Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 455 - The Bone Wars

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, is what a period of intense fossil hunting in the late 19th century came to be called, thanks primarily to the intense and bitter rivalry between two of America's most prominent early paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. These two men, who started out as friends, would end up destroying each other's and their own lives in their intense quest to become America's most heralded fossil hunter. Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch.

Do you love witnessing a good feud? Yeah, me too. It's amazing how some people will allow a slight, real or perceived, to turn into a rivalry that will just completely consume them. How they can become so singularly focused on wanting to show someone else up or bring someone else down or both. And how in the process they will needlessly inflict a preposterous amount of damage on themselves. The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, was a period of intensely competitive

fossil hunting in the late 19th century that led to the downfall of the era's two best fossil hunters. The Bone Wars were ignited by the rivalry between noted U.S. paleontologists 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 man would resort to bribery, theft, and even the destruction of priceless fossils in order to ruin the other man's reputation and cut off his funding. The pair went out of their way to accuse the other of wrongdoing and they attempted to destroy each other's reputations

amongst the scientific community through a battle of the press. There were times when their feud threatened to completely destroy their careers and financing their ventures did bring them both to financial ruin. How did Marsh and Cope go from being friends, naming species after one another, to mortal enemies determined to ruin the other's life at almost any cost. This week we will discuss the history of paleontology and dinosaur research, how the rivalry between Cope and Marsh came to be, and the events of the Bone Wars on this scientific, dinosaur-centric More centric, historical edition of Time Suck. Well happy Monday and welcome or welcome back to the Cult of the Curious. I'm Dan Cummins, the Suckmaster, guy who loves to say

LA LUS DE L'ONDOOOOOO! Amateur historian, professional smartass, and you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, hail Lucifina, praise be to good Voivode Jangles, and glory be to Triple M. One special announcement and then we are off into Bone Land. This month we will be donating to the very worthy cause of the Hamilton County Youth Center. It's run and operated as a 501c3 under the direction of one of our very own, a time sucker named Paul Johnson. And Paul said in the following email that really touched our hearts. Master sucker, I'm a little behind but I just finished your suck on Mr. Rogers. I unfortunately was not able to listen to Mr. Rogers growing up

because my parents believed that he was a communist. I was raised in a very fire and brimstone southern Baptist church household. We were not allowed to watch any Disney movies, standard television programming, or Sesame Street to name a few. My parents believed that by watching those things we would turn out to be gay. Obviously all of that is complete and utter nonsense, although my sister did turn out to be gay so maybe they were on to something. Your Mr. Rogers suck hit me very hard in the allergy department. Growing up we moved every six to eight months, we went from church to church, and every church had the same theme. Nice enough to you while you were in the building and all, but telling you to go fuck yourself the second you got outside.

I vividly recall being in third grade, listening to the pastor preach about the fires of hell and homosexuals, democrats, catholics, mormons, and other various sinners who were going to burn forever and looking around at everyone thinking, they believe this shit? There was very little talk of doing good in the world, only eternal damnation for anyone who had different beliefs. Then we moved to Aurora, Nebraska when I was 16. Aurora is a small town of about 4,000 people where I encountered more of the same thing until I met a man named Merwin Davidson.

Merwin ran a non-profit youth center where everything was free. My family was incredibly poor and I wasn't able to participate in most things either due to financial restraints or the constant moving. It was difficult to the youths, it was different, excuse me, at the youth center. Both the free activities and the man running everything. Merwin was a modern day superhero. He took a small group of us everywhere with him, visiting skate parks all over Nebraska, shopping trips for supplies, paintballing in the woods, disc golf in the parks. Merwin was in his mid to late 70s and he did it all with us.

He was out there getting destroyed in paintball, rolling around on a skateboard. I eventually learned that Merlin was a missionary and a pastor in his younger years. But he never really mentioned it unless somebody asked. He spoke through his actions and not his words. I wish I was kidding, but he was the first person in this world who treated me as if I mattered. Of course, I didn't realize this as an incredibly angry and resentful teenager. It wasn't until years later when I was finally processing my hectic and damaging childhood that I started to understand how much he meant to me and how much he helped me in a time when I desperately needed help.

He had no idea what my home life was like, didn't know the full scope of what constantly moving and having no friends did to me. He didn't care that I was very outspoken and hateful kid. He was kind, he was patient, he listened, and he helped where he could. Unfortunately, he passed away before I could tell him the effect he had on my life. I moved back to Aurora in 2018 and often drove past the old youth center, reminiscing about the time spent there. One day I drove by and the lights were off when they should have been on. I was deeply saddened when I

looked around and learned it had closed, realizing that my kids would not get to enjoy the same thing I did. So I did what anyone would do and I reopened it. I have been the director of the Center for three years now and it is booming. We have an average of 120 kids every weekend and offer a ton of free summer programs so every kid can participate regardless of their social income or any other status. I may not be the same kind of leader as Merwin was but I'm sure he'd be proud to see his legacy live on. Our theme is Be Excellent to Each Other which is painted as a giant mural on an interior wall. Every summer we have a new theme

past ones being do good recklessly, be more kind, and this summer's actions speak louder than words. Mervyn Davidson was my personal Mr. Rogers and I hope that one day some kid will say that about me. Thanks for all that you do. Hail Nimrod and praise be to good boy Bojangles, Paul Johnson." Well, Paul's email made both Lindsay and I's allergies act up and Lindsay was able to give him a call and tell him bad magic would be given the Hamilton County Youth Center $11,750 in addition to our scholarship

donation this month. And then Lindsay teared up again and so did Paul. So I just want to say thank you to everyone every one of our patrons who makes moments like this possible. Thanks for being excellent to each other, you space lizards. Hail Nimrod. And Lucifina thinks it would be sexy as fuck if any of you wanted to go to hcyouthcenter.com. H as in horse, C as in cock. Youthcenter.com.

