Citation Needed - The Bone Wars

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush,[1] was a period of intense and ruthlessly competitive fossil hunting and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a h...eated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to outdo the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and the destruction of bones. Each scientist also sought to ruin his rival's reputation and cut off his funding, using attacks in scientific publications. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

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Starting point is 00:00:02 Guys guys wake up. Where are we? Oh my head again. Why are you doing sleepy heads? I gotta admit I thought you guys were never Going to wake up. Where where are my hands? What happened to our bodies? Okay, okay? Okay, Mr. Rushy Rush. I was gonna like slow build into it, but Okay, Mr. Rushy Rush, I, but where are we? Where are we? Now, okay, I'm gonna be honest, I do not know. But I know it's dinosaur times, so enjoy. Eat some leaves, get into the, I'm a carnivore, be it?
Starting point is 00:01:02 I think I have an idea when we are. You do? How? Well, I mean, look up and you see that big asteroid in the sky there? Oh yeah, yeah. It really did have everything, didn't we? Okay, don't. Let's do the last line from Don't Look Up. Such a good movie. Right? It is though. Jonah Hill come on Hello and welcome to Cytation Needed. The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.
Starting point is 00:02:02 I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be leading this archeological dig through history, but I'll need some fossils to dig up. First up, two men who remember when dinosaurs were neighborhood pests, snow and sea, so yeah, by the way, how the hell that's where you're gonna punch a time card back then they were gonna stone. That grown Bronto burger is just not gonna be the same.
Starting point is 00:02:22 I don't know. You guys are in. And also joining us tonight. two men who can't get a side of ribs big enough to tip over their car, no matter how nicely they ask, Keith and Tom. Okay, you've seen my car just lots of load bearing duct tape. It's quite a deal. Eli ribs are never a side. And also the trick is to get two orders, balance them out one on each side. There you go. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a second to thank our patrons.
Starting point is 00:02:51 Patrons, without your money, we couldn't dig through the shell of our minds to unearth these precious, precious goose that we put on display for you. Your names are written on that golden black thingy at the door of every museum. You know what I'm talking about, except the door is our hearts. If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that of the way, tell us,
Starting point is 00:03:17 Cecil, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event we'll be talking about today. The bone wars. And Noah, you wanted to talk about dinosaurs without an eruption since you were four years old. And now you're big enough that nobody gets to stop you. Are you ready to live out your childhood dreams? And I assume pajamas. Hey, look, I'm not the only grown adult with a fucking 14th favorite dinosaur Eli. That's normal. All right. So tell us what were the bone wars? Yeah, so I have to admit that they're probably not as cool as they sound. They have nothing to do with battles between skeleton armies or sword fights with erect penises. Incidentally, I couldn't use their other name,
Starting point is 00:03:56 the great dinosaur rush, but that doesn't really solve the isn't of schools that sounds problem. So I didn't. The bone wars were actually a two-decade long feud between America's most prominent paleontologists in which both men competed for Grand Rhydr and Grandrhyr finds will simultaneously doing everything in their power to sabotage the efforts of their rival. Uh, two well actually dude bros fighting. It does sound exactly like sword fighting with erect penis. Okay, actually, I met a podcast before I brought us together with the power of love you guys.
Starting point is 00:04:28 Now, quick word to the penance out there. The bone wars involve a lot of things, but they do not involve bones. Well, except in the sense that the people in the story had bones, I'm sorry, when you're specifically talking to the penance, you have to be exact and you say things. But we're talking about here are fossils,
Starting point is 00:04:45 which are not bones, and I know that. You super dupe don't need to send me an email or a tweet to tell me that. I'll intermittently be referring to them as dinosaur bones, the excavation sites as bone beds, and their conflicts as the bone wars, because that's what like all the sources call them, but not because I think that fossils are bones.
