6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

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    IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey—exactly who now seems to be fotten—found anenormous thighboig 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 beloo 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 Ameri Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. Unfortunately,Wistar failed pletely the bone’s signifid merely made a few cautiousand uninspired remarks to the effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the ce,half a tury ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Ihe boed so little ihat it ut in a storeroom aually disappeared altogether.

    So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

    That the bone didn’t attract greater i 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, aanimals. The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great Frenaturalist thete 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, their stitutionsweakened by the “noxious vapors” that rose from its rotting ss and sunless forests. Insu enviro eveive Indians lacked virility. “They have no beard or bodyhair,” Buffon sagely fided, “and no ardor for the female.” Their reproductive ans were“small and feeble.”

    Buffon’s observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especiallythose whose clusions were not plicated by actual familiarity with the try. ADut named eille de Pauw announced in a popular work called RecherchesPhilosophiques sur les Améris that native Ameri males were not only reproductivelyunimposing, but “so lag in virility that they had milk in their breasts.” Such viewsenjoyed an improbable durability and could be foued or echoed in Europeas tillhe end of the eenth tury.

    Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jeffersonincorporated a furious (and, uhe text is uood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in hisNotes oate of Virginia , and induced his Neshire 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 Ameri 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  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 Ameri initum” but lateridentified, not quite correctly, as a mammoth. The first of these bones had been discovered ata place called Big Bone Li Kentucky, but soon others were turning up all over. America,it appeared, had once been the home of a truly substantial creature—ohat would surelydisprove Buffon’s foolish Gallitentions.

    In their keeo demonstrate the initum’s bulk and ferocity, the Ameriaturalists appear to have bee slightly carried away. They overestimated its size by afactor of six and gave it frightening claws, whi fact came from a Megalonyx, iantground sloth, found nearby. Rather remarkably, they persuaded themselves that the animalhad ehe agility and ferocity of the tiger,” and portrayed it in illustrations as poungwith feline grato prey from boulders. When tusks were discovered, they were forced intothe animal’s head in any number of iive ways. Oorer screwed the tusks in upsidedown, like the fangs of a saber-toothed cat, which gave it a satisfyingly aggressive aspect.

    Another arrahe tusks so that they curved backwards on the engaging theory that thecreature had been aquatid had used them to anchor itself to trees while dozing. The mostperti sideration about the initum, however, was that it appeared to be extinct—afact that Buffon cheerfully seized upon as proof of its intestably degee nature.

    Buffon died in 1788, but the troversy rolled on. In 1795 a sele of bones made theirway to Paris, where they were examined by the rising star of paleontology, the youthful andaristocratic Gees 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 siooth or scrap of jaw, and often he species and genus into the bargain. Realizing that no one in America had thought to writea formal description of the lumberi, Cuvier did so, and thus became its officialdiscoverer. He called it a mastodon (which means, a touexpectedly, “nipple-teeth”).

    Inspired by the troversy, 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 ofextins. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experienced global catastrophes inwhich groups of creatures were wiped out. Fious people, including Cuvier himself, theidea raised unfortable implications si suggested an unatable casualness o of Provideo what end would God create species only to wipe them out later? Thenotion was trary to the belief in the Great  of Being, which held that the world wascarefully ordered and that every living thing within it had a plad purpose, and always hadand always would. Jefferson for one couldn’t abide the thought that whole species would everbe permitted to vanish (or, e to that, to evolve). So when it ut to him that theremight be stifid 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 persoed to advise him on what to look out forwith regard to animals living and deceased was her than Caspar Wistar.