And also donate or as in Hamilton County. And Paul, please use a bit of the donation to add a bio section to the website, hcucenter.com and share what your organization is all about and where you're located. Come on, dude, beef that shit up. Let the world know. And now, yeah, thank you again.

Are you ready to talk about not just what has been called the most intense scientific rivalry of all time, but also super cool dinosaurs. Fuck yeah bro. How are we not talking about dinosaurs here yet? Anyone else go through a phase as a kid where they were just absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs and just wouldn't shut up about them? I'm guessing I drove my parents and grandparents bonkers with all my dinosaur talk. But then I think like most of us, you know, I moved on didn't really think much about them anymore.

And why is that? Prior to this episode, honestly hadn't thought about dinosaurs much in years. Whenever a new Jurassic Park movie comes out, I'll be like, oh yeah dinosaurs cool. But other than that, they don't really cross my mind too often. Well, they should because they're fucking awesome. Back when I was in second third grade, I knew that. I loved to read little kid books with all kinds of cool illustrations about dinosaurs and various facts about them. I would doodle all kinds of dinosaur drawings. Made their teeth in spikes you know nice and huge and menacing. Memorized so much dinosaur trivia you know stuff like did you know that Tyrannosaurus Rex means means Tyrant Lizard King?

And that T-Rex teeth have been found that measure a full 12 inches long, the longest known teeth of any predator. Also guys, did you know that the first dinosaur ever named was Megalosaurus? Great Lizard! And it was named back in 1824. And did you know that Veliraptors aka quick thieves were probably some of the smartest dinosaurs because they had very large brains in proportion to the size of their bodies. I couldn't learn enough about dinosaurs. And I love to imagine them once roaming the earth. And of course I imagine that somewhere maybe on an island, you know, they were still roaming the earth and it would be so cool to find them.

At least if I didn't get eaten. You know, a lot of kids back when I was a kid, I think imagine stuff like that. I think it's probably what helped, uh, Jurassic park become such a popular movie that launched such a popular franchise. So let's talk dinosaurs now. And let's talk about the ultra intense rivalry that defined and then utterly ruined the lives of two of history's greatest dinosaur hunters, Hale Nimrod. Starting things off today with an overview of dinosaur discoveries and the history of the field of paleontology, followed by a timeline of the infamous bone wars. That's a dope name for

a rivalry. Bone Wars. Sounds intense and it was. But first the beginning of finding those sweet sweet dinosaur flintstone bones. Long before the field of paleontology had a formal name, humans had already discovered ancient fossils of giant monstrous creatures. They just didn't have any clue what they were looking at. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and more all interpreted fossils as the remains of mythological creatures. Some experts have proposed that certain mythological entities such as the Griffin of Central Asia were invented as

a direct result of attempts to interpret early fossil discoveries which makes sense to me. I mean right you find a bunch of big-ass bones a couple thousand years ago before anybody knew what fossilization was and how it worked. I could absolutely see someone like myself coming across like a pterodactyl or a pterodactyl skeleton thinking some version of, uh-oh, oh shit. I need to go warn the others. We have ourselves a dragon problem. Back in 1677 English naturalist Robert Plot published the first known illustration we have of a dinosaur bone. Year earlier, the lower end of a large femur had been found in tainting limestone formation

of the stone-filled limestone quarry of Oxfordshire. Plot didn't know what he was looking at and wondered if the femur was an elephant bone from the days of the Roman Empire. He examined a live elephant for comparison purposes and when it didn't match he now concluded the bone must have come from a human giant like those mentioned in the Bible. That's a fun thing to believe, right? That there were giant-ass humans, you know, roughly 30 fucking feet tall. At first imagine that like imagining that as a real giant. I thought about how you could just wreak havoc

Like if you're like a I don't know 20 30 foot tall giant back on some ancient battlefield. Oh, man kick some ass maybe Cuz then I started thinking about the complications of being a giant back then You can only wreak some havoc if you had really good armor You know, otherwise you're just a massive moving target for arrows and spears. And to get that good armor, I mean, I would imagine another giant would have had to have made it because it would be so hard for a human blacksmith

to customize super heavy, massive metal plates or chainmail. You know, they would need to cover, provide proper coverage for a big ass giant. So now you got these giant blacksmiths, you know, and then, you know, you got the giant warriors and you're gonna need a lot more giants because you're gonna have to like, you know, fuck other giants to make more giants. So you're gonna have to have this whole secondary fucking giant civilization attached to the normal-sized human civilization and they're gonna need giant homes to live in.

So if you have like a normal human people have to have like a giant village conveniently located next to them or they'd have to live by a big labyrinth of huge caves which seems like a big ask. And also you know were these giants you know worshiping God you know in medieval biblical times? I imagine they were. So they would need like a giant temple or a giant church with giant doors and giant pews and stuff and that gets complicated. Who's building all that? Well fucking giant carpenters and giant masons. I mean you're gonna need that. Yeah, an entire secondary society of giants. And if you had that, I would think

that once the giants were like, we can do everything for ourselves, why are they gonna keep fucking around with regular-sized people? I don't think they would. I think they would turn on us and they would smash us into oblivion. So at that point, you know, wouldn't all of us now today be the descendants of giants? You know, humans would have died out and we're just all, you know, huge giant people. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes to me that the human giants once roamed the earth. Especially because we haven't found any proof of these big-ass giants, right? There'd be more than bones. There'd be giant fucking weapons, giant tombs,

giant statues made by giants, you know, archaeological sites that would be easier to find because they're so much bigger. I don't know. Clearly I'm not sold now that I've really thought about ungiants ever existing. Now back in the 17th century, let's return there, where crazy ideas like that were a lot easier to entertain. Plot's work, Natural History of Oxfordshire, contained an illustration of the massive thigh bone which was later identified as part of the knee of a megalosaurus. I think I had an extra syllable earlier when I said megalosaurus, which is fun to say. I think it's megla. Mega? No, it is that.