Starting point is 00:05:06 But, but the rest of us do think fossils are bones so you can still tweet it in no way. Anyway. I'm actually beginning to wonder if it's not Noah. Just sometimes tweeting at us from alternate accounts to that. I don't see why we would want to educate that right now. Tom, it's not important. Now, of course, humans have known about fossil since prehistory. There are numerous examples of paleolithic knives with fossilized starfish embedded in the handles. The Greek legend
Starting point is 00:05:35 of Gryffin's guarding great treasures probably comes from the abundance of fossilized proto-saritops skulls in the region that they associated with gold mines. Their legends of cyclopsis probably come from the fossilized skulls of a distant cousin of the elephant, which had like a huge trunk hole that looks like the space for a giant eye. And by the time Christianity took hold in Europe, fossilized shells on mountains were being used as evidence of Noah's flood. The point is that there's no moment in history where humans discovered fossils, just a point
Starting point is 00:06:01 where we finally figured out what the fuck they were. Bones, like he said earlier bones planted by the devil to drive us from Christ In fact, those are in fact dinosaurs that fought during the Civil War no, just said Part that matters to be the most there is the idea that tear that those were dinosaurs now I know to laugh at those silly ancient Greeks the most there is the idea that tear actos were dinosaurs. Now, as easy as it is, I'll wipe it out there. I know. To laugh at those silly ancient Greeks,
Starting point is 00:06:29 their silly beliefs about cyclops and griffins and shit, it's worth emphasizing that the correct answer to the fossil question actually is, they are the remains of great and terrible monsters that once roamed the earth in the ancient times. They're like, all they got wrong was the type of monster.
Starting point is 00:06:46 That's a metaphor for our times. Not intentionally, but yes. And let's be honest, much of the shit that they turned out to be was way the fuck crazier than huge one I'd do to or winged a lion. Right. Yeah, they were boneless winged lions. Yeah you. Yeah, they're also probably wrong about what they look like, because you know, they're the scientific field. They got bullied by an action movie from the 90s, but you know, remember, you can go with yourself. Well, let's be honest, action movies from the nice bully to all the scientific fields. They're just the one that got at the worst. Yeah. Yeah. So interestingly enough, by the way, one of the main figures that helped the
Starting point is 00:07:22 ancient world solve the fossil puzzle was when Leonardo da Vinci. He was fascinated by fossils, spent a fuck ton of time drawing and classifying them. Now, he rejected the biblical Deleuze hypothesis because it was stupid and he wasn't, right? He pointed out that when you find fossilized oyster shells, say, or whatever out of the mountain, you'd find them in big groups like you would find them when they're alive, not a huge jumble of random shit like you'd expect if they got churned up and tossed onto a mountain miles away by a huge flood. Right. He proved that they were organic, which believe it or not was in dispute, but he also presented a pretty accurate theory as to how they formed,
Starting point is 00:07:57 though he was at a loss to figure out how the hell they got on the mountain sides. Um, now I should point out here too, that the whole idea of extinction did not set well with the Christian world, you still doesn't. So Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers shied away from that concept altogether. It wasn't until the groundbreaking worker French naturalist George Cuvier in 1796 that the scientific community would start to come around to that idea at all. He used comparative anatomy to prove that mastodon and mammoth skulls could not be a variety of modern elephant. And he later showed that a fossil, mega-theorium skeleton from Paraguay was related to the
Starting point is 00:08:30 modern sloth. This combined with the emerging study of stratigraphy, which is the branch of geology that deals with rock layers, gave rise to the science of paleontology in the early 1800s. Okay, how the fuck do you not believe in extinction? Just like digging up a giant fucking T. Rex skull and you're like, oh, well, guess there's bound to be one of these around here somewhere. Yeah, no, I don't laser somewhere. She would. Shake it back a teenager. Now, once we had a dedicated science studying, like, just fossils, it didn't take long to discover dinosaurs.
Starting point is 00:09:11 They were huge. Their fossils were abundant compared to other fossils that is, and they were the coolest goddamn thing that the science would ever turn up. And for this, we have to think one Mary Anning, a British fossil collector that discovered among other things, the first Ictiosaurus skeleton that was at least recognized as such, and the first and second complete pleasiosaur skeletons. And as any proper dinosaur nerd will know, she made the first of these groundbreaking discoveries at the ripe old age of 11. Right. But like most dinosaur nerds, she grew out of it when she hit puberty.