    In the same year—in fact, the same month—that the aristocratid celebrated Cuvier ropounding his extin theories in Paris, oher side of the English el 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 stru on the SomersetCoal al. On the evening of January 5, 1796, he was sitting in a coag inn in Somersetwheted dowion that would eventually make his reputation. To interpret rocks,there o be some means of correlation, a basis on which you  tell that thosecarboniferous rocks from Devon are youhan these Cambrian rocks from Wales. Smith’sinsight was to realize that the answer lay with fossils. At every ge in rock strata certainspecies of fossils disappeared while others carried on into subsequent levels. By noting whichspecies 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 oo make a map ofBritain’s rock strata, which would be published after many trials in 1815 and would bee aerstone of meology. (The story is prehensively covered in SimonWier’s popular book The Map That ged the World .)Unfortunately, having had his insight, Smith was curiously ued in uandingwhy rocks were laid down in the way they were. “I have left off puzzling about the in ofStrata and tent myself with knowing that it is so,” he recorded. “The whys and whereforesot e within the Province of a Mineral Surveyor.”

    Smith’s  revelatiarding  strata  heightehe moral awkwardness iins. To begin with, it firmed that God had wiped out creatures not occasionally butrepeatedly. This made Him seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile. It also made itinvely necessary to explain how some species were wiped out while others tinuedunimpeded into succeeding eons. Clearly there was more to extins than could beated for by a single Noa deluge, as the Biblical flood was known. Cuvie<dfn>99ｌｉb?</dfn>r resolvedthe matter to his own satisfa by suggesting that Genesis applied only to the most retinundation. God, it appeared, hadn’t wished to distract or alarm Moses with news of earlier,irrelevains.

    So by the early years of the eenth tury, fossils had taken on a certain inescapableimportance, which makes Wistar’s failure to see the significe of his dinosaur bone all themore unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up all over. Several otheropportunities arose for Ameris 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 ecticut River Valley of New Englandafter a farm boy named Plinus Moody spied aracks on a rock ledge at South Hadley,Massachusetts. Some of these at least survive—notably the bones of an Anchisaurus, whichare in the colle of the Peabody Museum at Yale. Found in 1818, they were the firstdinosaur boo be examined and saved, but unfortunately weren’t reized for what theywere until 1855. In that same year, 1818, Caspar Wistar died, but he did gain a certainued immortality when a botanist homas 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, araordinary child named Mary Anning—aged eleven,twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose at you read—found a strange fossilized seamonster, seventee long and now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded ieep anddangerous cliffs along the English el.

    It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the hirty-five yearsgathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is only held to be the source for thefamous towister “She sells seashells on the seashore.”) She would also find the firstplesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first a pterodactyls. Though hese was teically a dinosaur, that wasn’t terribly relevant at the time sinobody thenknew 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 delicad without damage. If youever have the ce to visit the hall of a mariiles at the Natural History Museumin London, I urge you to take it for there is no other way to appreciate the scale ay ofwhat this young woman achieved w virtually unaided with the most basic tools innearly impossible ditions. The plesiosaur aloook her ten years of patient excavation.

    Although untrained, Anning was also able to provide petent drawings and descriptions forscholars. But even with the advantage of her skills, signifit 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 try doctor in Sussex.

    Mantell was a lanky assemblage of shortings—he was vain, self-absorbed, priggish,ful 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 beeo fill potholes she found a curious object—a curved brown stone,about the size of a small walnut. Knowing her husband’s i in fossils, and thinking itmight be one, she took it to him. Mantell could see at o was a fossilized tooth, and aftera little study became certain that it was from an animal that was herbivorous, reptiliaremely large—tens of feet long—and from the Cretaceous period. He was right on allts, but these were bold clusions sihing like it had been seen before or evenimagined.

    Aware that his finding would entirely upend what was uood about the past, and urgedby his friend the Reverend William Bud—he of the gowns and experimental appetite—to proceed with caution, Mantell devoted three painstaking years to seeking evideosupport his clusions. He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the greatFren 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 versation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth lookedvery like those of animals he had been studying, South Ameri iguanas. A hastyparison firmed 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 Bud, the very man who had urged him not to work in haste.

    It was the Megalosaurus, and the name was actually suggested to Bud by his friend Dr.