Megalosaurus. These words are so long. It's a 10-ish foot tall, 20 to 30 feet long, carnivorous dinosaur that walked on two hind legs. The Megalosaurus lived during the mid-Jurassic period, the span from approximately 174 to 161 million years ago. And now let's talk about the field of paleontology, the branch of science concerned with fossil animals and plants that came about not long after Robert Plot found an ancient giant dude's knee.

One more giant thought though, if only those giant people were real, there was like a small group of them and we still have them around today, God the NBA would be just that much more interesting. Really changed the game. Paleontology. Paleontology is a science came about in the 1700s during the Age of Enlightenment. Scientists began to first describe and map rock formations and classify fossils in the ways we recognize today. Geologists also determined that rock layers were the results of centuries of sediment buildup rather than singular geological events.

In the early 19th century, English geologists William Smith and French zoologist Georges Collier, considered the fathers of paleontology, found that rock layers in different areas could be compared and matched based on what fossils were found within them. I nerded out over geology as a kid also. When I was like sixth, seventh, eighth grade, got real into rocks. Growing up in a steep, deep river canyon helped, right? You can easily see so many distinct and different layers of rock that the Salmon River has been slicing through as it's eroded this canyon over millions and millions of years.

And trapped in each layer of various minerals and fossils describing what types of plants and animals lived near the river at that time. Information from ancient natural events like raging forest fires or volcanic eruptions or glacial melts all Trapped and recorded within these layers. I went fossil hunting as a kid actually found some little fossils ancient tiny sea creatures from the Cambrian period Which you know when much of Idaho was underwater and the land was part of this broad oceanic shelf

Also found tons of arrowheads and tools of indigenous peoples from much much more recent times. So much evidence of how our world used to be, how it was formed, who you know, and what used to live on the earth at various times. Just sitting there in the soil. Frozen in place inside rock deposits for anyone who cares to look, dig, locate, discover, and study. How cool is that? Feels like geology, paleontology, they are so cool. Look at the entire planet, kind of like one big crime scene. Figuring out what lived and died before us, how things lived, how and why things died. Charles

Darwin's theory of evolution, first formally presented in 1858, would influence how scientists understood these fossils in the history of the earth. Early paleontologists studying living animals to comparing them to fossils from millions of years ago began to establish important evolutionary connections. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Backing up to 1818 that year Oxford professor William Buckland began to study fossils in detail. He came to believe that one fossil was a large lizard that walked on four legs, a fossil that came to be known as a guanadon. I fucking loved a guanadon when I was like first or second grade. I made a paper mache

guanadon, one of my first school project memories I have. I remember being so proud of it. I thought it looked so cool. I thought it looked so cool I didn't want to leave it displayed in the classroom because I was I was certain that somebody might ruin it. I needed to take it home put on a shelf ideally in the living room where it'd be safe. Everyone could admire it where my parents could you know present it show it off to their friends who would then say stuff like Danny made this? Oh my incredible! Oh the quality! This could easily be in a museum or an art gallery. Oh if I hadn't have known

better I would have thought that was a real live iguanodon. The first evidence of the iguanodon was a collection of teeth literally found on the side of the road by paleontologist Dr. Gideon Algernon Mantell and his wife Mary Ann Mantell, discovered in 1822. Dr. Mantell has been referred to by many as the first dinosaur hunter. His wife Marianne has been referred to as the first woman to get so fucking sick of her husband never shutting the fuck up about dinosaurs that she left him. By me. I referred to her as that. And the two really would get divorced actually. And Gideon really would point to his obsession with finding more dinosaur bones and her growing irritation with that obsession as the reason for their divorce. The Mantell's discovery got its name because its teeth looked like larger versions of modern

iguana teeth. But the Iguanodon is so much bigger than the modern iguana. Roughly 9 feet tall, 33 feet long, up to 11,000 pounds, big ol' lizard! This was the first ancient reptile officially discovered and named that was believed to have been an herbivore. Two years later, February 20th, 1824, that Oxford professor William Buckland formally introduced the megalosaurus. Discovered over a century earlier during a meeting of the Geological Society of London, Buckland identified megalosaurus based on a jawbone fossil found in the village of Stonesfield. The name comes from the Greek word for big lizard or great lizard as

I mentioned earlier. He believed Megalosaurus was a very large predator but didn't have enough of the creature's bones to know exactly how big it was. Megalosaurus is the first named dinosaur as I stated earlier although the term dinosaur did not exist yet. Paleontologists had only discovered scattered pieces of its skeleton including parts of the skull, pelvis, leg bones, and vertebrae. The exact size and other details of Megalosaurus remain somewhat uncertain due to the incomplete

fossil record. Backing up again to 1763, that year, English physician Richard Brooks, AKA Dick Brooks, AKA Cockstreams, but actually only Richard Brooks, reviewed Robert Plot's work in his compilation of books titled A New and Accurate System of Natural History. Volume 5 he named the sketch of Plot's fossil Scrotum humanum. Writing that stones have been found exactly representing the private parts of a man. So he clearly thought it was bullshit and he made a dick joke to make fun of it.