Starting point is 00:09:42 So fun fact, the science people spent the next like 150 years in a furious blood feud about whether the pleasy of sore would swim with a paddling motion like a seat turtle or with a rowing motion like like rowing. That's so much arguing about that. That's important. Of course. Of course. Of course. Another fun fact that's the Loch Ness monster. Please you sore. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:10:05 Of course, then as now, the general public was fascinated by dinosaurs. It kind of hard to get the average person fired up about a bazillion year old stromatolite and people are surprisingly blase about elephant-sized ancient sloths. But you tell them that giant lizards with femurs the size of full grown people used to roam the earth and Generally speaking you have their fucking attention So this public interest thrusted paleontology to the forefront of the prestige sciences Which meant that if you were a 19th century naturalist with a huge ego You are very likely to be a paleontologist and that's my way of introducing the two men at the heart of the rivalry Edward drinker
Starting point is 00:10:44 Cope and Othneal Charles Marsh. Okay. Edward drinker, cop. That's a little on the gin blossom. Now I'll go ahead and tell you up front that this isn't really a good guy versus bad guy type story. Both of these guys are assholes as well. Learn. So a cop was born into a wealthy family of Philadelphia Quakers in 1840. Marsh was born in upstate New York in 1831. And while his parents weren't rich, his uncle was George fucking pee body, the miserly bastard known as the father of philanthropy. I know that sounds like a contradiction. It's not. He amassed a fortune of over $16 million in 1840s money. So
Starting point is 00:11:26 we're talking like half a billion in today's money. Yeah. If your uncle has half a billion dollars and your parents aren't rich, one of your parents is a shitty sibling. Yes. The mom in this case. So Margin coke first met in Berlin in 1864. And if you're wondering why these two fighting age Americans were touring Europe the year before the Civil War ended, I should remind you they were rich. Now at first they got along great. They spent a few days together bonding over their shared level fossil collecting. They they even named species after each other, but this honeymoon period would not last long. Hell as near as I can tell, nobody got along with these guys for long. Cop was notoriously argumentative and had a hair temper. Marsh was introverted, aloof, and condescending.
Starting point is 00:12:10 They also had Titanic egos and never shared credit with anyone at any point in either of their professional careers. You don't just get a podcast fuck. Right. That's four. Now, normally this story is told as two friends slowly turning against each other due to professional rivalry, but I think that people just really like that dynamic in stories that this is not a Charles Xavier and Magneto type of thing from pretty much the
Starting point is 00:12:34 minute these two guys met, they were sniping at each other. So the first time the two went fossil hunting together, they went to a place that copes family owned in New Jersey. And during the trip, Marsch bribed the pits operator to divert fossil fives to him instead of coped. Okay. Have we considered that this was a lovers quarrel, right? Because I can get us two seasons on showtime if we can. That's what I'm saying.
Starting point is 00:12:57 Oh, I know. I know. Broke back pre-cambrian explosion fossil strata. The name needs work. That's very, very, that's not awkward. All right. So mate, no mistake. By the end of this, both men are going to be at fault, but Marsh very clearly fired the
Starting point is 00:13:13 first shots in the bone wars. Say, nothing wrong with that. Just as long as you don't get selfish and lose interest when you're right. Exactly. Thank you. Tom. And so not only was he bribing copes people from damn near the very day that they met, but he also went after copes professional reputation in a public forum.
Starting point is 00:13:30 So coped published a paper in a prestigious journal where he recreated the skeleton of a prehistoric marine animal called an alasmasaurus. And in the drawing, he placed the head at the end of the tail instead of the end of the neck. Now in copubs defense, this is an ake theasora. They have the ridiculously long necks and ridiculously short tails in comparison. Like he said, basically the log nest monster. So it's an easy mistake to make, I guess, but still he pretty much literally had the things head up its own ass. So that's a tough one to live down when you're supposed to be an expert. It's an or a Borisaurus.