    James Parkinson, the would-be radical and eponym for Parkinson’s disease. Bud, it maybe recalled, was foremost a geologist, and he showed it with his work on Megalosaurus. In hisreport, for the Transas of the Geological Society of London , he hat 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, Bud failed to realize what it meant:

    Megalosaurus was airely ype of creature. So although his report demonstrated littleacuity or insight, it was still the first published description of a dinosaur, and so to him ratherthan the far more deserving Mantell goes the credit for the discovery of this a line ofbeings.

    Unaware that disappoi was going to be a tinuiure of his life, Mantelltinued hunting for fossils—he found aniant, the Hylaeosaurus, in 1833—andpurchasing others from quarrymen and farmers until he had probably the largest fossilcolle in Britain. Mantell was an excellent doctor and equally gifted bone hunter, but hewas uo support both his talents. As his colleg mania grew, he ed his medicalpractice. Soon fossils filled nearly the whole of his house in Brighton and ed much ofhis ine. 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 ahim ￡300 out of pocket—an unfortably substantial sum for the times.

    In some desperation Mantell hit on the idea of turning his house into a museum andcharging admission, theedly realized that such a merary act would ruin his standingas a gentleman, not to mention as a stist, and so he allowed people to visit the house forfree. They came in their hundreds, week after week, disrupting both his practic<tt></tt>e and his homelife. Eventually he was forced to sell most of his colle 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 fotten sight: the world’s first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not manypeople travel there these days, but ohis was one of the most popular attras inLondon—in effect, as Richard Fortey has he 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 rown dog. (In life, the iguanodon did not crou all fours, but edal.) Looking at them now you would scarcely guess that these odd and lumberiscould cause great rancor and bitterness, but they did. Perhaps nothing in natural history hasbeen at the ter of fiercer and more enduring hatreds than the line of a beasts knownas dinosaurs.

    At the time of the dinosaurs’ stru, Sydenham was on the edge of London and itsspacious park was sidered an ideal place to re-erect the famous Crystal Palace, the glassand cast-iron structure that had been the terpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and fromwhich the new park naturally took its he dinosaurs, built of crete, were a kind ofbonus attra. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one promistists was held ihe 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 sce 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, ans, and other parts from cadavers and took them home for leisurely disse.

    Once while carrying a sack taining the head of a black Afri sailor that he had justremoved, 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 octs had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to ahalt at their feet  only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terriblyadvanced clusions 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 aheir extensive, but disordered, colles ofmedical and anatomical spes. Most of these had beeo the institution by JohnHunter, a distinguished surgeon and tireless collector of medical curiosities, but had neverbeen catalogued anized, largely because the paperwork explaining the significe ofeach had gone missing soon after Hunter’s death.

    Owen swiftly distinguished himself with his powers anization aion. At thesame time he showed himself to be a peerless anatomist with instincts for restruost on a par with the great Cuvier in Paris. He bee su 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 ainct—from platypuses,eas, 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 ed 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 ohing they most emphatically were not was lizards, which are actually ofa much older (by thirty million years) lineage. Oell 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 erriven the paucity of spes at the time)was that dinosaurs stitute not o two orders of reptiles: the bird-hipped ornithissand the lizard-hipped sauriss.

    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 thten 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 ess of heart.”

    His undoubted gifts as an anatomist allowed him to get away with the most barefaceddishoies. In 1857, the naturalist T. H. Huxley was leafing through a ion ofChurchill’s Medical Directory wheiced that Owen was listed as Professor ofparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Gover School of Mines, which rathersurprised Huxley as that was the position he held. Upon inquiring how Churchill’s had madesu elemental error, he was told that the information had been provided to them by Dr.

    Owen himself. A fellow naturalist named Hugh Faler, meanwhile, caught Owen taki for one of his discoveries. Others accused him of borrowing spes, then denyinghe had done so. Owen even fell into a bitter dispute with the Queen’s dentist over the creditfor a theory ing the physiology of teeth.