I like it. Brooks name, Scrotum humanum, followed the lineum classification system, aka linean taxonomy, introduced in 1735, still used today. Scientists classify species with binomial nomenclature or by their genus and species. Some examples of this are homeo sapiens, canis lupus, you know dogs, feles catus, cats. Because scrotum humanum follows the Linnean system and

megalosaurus does not, some have argued that scrotum humanum was actually the first species name ever applied to a dinosaur. And that is better trivia than what I listed out earlier. Scrotum humanum, the first dinosaur. However, in the 1990s, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature determined that Scrotum humanum did not constitute a valid scientific name since homeboy was simply making a cock-a-ball joke. Brooks description was thus disregarded and Megalosaurus kept its name, which is kind of a bummer. Returning to 1833 now, paleontologist Gideon Mantell, who originally discovered the Iguanodon teeth alongside his wife Marianne, who probably came to despise that dead beast,

used bone fragments to identify a new creature called Hylaeosaurus. And Hylaeosaurus was a badass looking dinosaur. 13 to 16 feet long, 5 feet tall to hip, way between 1 and 2 tons, it was built like a fucking tank, with a broad barrel shaped body, 4 short and sturdy limbs built for slow and powerful movement along with its muscular tail, a heavy covering of bony plates and large spikes along its back and flanks acting like armor. Reminds me of a way bigger, much more aggressive and formidable-looking armadillo.

After its discovery, there were now three ancient reptiles for scientists to compare to one another, renowned English paleontologist and anatomist Richard Owen, our second dick in this suck and we have just begun, said about doing so. Owen noted that Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus all shared certain features of the hip region that other reptiles did not have. All three were large and their bodies and limbs were specialized to carry massive weight. Though they were reptiles they also had features of pachydermal mammals which is a classification that is no longer used for tough skinned mammals like elephants

rhinos and hippos. This was the first time that all three ancient reptiles were recognized as being close relatives. According to the Smithsonian a confusing number of large ancient fossil reptiles were being documented by a scientist at this time and many were exciting, and without any obvious close relationship to modern turtles, snakes, lizards, or crocodilians. Owen gave a speech on his findings in July of 1841 and published them in 1842. It was called Report on British Fossil Reptiles. He was the first to use the term dinosauria in this report, combining the Greek words of dinos, fearfully great, and soros, lizard. Owen's belief that all dinosaurs were pachyderm-like would later be challenged by additional discoveries in Europe in the late

19th century as some new fossils showed a close link to present-day birds. Dinosaurs captured the public's attention around the world. First in Britain, where there were the first three dinosaurs named, you know, where they're all discovered and studied in the 19th century. One of the first major pop culture references to dinosaurs comes from Britain from the novel Bleak House written by Charles Dickens. Kind of our third dick, I think, in this tale. Published serially between 1852 and 1853.

Maybe fourth dick, actually. The first chapter opens with, it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, 40 feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holburn Hill. This fascination with dinosaurs soon spread to the United States, really took hold. Not long after it did,

the US would become the new epicenter of paleontology because of a great number of remarkable finds in Colorado, Montana, Utah, and other western states. This not precisely defined period of time will become known as the Golden Age of Discovery and it will peak during the Bone Wars. Some of the most well-known dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, oh fuck yeah bro, one of my favorite dinosaurs for sure, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, and Stegosaurus, another great one, were found during this time. Museums began featuring these big-ass dinosaur bones and reconstructions of what full dinosaur skeletons were thought to look like, starting with the display at the Academy of Natural

Sciences in Philadelphia in 1868, which allowed the public to see these ancient creatures up close. Right? How exciting when all of this was so brand new. Makes me want to go check out a dinosaur museum right now. Following the initial golden age of discovery, a new one would begin in 2014. There was a long so-called quiet phase of paleontology beginning in the early 20th century. Paleontologists in the U.S. and Europe continued discovering new species into the 1920s and then funding for excavations would be cut almost entirely due to the Great Depression and that funding freeze would continue into World War II. Some work did of course continue

but at a much smaller scale and dinosaurs were also being overshadowed by other animal research when research was being done. For decades in the mid-20th century. It was thought that dinosaurs were uninteresting when compared to understanding current life on Earth. Right? Fuck fossils! What the hell is going on in the Amazon rainforest right now?

What kind of creepy shit's living in the deepest depths of the ocean? Also, where the hell is Sasquatch hiding? We need to figure all this out before we get back to digging up those old skeleton bones. In the 1950s and 60s, dinosaurs were regarded as evolutionary failures that had been destined for extinction. A bunch of big losers. Clearly inferior to modern mammals. Scientists believe the only reason they were ever able to survive in the first place was because the Mesozoic Earth was such a

lush tropical swampland with so much to eat. It's pretty funny angle on dinosaurs. Right? Fuck those losers! If they were so cool, how come they're dead? No thank you! The quiet phase of paleontology, when most people had no respect for dinosaurs apparently, finally ended in the late 1960s when a group of paleontologists began to take a new look at dinosaurs. This period became known as the Dinosaur Renaissance, led by Yale researchers John Ostrom and Bob Bakker. So close to...

Uh, what's that guy? The host of The Price is Right? Bob? Oh my god, that just popped into my head. I've... Bob Baker? Fuck, well I can picture his name, his face. Oh god dang it. Anyway, doesn't matter. Dr. Bacher. He's still around today at 80 years young. Bob Barker? I think that's the Price of Rights guy's name. Anyway, fuck Bob Barker.

Talking about Dr. Bacher. He currently looks like a extra in an old western movie. Some ol' big-bearded prospector drinking at the bar when the gunslinger walks in, who quickly finishes his drink and nervously leaves after saying something like, What if that ain't Black Bot? Evenin' gentlemen, I ain't fittin' to get bit by that walkin' rattlesnake. Dr. John Ostrom, who died in 2005 at the age of 77, revived interest in paleontology by theorizing that today's birds are directly descended from dinosaurs. He was not the first to make this connection, not even close, but he just really kind of firmed it up.