Starting point is 00:14:10 Stop eating yourself. Stop eating yourself. Stop eating yourself. Modern example of an expert with their head up their own ass would be Dr. Oz. Yes. Dr. Oz, the doctor Oz of his day. So this is the state of affairs around 1870. The groundwork for their legendary feud is set. And about that same time is becoming super clear that the truly great
Starting point is 00:14:31 paleontological discoveries that America had to offer were out west. Now a lot of the gunslinger outlaw reputation of the American west of this point is a product of mythology, but we're still talking about the wild west here at the very height of its wildness, and ultimately, both men would use the region's lawlessness to their advantage in the wars to come. All right, well, looks like there's going to be slippy slaps and hair pulling in high news. Well, I prepare myself for someone's glasses to get broken, we'll take a little break for a purple of nothing. Someone's glasses to get broken will take a little break for Apple, not a thing.
Starting point is 00:15:07 Well, if it isn't my good friend Edward Cope. Oh, Fanny or Charles Mosh. I'll say I didn't expect to see you at this dig site. Yes, well, my man Ali here has quite the eye for fossils. Mmm it's death my man Quatheme. Well, oh reason we can't share the dig site made the best man win. Indeed I will. Hey Ali, how's it going?
Starting point is 00:15:42 You know the usual. Do I find anything this week? I don't know, man. He's an asshole when he finds stuff. He's an asshole when he doesn't find stuff who can tell. Totally, totally. Nuh-huh! Damn it, what did you find?
Starting point is 00:15:58 Nothing. It's just a shiny rock. Ha! Did I tell you what happened last week? No, not what happened. Your guy comes over to me during my lunch break, you know, and he says, Hey, if you find any fossils, give him the me and study your boss, okay? He gave me 50 bucks.
Starting point is 00:16:18 You're shitting. I swear to God, your guy did the exact same thing to me. Ha! Too funny. Too funny, right? So what do you say we give him another 20 minutes? We can bring him that piece of cow bone we planted last week. What do you think? I could we make it 30 might my wife sisters in town
Starting point is 00:16:39 Say no more say no more man. I'm doing science. No, I'm doing science. in what? Oh, it's, it's a board game that know and heath play that may end our company. You'll see in July when you come from matrion. I didn't, I didn't say yes yet. Yeah. Well, I scripted me inviting you into the show. So now it'll be weird if you don't know. No, no. No, no, no. You underestimate sea salt. All right. So thank you for that introduction back into my story. Eli, that was nice of you. So by 1872, both men realized they needed to go west where all the good fossils were.
Starting point is 00:17:39 Now, they both had plenty of family money, but Mars could afford to spend more lavishly on his expeditions. His gazillionaire uncle died in 1869, left them a substantial inheritance, but Cope had the better family connections, and he used them to secure a spot on the US Geological Survey. And while that position didn't include a salary, it did put Cope in about the best position possible to get first crack at new fossils. In archaeology, they call that hip toe nepotism. What? Why do they call it that?
Starting point is 00:18:08 Hahaha. Hahaha. Is it a Pharaoh? Hip no tap. What? Okay, hip toe right now. The Pharaoh? Imhotep?
Starting point is 00:18:19 Yeah. Got it. He eats joke. Hahaha. For our comedy body. Yeah, nothing. Okay, I get it. No, they joke. So it didn't take long for Copp to piss off pretty much everybody he worked with at first his boss for Dan Hayden actually really liked him because he tended to be overly dramatic in his writings, which made
Starting point is 00:18:38 it way easier to justify the service expenses, but Copp's proclivity for wandering off for weeks at a time to do whatever the fuck he felt like what a tried the patience of any boss. You know, so ruffled the feathers of pretty much every other paleontologist in the area, um, essentially like setting up dig sites right next to the errors and scooping them on all the best fossils. I drink your I drink it up. Exactly. He was also known for quick excavations, which is exactly the opposite of the way you're supposed to do fucking paleontology, right? It's kind of supposed to be this slow, methodical,
Starting point is 00:19:19 you know, move a layer of dirt off with a little toothbrush kind of process, you know, filled with excessive documentation. But cop process, you know, filled with excessive documentation, but cop was practicing speed paleontology with the singular goal of describing more new species than anybody else. Speed paleontology is when a giant meteor goes slower than 50 miles an hour and ends all dinosaur life on earth. That's a speed paleontology is awkwardly sitting across from a fossil at a bar. So, so do you come from a big family? That's genius species. So eventually Hayden got so sick of copes shit that he started
Starting point is 00:19:58 pretty much ignoring him. At one point, copes shows up in Buckeye, Wyoming, expecting men, wagons and supplies for an expedition that he's going to do. And there's just nothing there at all. Dan Davies is going to let that stop him. Cope then puts together his own last minute team by hiring away a couple of guys that were in the area collecting fossils for Marsh. This was remarkably easy to do. By the way, as Marsh was in the bad habit of forgetting to pay people for a really long time. So the two men would later tell March that they actually led Copa away from all the best fossils.