    He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used hisinflue the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Rrant whose onlycrime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. Grant was astoo discover thathe was suddenly denied access to the anatomical spes he o duct hisresearch. Uo pursue his work, he sank into an uandably 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 practid most of his fossil colleantell 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 act. While crossing Clapham on in a carriage,he somehow fell from his seat, grew entangled in the reins, and was dragged at a gallop h ground by the panicked horses. The act left him bent, crippled, and in i, with a spine damaged beyond repair.

    Capitalizing  on  Mantell’s  enfeebled  state, Owe about systematically expungingMantell’s tributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named yearsbefore and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell tio try to dinal research but Owen used his influe the Royal Society to ehat most of hispapers were rejected. In 1852, uo bear any more pain or perseaook hisown life. His deformed spine was removed ao the Royal College of Surgeonswhere—and now here’s an irony for you—it laced 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 ierary Gazette. In it Mantell was characterized as a medioatomist whose modest tributions to paleontology were limited by a “want of exaowledge.” The obituary even removed the discovery of the iguanodon from him aed it io Cuvier and Owen, among others. Though the piece carried no bylihestyle was Owen’s and no one in the world of the natural sces doubted the authorship.

    By this stage, however, Owen’s transgressions were beginning to catch up with him. Hisundoing began when a ittee of the Royal Society—a ittee of which he happeo be chairman—decided to award him its highest honor, the Royal Medal, for a paper he hadwritten on ainct mollusc called the belemnite. “However,” as Deborah Cadbury notes inher excellent history of the period, Terrible Lizard, “this piece of work was not quite asinal as it appeared.” The belem turned out, had been discovered four years earlierby an amateur naturalist named ing 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 whiot ially,he rechristehe creature Belemnites owenii in his own honor. Although Owen was allowedto keep the Royal Medal, the episode left a permaarnish on his reputation, even amonghis few remaining supporters.

    Eventually Huxley mao do to Owen what Owen had doo so many others: he hadhim voted off the cils 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 uionable pursuit for which we  all be grateful. In 1856 he became head ofthe natural history se 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, ahen 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 sed time to pick up a ticket—that isassuming they had passed the interview—and finally e back a third time to view themuseum’s treasures. Evehey were whisked through in groups and not allowed tolinger. Owen’s plan was to wele everyone, even to the point of encing wmento 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 uedly, he posed by T. H.

    Huxley, who believed that museums should be primarily researstitutes. 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 certaied,ient triumph. Today his statue ands a masterly view from the staircase of themain hall iural History Museum, while Darwin and T. H. Huxley are signedsomewhat obscurely to the museum coffee shop, where they stare gravely over peoplesnag on cups of tea and jam doughnuts.

    It would be reasoo suppose that Richard Owen’s petty rivalries marked the low pointof eenth-tury paleontology, but in fact worse was to e, this time from overseas. InAmeri the closing decades of the tury there arose a rivalry even more spectacularlyvenomous, if not quite as destructive. It was between twe and ruthless men, EdwardDrinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

    They had mu on. Both were spoiled, driven, self-tered, quarrelsome, jealous,mistrustful, and ever unhappy. Betweehey ged the world of paleontology.

    They began as mutual friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other,and spent a pleasaogether in 1868. However, something the wroweenthem—nobody is quite sure what—and by the followihey had developed aythat would grow into ing hatred over the hirty years. It is probably safe to saythat no two people iural sces 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 o Bluff,Wyoming, he failed to notice the bohat 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 unclewas the supremely rid extraordinarily indulgent financier Gee Peabody. When Marshshowed an i in natural history, Peabody had a museum built for him at Yale andprovided funds suffit 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 Gee Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little BigHorn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it ointed out to him that this robably 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 mao win them over by repeatedlytaking out and replag 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.

    Reizing the bones as ing 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. fused, Lakesnow asked Marsh to pass the bones on to Cope. Marsh did so, but it was an affront that hewould never fet.