And now birds are considered living dinosaurs. They have key skeletal features, behaviors that come from dinosaurs such as nesting and brooding. Birds are believed to have evolved from a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods. Theropods include the infamous Tyrannosaurus Rex. And birds and T-Rexes share a common smaller theropod ancestor. Pretty funny. Birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs like T-Rex. A little sparrow out in the yard more closely related to T-Rex than you. A little parakeet at the pet shop, has some ferocious T-Rex DNA deep down inside of his

little bird heart. The oldest bird fossils are over 150 million years old. They resemble small feathered dinosaurs with sharp teeth. Over time, birds lost their teeth, thank God, and evolved into having the beaks we know now. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to be sitting on a fucking park bench somewhere? Some pigeon lands beside you, and then you watch it just open up its beak and just flash you a sinister smile full of a bunch of fucking shark teeth? God, I would hate birds so much if they had big teeth. I'm not sure I would ever be able to take psychedelics again and venture

outside. It'd be way too scary knowing that a bird with a beak full of fangs could land near me at any moment. I bet a lot less people would think it was cool to to raise chickens if those little sons of bitches had fangs or even creepier if they had like human-like teeth. That's maybe that's worse. Imagine a chicken looking at you just flashing a big movie star smile full of pearly whites. Imagine a chicken looking at you, just flashing a big movie star smile, full of pearly whites. Oh no, thank you. Anyway, Ostrom was led into his work with dinosaurs by his interest in the work of George Gaylord Simpson, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. Ostrom pursued his Ph.D. at Columbia specifically to study with Simpson and then he joined the

faculty of Yale in 1961. Ostrom's early work concerned the teeth and jaws of hadrosaurs, aka duck-billed dinosaurs, excuse me, and some horned herbivore dinosaurs. He argued that hadrosaurs were not swamp dwellers as previously thought. They lived on land, ate from the trees, also found evidence indicating that non-bird dinosaurs were more social and complex than previously thought,

when he began to telepathically communicate with those dinosaurs and interview them in his dreams. No, he did stuff like study their skull size to determine overall brain size and he made educated guesses as to their behavior based on where he found their fossils, how they were arranged with the fossils of other extinct flora and fauna. Ostrom's most famous works were his 1969 studies of the bird-like Theropod Deinonychus discovered Montana in 1964 and the Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx. Oh Archaeopteryx, that's a fun one to flow off the tongue. Archaeopteryx which had first been found in Germany way back in 1861 and named by somebody who fucking didn't care how hard that word would be to say.

Scientists at the time believed they might have discovered the remains of the world's first bird. Scientists currently believe it may have been the first creature on earth to ever take flight on its own. This Archaeopteryx. Yeah, first creature on earth to take flight on its own as opposed to, you know, like a creature gliding down from a tree or something. These species, these two species share features which show a close evolutionary relationship. This Dynonychus and Archaeopteryx. Dynonychus dates to approximately 115 million years ago, while Archaeopteryx dates back 150 million years,

meaning Deinonychus is a surviving relic of an earlier phase of evolution. Fun trivia about Deinonychus, the velociraptors in the movie Jurassic Park are based on Deinonychus. Real velociraptors weren't much bigger than a wild turkey. They're still only about 18 inches tall at the hip Give me an aluminum bat room to swing it. I'll fuck up of Lossoraptor. You probably would too

That's you probably not They're very fast and they're full of sharp teeth and talons and they were scary It was a 19th century English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley who passed away in 1895 who was one of the first to point out the similarities between birds and these dinosaur fossils suggesting there was an evolutionary connection. Huxley described the anatomy of fossilized bird remains and remarked, if found in the fossil state I know not by what tests they could be distinguished from the bones of a dinosaurian. These words struck Ostrom in 1970 while visiting a museum in the Netherlands. He was looking at what was believed to be a pterodactyl and recognized that the specimen

was a feathered bird. He hypothesized that the specimen was not a pterodactyl, another one of my favorite dinosaurs when I was a kid, but instead was Archaeopteryx, a prehistoric bird. Before moving on, did you know that the wingspan of those flying reptile pterodactyls range from six and a half feet to 36 feet, which makes them the largest known flying animals ever? And I won't keep hitting that button, I promise. Ostrom's work received wide coverage in magazines and TV shows, as research did a lot to reignite the public interest in dinosaurs and help answer the question, where do birds come from?

According to paleontologist Daniel Brinkman, Ostrom's last grad student, quote, prior to Ostrom, dinosaurs were thought of as large, lumbering, cold-blooded and slow-witted evolutionary failures. David Skelly, professor and director of the Peabody Museum, told Yale News in 2024, The discovery of Deinonychus not only reshaped our understanding of dinosaurs, it recalibrated how we understand evolution. Darwin's notion of steady gradual change had led scientists to believe that dinosaurs must have been quite primitive in their behavior and cognitive ability.

Deinonychus called this presumption into serious question. Half a century later, the way we conceive of prehistoric life is completely transformed. Ostrom deduced that Deinonychus had an upright posture by analyzing the shape and function of its limbs. As he was studying Deinonychus, he found the work of J.E. Heath, who proposed that an upright posture benefits warm-blooded animals because it allows the muscles to retain and generate heat. Over the next decade, he would publish a series of papers investigating the possible relationship between Deinonychus and Archaeopteryx. He theorized that flight evolved through feathered dinosaurs more and more effectively flapping their arms while in pursuit of prey. Ostrom student Bob Bacher also promoted his work.