Starting point is 00:20:29 And that might have been true, but March wasn't buying it and he was furious. Now, up to this point, they'd been rivals, but after 1872, any pretense of professional courtesy was gone. And the two men were what the wiki described as in open hostilities. And yes, that would eventually include rival fossil hunting teams, hurling rocks at one another to secure a particularly rich five. You ever see two curling teams get into a brawl during a point? It's a lot of that. Giant monolith appears they all start worshipping it and screaming. Oh, okay. So now the rivalry between the two men had already led to a shoddy, rushed science kind
Starting point is 00:21:10 of an environment, but at this point, it got ridiculous. Okay, it got to where they would like fill back in their dig sites when they were done. So the other guy wouldn't have a head start if they showed up to the same place. And at least one instance, in fact, Marsh had his assistant dynamite a dig site and blow up all the fossils. They didn't have time to crate up. And at the end, are you licking all the fossils? What the dead fish is?
Starting point is 00:21:37 At the same time that this fight is playing out in the bone beds, it's also playing out in academic journals. The two are constantly sniping at each other, highlighting one another's mistakes and fighting over the proper classification of new species. It was only able to sequence half a genome before I got on my flight. So I beat my computer death with a hammer. What? That's what you do.
Starting point is 00:21:56 That's how you do science. So I should point out here that Merch apparently sucked at the actual expedition part of this. He's been extravagantly. He didn't like roughing it at all, he preferred the part where he got to examine the fines to the part where he actually made the fines, but he still wanted credit for both. When he realized that he could get that just by controlling the purse strings of the actual expeditions, he opted for that and after 1873, he never made an actual excursion himself again.
Starting point is 00:22:23 Of course, since he kept forgetting to pay the people who were doing that work for him, a lot of the time he just ended up training the folks that would eventually go to work for Coke. Okay, but I'm trying to figure out how we sucked at expeditions because it sounds like you got everyone to do the work took all the credit and he didn't have to go camping. Yeah, I guess for some people that's living the dream. That's it. That's management. No, of course, by the mid 1870s, pretty much everybody out west with even a passing interest in fossil hunting and herd of one or both of these guys, and they knew that
Starting point is 00:22:54 they would pay handsomely for tips on a new find. There were multiple instances where amateur paleontologists would, like, send both of them letters with samples of the new shit they found. And then like the race was on to see who could get that person enough money to shut the other guy out fast enough. Of course, there's nobody actually owned most of the land out there, even when one of them secured a dig site for himself, all it took was a tiny bit of espionage to figure out where they were and then set up camp in their shadow, which happened a lot. A boss step push has been following us for like 45 minutes.