    It also marked the start of a war betweewo that became increasingly bitter,underhand, and often ridiculous. They sometimes stooped to oeam’s diggers throwingrocks at the other team’s. Cope was caught at one point jimmying open crates that belooMarsh. They insulted each other in print and each poured s oher’s results.

    Seldom—perhaps never—has sce been driven forward more swiftly and successfully byanimosity. Over the  several years the two meween them increased the number ofknown dinosaur species in America from 9 to almost 150. Nearly every dinosaur that theaverage person ame—stegosaurus, brontosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops—was found byone or the other of them.

    1Unfortunately, they worked in such reckless haste that they oftenfailed to hat a new discovery was something already knowweeheymao “discover” a species calledUintatheres anceps no fewer thay-two times. Ittook years to sort out some of the classifiesses they made. Some are not sorted outyet.

    Of the two, Cope’s stific 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. ight have done even more, but unfortunately he went into a rather precipitatedest in his later years. Having ied a fortune in 1875, he ied unwisely in silverand lost everything. He ended up living in a single room in a Philadelphia b house,surrounded by books, papers, and bones. Marsh by trast finished his days in a splendidmansion in New Haven. Cope died in 1897, Marsh two years later.

    In his final years, Cope developed oher iing obsession. It became his earwish to be declared the type spe forHomo sapiens —that is, that his bones would be theofficial set for the human raormally, the type spe 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 sino first set of Homo sapiens bos, there was a vacy, 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 boo the Wistar Institute, a learned society inPhiladelphia endowed by the desdants 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 iype spefor one’s own race. So Cope’s petition and his bones were quietly shelved. There is still notype spe for modern humans.

    As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope orMarsh. Bud ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wre alunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crippling act.

    Mantell’s twisted spine remained on display at the Hunterian Museum for nearly a turybefore being mercifully obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz. What remained ofMantell’s colle 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 offiinister of Native Affairs. In 1865 he dohe primespes from his father’s colle, including the famous iguanodon tooth, to the ialMuseum (now the Museum of New Zealand) in Wellington, where they have remained eversihe iguanodon tooth that started it all—arguably the most important tooth iology—is no longer on display.

    Of course dinosaur hunting didn’t end with the deaths of the great eenth-tury fossilhunters. Io a surprisient 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  Quarry, only a few miles fromMarsh’s prime hunting ground at o Bluff, Wyoming. There, hundreds and hundreds offossil bones were to be fouhering out of the hills. They were so numerous, in fact, thatsomeone had built a  out of them—hehe name. In just the first two seasons, 100,000pounds of a 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 tweh tury, paleontologists had literally tons ofold boo 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 fortably support thenumbers of eons and ages and epochs that the past obviously tained. If Earth were reallyonly twenty million years old or so, as the great Lord Kelvin insisted, then whole orders ofa creatures must have e into being and go again practically in the samegeological instant. It just made no sense.

    Other stists besides Kelvin turheir minds to the problem and came up with resultsthat only deepehe uainty. Samuel Haughton, a respected geologist at Trinity Collegein Dublin, announced aimated 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 o salts idea a whirl, but his method was based on so manyfaulty assumptions that he was hopelessly adr<q>..</q>ift. He calculated that the Earth was 89 millionyears old—ahat fit ly enough with Kelvin’s assumptions but unfortunately not withreality.

    Such was the fusion that by the close of the eenth tury, depending on whichtext you sulted, you could learn that the number of years that stood between us and thedawn of plex 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 Ameri Ge<bdi>?</bdi>e Becker, put the Earth’s age at perhaps aslittle as 55 million years.

    Just when matters seemed most intractably fused, along came another extraordinaryfigure with a novel approach. He was a bluff and brilliant New Zealand farm boy namedEr Rutherford, and he produced pretty well irrefutable evidehat the Earth was at leastmany hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more.

    Remarkably, his evidence was based on alchemy—natural, spontaneous, stificallycredible, and wholly non-occult, but alchemy heless. on, it turned out, had not beens after all. Aly how that came to be is of course aory.

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