Bob Bacher is kind of a weird name. Anyway, Bacher argued that the microscopic, sounds like a chicken, like, Bok, bok, bok, bok, bok, bok, bok, Bacher. Bob Bacher argued that the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones revealed evidence for rapid growth similar to that of mammals and birds, and that dinosaur trackways provided evidence for rapid walking and running speeds like those seen in living mammals and birds.

Bokker also studied the pace of dinosaur evolution, anatomy, and the ratio of predators to herbivores. Again, this evidence provided support for the theory that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and their bodies worked more like birds and mammals than today's lizards and crocodilians. Bacher champion Ostrom's work on bird origins argued that the belief the dinosaurs were evolutionary failures was wrong and that they were superior in evolutionary terms to other animal groups. It should be noted that researchers in Poland, Russia, China, South Africa, Argentina, and other countries were also making significant discoveries at the time, but Ostrom had the most name recognition in the field. Ostrom and Bakker's work attracted more scientists to the field, which is awesome, and Ostrom's bird hypothesis is now one of the best supported hypotheses in the history of vertebrate evolution. So why did these amazing creatures, if they were so amazing,

why did they die? Why don't we still have them around today? Why do I have two pet doodles who truly struggled to kill flies in the house? Are they somehow superior to dinosaurs just because they're still alive and dinosaurs are not? Why does one of my doodles Penny Pooper pee on the floor every time she gets too excited? Why does the other one Ginger Belle run and hide in her bed and look like she is so scared she's going to have a psychotic break whenever anyone brings a balloon into the house. Why don't I have two ped velociraptors who, although just as small as my dogs,

would tear an intruder to shreds and feed themselves on small game it caught in the yard not fucking even mess around with flies. In 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winning physicist Luis Walter Alvarez and his geologist son Walter published a paper theorizing that a layer of iridium rich clay in the Earth's crust was caused by a large asteroid colliding with Earth over 65 million years ago. And the devastation at that crash site and secondary effects of the crash caused the sudden extinction of the dinosaur. Was not because they were dumb, wasn't because they were inferior, they

just got fucking wiped out by a meteorite. At first their hypothesis was controversial but it is now the most widely accepted theory for the mass extinction at the end of the Mesozoic era. Scientists have also found the asteroid crater called the Chicxulub crater on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the massive asteroids thought to have been over six miles in diameter and the velocity of the collision caused the creation of a crater roughly a hundred and twenty miles in diameter and over half a mile deep. It's the second largest known crater on earth after the Redifort crater which did not wipe out any advanced life forms

because none existed when that thing hit the Earth. That crater was formed by an asteroid that hit Earth a little over 2 billion years ago, long before most scientists agree the very first multicellular organisms evolved. The impact of the Chicxulub asteroid through debris into the air caused massive tidal waves on parts of the American continents. There is also geologic evidence of raging forest fires. Asteroid kicked up a massive cloud of soot that covered the entire earth to various degrees for up to 15 years. Didn't block out the Sun completely but came close.

Significantly reduced the amount of light to reach the surface especially for the first two years and that you know severely negatively impacted plant growth. This then seriously affected the food chain and caused the ecosystem to collapse. Most herbivores died out leading to the death of most carnivores now missing their primary food source. About 75% of Earth's animals died because of this including all dinosaurs except for birds. Interestingly some animals still alive today also live during the age of the dinosaurs like crocodiles, sharks, horseshoe crabs, some lizards and snakes, some turtles, bees, and lobsters. Also if you search for Chicxulub asteroid

on Google, a little asteroid will fall across your screen and then the the window will shake, which is pretty darn cute. Jumping ahead to recent years, dinosaur research is alive and well now. According to National Geographic, a new species is discovered approximately every two weeks. A lot of dinosaurs are being discovered in China right now. Some fossils are found during excavations while others are found hidden in museum storage. Creatures either never originally classified or misidentified as a different species originally. While we may never know exactly how many non-bird dinosaurs once lived on this planet, in 2006, paleontologist Steve Wang, close to another nickname, and Peter Dotson, also close to another nickname, Wang and Peter, estimated that around 1,844 dinosaurs

lived during the Mesozoic era. University of Oslo researchers Dr. Hengi Boingi and Professor Ufda, I mean Joostein Starholt and Li Xiong Liao, oh my gosh let me say that again, Li Xiong Liao created a model called TRIPS to estimate how many species existed during the Triassic occurring from 230 to 190 million years ago and characterized by the advent of dinosaurs and coniferous forests. Jurassic, occurring from 190 to 140 million years ago and characterized by an abundance of dinosaurs and the advent of birds and mammals.

And Cretaceous, occurring from 140 million to 65 million years ago, characterized by the greatest development and subsequent extinction of dinosaurs and advent of flowering plants and modern insects periods. All those periods, part of the Mesozoic era, occurring between 230 and 65 million years ago, and based on their estimations, there were about 1,936 different dinosaur species alive during that era. And we have currently found only about 700 of them. So what great beasts once roamed the earth that we have yet to discover? Some massive predator twice the size of a T-Rex? Some ancient flying dragon that would dwarf a pterodactyl? Okay, with all that laid out, let's now begin our timeline of the two influential rival paleontologists who impacted the original dinosaur golden age of discovery like none other right after we

take this week's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks if you don't hear these ads anymore if you want to help us with donations each month sign up to be a space alert on patreon and get the entire catalog ad for you more and now it is actually time for our timeline. Shrap on those boots soldier. We're marching down a time suck timeline. Oskneel Charles Marsh was born October 29th 1831 on a farm in Lockport, New York. He was named Othniel because his parents hated him. Hated him the moment they saw him. They

originally planned on giving him a good normal name. You know like Nathaniel or Henry or Thomas. Something conventional for the times. But then when they saw them or saw him they were like, ah this thing is our son? Ugh, how? Looks nothing like either one of us. He's ugly. He smells like rotten onions. Let's just call him Othniel. Hope he dies in his sleep. It's messed up. Uh, good thing that didn't happen.