Starting point is 00:23:26 You sure? The dinosaur guy is around. Yeah. Also, these are clearly baby back ribs. You glued together and threw in the fucking ditch. Oh, we had decoy team. So one of the biggest clashes between the two men came over the Como bluff spined. This was a huge and incredibly
Starting point is 00:23:45 prolific fossil bed in Wyoming discovered by two workers for the Union Pacific road. Now they essentially, they know that marsh is the better finance to the two, so they send to him a letter identifying themselves only as Harlow and Edwards. Their real names were William Harlow Reed and William Edwards, Carlin. And I guess they needed at least partial pseudonyms in case marsh decided to reverse engineer where their jobs had taken them and find out where the bone bed was that way. Their letter also mentioned that they were quote, other interested parties scouting in the area end quote. So Marsh immediately says one of his guys to take a look at defined. And the second is assistant confirms that it's real. Marsh sends out a healthy check to
Starting point is 00:24:22 secure exclusivity. Of course, he makes it out to their pseudonym, so they can't cash the damn thing, but it did tell them that Marsh was serious, so they agreed to shut cop out. They're going to the gas station. Is there any way I can exchange this check that isn't in my name for camel cash? Can you do that?
Starting point is 00:24:36 That's the... See, this story is why adults need to keep taking dibs seriously. We could have solved so many of the world's problems with a well respected dibs. Yeah. Right. The fucking Warren Ukraine, for example. Yeah. Now, of course, eventually cope found out about this huge fine. And he said his people right into the heart of it. And that's where the conflict really earns its reputation for the next 15 years. These two guys will be financing digs pretty much nonstop
Starting point is 00:25:05 and pretty much the same as place. Their teams would dig through the spring and summer and then they would spend the fall in the winter, creating up everything that they'd gotten and sending at east. And in the meantime, they'd hire other guys to go out and just break all the equipment the rival team was using. At one point, Copes guys even managed to lock a marshes team out of the train station in the middle of winter, forcing to load literally tons of fossils outdoors in a Wyoming blizzard. I feel like they were like, Hey, guys, this, this dinosaur feud, it's getting murdery. I'm not saying we're there, but we're like close to murdery. We all feel that it's close
Starting point is 00:25:42 to murdery right now. I like it got murder. Yeah. Time, bounty. Now, a lot of people try to put a cherry on this story by pointing out all the great discoveries that were made because of this rivalry, but that betrays a misunderstanding of like how science works. Honestly, these fossils were there for anybody to find. Somebody was going to find them regardless. The insane rush to catalog the most possible species doubtless destroyed potential discoveries, even before they started fucking dynamite and used quarries for fear that the other guy would find an awesome tooth in it if they didn't. That being said, they did discover a fuck ton of new species, including strong
Starting point is 00:26:17 contenders for best overall dinosaur like stegosaurus, triceratops, a pathosaurus, deplodicus, and alosaurus. Teradass. There's like a few years after blowing up all the good dig sites, each of them is just trying to wire up alligator heads onto increasingly improbable bodies. What do we have left? Pigeons? That's all.
Starting point is 00:26:40 Yeah, fuck it. Bring him here. Bring some more wire. I don't know what's going to believe this. Shit, pigeons. Kurt Cameron will get this crocodile duck after all. Yeah, fuck it. Bring him here. Bring some more wire. I don't know. It's going to believe this shit. Pigeons. Kurt Cameron will give this crack a duck after ultimately Marsh would win the Bone Wars discovering
Starting point is 00:26:53 80 new dinosaurs species to cobes 56. Both men though would be bankrupted by their obsession and they would never reconcile in the slightest. In fact, when Coke found out he was dying, and this is my favorite fact to come out of researching this, one of his last acts was to issue a challenge to Marsh that both would agree to have their brains measured after they die to see who was bigger. Like at the time, they believed that brain size wasn't like an accurate measure of intelligence. Now, Marsh, where do you measure from the base? You're
Starting point is 00:27:25 going to go from the base to the base time that comes down. You're allowed to push it down. Yeah. That got you stretch it out. Yeah. You can stretch it as much as it'll stretch. No, that's 10 minutes before the measuring. No, to be clear though, Mars did not take him up on this challenge, but Cope's brain was preserved by the University of Pennsylvania, Justin Case and is still there. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? The Wild West was so much more than the movies give it credit for it. All right.
Starting point is 00:27:58 And are you ready for the quiz? I've been ready for this quiz for 65 million years. All right. Noah, which is the following is my top choice to do the hip hop soundtrack for the movie about Martian Coke. Hey, Snoop Dig. Dog. B, T Rex in effect.
