with the real head this time.
[Marsh quoted in Richard Ellis’s Sea Dragons, which is worth a read-through if you’re interested in the paleological history of big fuck-off marine reptiles.]
Best line:
"Shit was so confused that Marsh’s dudes were known to accidentally mail shit collected for Marsh to Cope, presumably because “King Dick Paleontologist” was a title in some dispute, and therefore the post office was just using their best judgment there."