Uh, Othniel is a very rarely used biblical name, actually. It's uh, Othniel was ancient Israel's first judge. Means God's line or strength of God. Never a real popular name, uh, I don't think. Our Othniel comes from a family of modest means. Apologies to all the Othniels. Listen. His parents were Caleb Marsh and Mary Gaines Peabody Marsh. Sadly, Othniel's mother died when he was just three years old. His father expected him to grow up, work the family farm as he had, but young Marsh had other plans.

From an early age, he showed an interest in science. And luckily for him his maternal uncle was George Peabody, a 19th century financier who was fucking loaded. A man considered the father of modern philanthropy. So while his parents were not rich his uncle was famously wealthy. George Peabody growing up poor built a fortune in banking never had any kids of his own to pass his fortune on to, so in his later years he gave most of his wealth away, and Othniel lucky to be one of his many beneficiaries. Othniel's uncle paid for his attendance at Phillips Academy, a private school in Andover, Massachusetts. Marsh studied there for five years, then spent his late 20s and early 30s at Yale, where his uncle continued to fund his education. After that, he studied abroad in Germany, still benefiting

from those Peabody bucks. Sounds fantastic. If I would have had an uncle that rich who supported me, I might not have ever gone into stand-up or podcasting. I might still be going to school right now. Just slowly working towards my like, I don't know, 20th bachelor's degree or something. Ah, good news, Uncle George, almost ready to join the workforce.

Ho ho, you're investing in me? About to pay off big time, brother. With my educational resume, I will soon be unstoppable. I just need to pair this art history major with my other majors in German, Japanese, ceramics, physical education, Spanish, 18th century Norwegian literature, 19th century Italian prose, anthropology, women's studies, bowling, 17th century African-American folklore, women's fashion marketing, Russian theater, information systems, puppet arts, accounting, knife fighting, and animal husbandry. Nine years younger than Marsh. Let's talk about Edward Drinker Cope now. He was born July 28th,

1840 at his family home in suburban Philadelphia and his middle name literally is drinker D-R-I-N-K-E-R It's gotta be a story there. Look look at little Eddie guzzles first beer down. Oh, just like his old man. Yep. He's a drinker His parents Alfred and Hannah were members of a well-off Quaker family. He had grown up in wealth and comfort. Cope's father hoped he would become a gentleman landowner. Which sounds like a great way to make money while not doing shit. But Cope was always on the path to becoming a scientist. By the age of six, Cope was able to read, write, express himself in complex terms.

He had excellent spelling. He was even helping to teach other children to read and write. Cope was fascinated by natural history of my young age. His father once took him to Peale's Museum in Philadelphia and Cope wrote to his grandmother shortly thereafter about the experience. He wrote, This is pretty adorable. I'm going to write thee a letter. I wrote one to Aunt Eleanor. I wrote to cousin Anna. I have been to the museum and I saw mammoth and Hydarchus. Does thee know what that is? It is a great skeleton of a serpent.

Aunt Susan brought me some pictures. One was a boa constrictor and one was a shark and I drew two sharks. We have school, grandmother, and I like it because I get to read and draw and write and say poetry and count up. Auntie Jane is our teacher. Father wants me to send his love to thee. I mean how is that not adorable? Grandma wouldn't want to get a letter from their grandson that includes the phrase, father wants me to send his love to thee.

Are you fucking kidding me? I said, are you fucking kidding me? Okay, Miles. All right. Not your style. Too syrup-y sweet. All right, I get it. Cope also showed artistic talent at a young age and was encouraged by his father who also taught him map making. Cope published his first scholarly article at the age of only 18, working as a researcher

for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the oldest natural science research institution and museum in the Americas. According to PBS in 1863, Cope's father sent him to Germany as a young man, possibly to avoid a draft for the Civil War. The BBC, however, reports that Cope was sent to Britain because his parents wanted him to get away from a young woman

they deemed unsuitable for him. Maybe both. Get away from the war, get away from that lady. Be gone, Lusifena! Either way, we know that Cope studied natural history in Germany, and there he would meet his future arch-nemesis, Oskniel Marsh, the man who would ruin his fucking life. And the man whose life he would also ruin. The two men became fast friends, bonding over their shared interest in paleontology, which as we know is a young field of the time. The two men became fast friends, bonding over their shared interest in paleontology, which

as we know was a young field at the time. In 1864, Cope, now back in the U.S., became a professor of zoology at Haverford College in Pennsylvania at the age of only 24. Within five years by 1869, though, he would leave his teaching position to devote himself fully to fossil hunting, which had become his obsession. In the early 1860s, Cope and Marsh still maintained their friendship but cracks in it were beginning to show. According to David Raines Wallace, author of The Bone

Hunter's Revenge, one of our main sources for this timeline, their early relationship was pretty one-sided. Cope, sweet sweet Eddie, wrote lengthy letters declaring his friendship for Marsh. Well, Marsh didn't really reciprocate. It's a little colder. They had temperaments that were bound to clash. Excuse me, Cope was known for his quick temper, while Marsh was much more introverted. Marsh could also be a bit paranoid. He often did not share anything with his acquaintances before he published them in a journal, because he feared they would steal his ideas. One observer said about Edward Cope, the patrician Edward may have considered Marsh not quite a gentleman. The academic Othneil probably regarded Cope as not quite a professional. Donald R. Prothero and Robert M. Scotch wrote in

their book, Horns, Tusks, and Flippers, the Evolution of Hoofted Mammals, another great source for this timeline, Cope was a brilliant, intense academic and political outsider of Pennsylvania Quaker heritage who never had a steady, respectable position until late in life. His personality was complex and often difficult. In particular, he held and expressed his opinions