Starting point is 00:28:20 C, bone thugs in disharmony. Okay, we also deep fossil thugs in disharmony. There it is, it's day, thing. That was correct. No, we heard a lot today about bad behavior around dinosaurs. We should focus on polite dinosaurs. What species is the most formal A, the pleasius sore, B, the swankly o'saurus. His honorable lordship, Laduckus or D. Sutan Tyranosaurus. Sutan time. That's pretty good. But I believe that the correct answer is be the swankyless or swankless ors correct you are correct All right. No, what is the best dinosaur? That's the angular source. That's easy. All right
Starting point is 00:29:15 fast answer Do you even have a separate bus? This is a little bit ambiguous. That's the coolest one I thought it was probably what you were asking. Like what dinosaur would win like a dinosaur tournament UFC? Like UFC style. Oh, there's probably be one of the Titanisaurus, right? One of the gigantic ones that would just be able to step on everybody else. Right? Maybe like the legend and battlebots.
Starting point is 00:29:37 Oh, it's there. Was there a place where she dinosaur edged with a giant hammer that goes back? Yeah. It's just a dinosaur rotating in very, very high speed. That's a story. Vigilosaurus. All right, Noah, which movie is strangely not about this story? A, the bone collector.
Starting point is 00:30:03 B, because they aren't bones. C, Tweeted Noah, they aren't bones. The correct answer is D, none of the above, dammit. C, Tweeted Noah. No, that's actually win this one. That's right. Noah got to talk about dinosaurs for 33 minutes. It was D wins.
Starting point is 00:30:22 Damn right, he does. And I would like a Cecil XSA next week. Man, 10th day. All right, well for Noah, Tom, Cecil, and Heath, I'm Eli Bosnick, thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, Cecil will be an expert on something else. But right now on that, you can help us from going extinct
Starting point is 00:30:41 by listening to Tom and Cecil over on Cognitive Distance or he's knowing myself on the skating atheist, God awful movies to Skeptocrat or D&D minus. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes connected to the Sun's social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com. [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪
Starting point is 00:31:13 [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INT Think of the shit you took this afternoon. Nice.
Starting point is 00:31:26 Science. I'm doing science. Nailed it. If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us know what person, but no, wait, wait. And with that person and with that out of the way, tell us heath, what person plays thing, concept, phenomenon or event we'll be talking about today. He says the bone wars My supposed to do a heath impression now. No, okay, so here's the thing. I we shouldn't do the game He's on air. I've written in heath every time I'm in the host the last four times and he changes it to Noah
Starting point is 00:32:02 No, I change it to the person who's doing the essay because it makes more sense to me. So that's how I like to do it. I, that's how you like Eli to do it. That's how I like to. It's a consent issue. Okay. I could consent. He doesn't consent to being on this show. It seems like he does. And with that of the way, tell us, Cecil, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today? Fantastic. I love Cecil so much.
Starting point is 00:32:37 And we're so bad out of the way. Cecil, look into my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Starting point is 00:32:50 I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Starting point is 00:32:58 I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love it. I'll do a career this time. I'll do a career. This is so I have been wondering why it was for years. It's my heart for real.
Starting point is 00:33:09 Here we go, for real. You don't even have to give me the line. You don't have to give me the line. I already have it. I already had it. You already did a great job. You did a great job. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:33:18 You know about the beat that's coming, right? I'm not going to do it. I was thinking about it, but I'm not going to do it. It's funny here if you do it. The bone. If he was going to do that, The bone was gonna make you say it. The bone was gonna make you say it. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:33:28 I think we should do it at the same time, see? We're gonna do the same time. We should do the same time. All right, wait. The bone was. The bone was. The bone was. God, what a mess to edit.
Starting point is 00:33:42 That is so nice. That's cool. It's not gonna stay. God, what a mess to edit. That is so cool. That's cool. It's not going to stay. Or, hey, why don't you see us all hanging out in July together in New Jersey? See?
Starting point is 00:33:54 I call back to it. Now it's really hard to edit out. No, it's not. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five star review. a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation bot or leave us a five star review.

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