very adamantly and did not take orders from anyone, be it a college administrator, the council of a learned society, or an army officer or government official on a geological survey. The authors wrote about Marsh, he was alternately amicable and sociable or formal and aloof, more often the latter. He also had a secretive and suspicious nature and could suffer from bouts of jealousy, such as when Cope beat him to the naming of new fossil species. Marsh was in no way as prolific as Cope, unlike Cope, however, he was part of the establishment. Before things went south between these two, two men did

both name newly discovered species after one another. Cope named an amphibian species, Pytoneus marshii, and Marsh named a new and gigantic serpent from the tertiary of New Jersey Monosaurus Copianus. I think it's Copanus. It's C-O-P-E-A-N-U-S. Copanus. Was that a kind gesture on Marsh's part? I mean how did he pronounce it if he didn't pronounce it as Copanus? Already sneaking in some shade? Little cope ass? Little cope butt hole? Marsh graduated from Yale in 1866 at the age of 35.

The time of his graduation until his death, he would maintain the position of the school's first chair of paleontology. Almost entirely thanks to his uncle's generosity. That year alone, Yale received 150 grand to endow a museum of natural history from George Peabody. Very hard to figure out how much 150k in 1866 would be worth in today's dollars, but an online inflation calculator says it would be equivalent to a little over 3 million. I bet it was more like 10 million or more. Either way, Uncle Peabody seems to have bought his nephew a professorship. And I imagine Cope was pretty jealous.

However, Uncle Peabody's generosity did come at a price. There were strings attached, strict strings, which is most likely why Marsh would remain a bachelor for his entire life. A warning was relayed to him years before he taught at Yale in a letter that, quote, if any of his nephews should in any way so conduct himself as to disgrace themselves and him, or now mind this, should any of them form a marriage connection or even get engaged before they had the means of supporting a family, they should never have a cent of his money. Alright.

Marsh was 25 when he received this letter and 35 when his uncle died. By that point he was most likely used to living as a bachelor and married to hunting them sweet sweet dinosaur bones! Thank you Reggie and Zach from a pancake manner. What a fun little dinosaur song. Most scholars agree that the feud between Cope and Marsh started in 1868. There are two possible origin stories, maybe it was a little bit of both. Here's one. That year Cope took Marsh to a fossil quarry in Haddonfield, New Jersey. A decade earlier, Cope's mentor

Joseph Leidy had identified one of the first dinosaur bones in the U.S. at Haddonfield, and he and Cope explored the fossil beds together. Leidy was an anatomy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, later a professor of natural history at Swarthmore College, and the director of scientific and educational programs at the Wagner Free Institute of Science. Cope spent a year studying anatomy with Leidy at the University of Pennsylvania. Cope also studied herpetology, the study of amphibians and reptiles, at the Smithsonian Institution, and as mentioned earlier spent a year abroad visiting museums.

And now Cope showed Marsh some of the most promising sites at Haddonfield and they would find three new dinosaurs together that season. How fun man to be the first to dig up, study, classify some fantastic beast that died over 65 million years ago. This episode has got me thinking about the premise of Jurassic Park. Come on geneticists! Or whoever, whatever kind of scientist would be needed to potentially pull that off. Let's bring dinosaurs back to life! Anyway Marsh went behind Copes back in New Jersey and made an agreement with the quarry owner

to deliver any newly discovered fossils directly to him at Yale and not to Cope. Even though it was Cope who invited Marsh along the trip, a trip made possible by Cope's mentor, not Marsh's. That sounds like a pretty big stab in the back, if true. And then Cope would discover his betrayal when he returned to the site to excavate. But is that what really happened? Is that how the feud truly began? I don't know, maybe. Others say the feud started in 1868 when Cope published an incorrect description of a newly identified species called Elasmosaurus. Elasmosaurus platyurus, a marine reptile that lived during the Cretaceous period roughly 80 million years ago. This

fossil had been found a year prior, sent to Cope by an army surgeon from Kansas. In a reconstruction Cope screwed up and he flipped the tail and the neck positions. Cope wrote to the Academy of Natural Sciences, it possesses a tail of great length which was elevated, compressed and adapted for sculling the ponderous body through the water. The limbs appear to have been disproportionately small. Well, Cope's mentor Joseph Leidy pointed out this error first. But then later Cope will claim in his embarrassment that Leidy did not tell him about his mistake before he published it in his paper. Historians, however, think that Leidy had spoken to Cope in person about the error, but the Cope was simply too proud to correct his mistake. Leidy will definitely comment on

Cope's error at a meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences on March 8, 1870. Professor Leidy made the following remarks. The reptilian remains from the Cretaceous Formation near Fort Wallace, Kansas presented to the Academy by Dr. T.H. Turner and described by Professor Cope under the name of Elasmosaurus Platyrurus belong to an Enolusaurian, oh my god, Enolusaurian as originally suggested by Professor Cope. The anatomical characters of the different regions of the vertebral column, those of the shoulder and pelvic girdles, and of the preserved portions of the skull and teeth are

decidedly plesiosaurian. Imagine if I had to fucking read the notes for these meetings. It would be my nightmare. Okay guys, sit down. I want to stumble through these fucking stupid words one more time. Professor Cope has described the skeleton in reverse position to the true one. This is still in the notes. And in that view has represented it in a restored condition in Figures 1, Part 2 of his Synopsis of the Extinct Batrachia and Reptilia, Part 1, August 1869, published in advance for a

14th volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, to explain the apparently anomalous and reversed arrangement of this articular processes, processes, of the American Philosophical Society to explain the apparently anomalous and reversed arrangement of this articular processes of the vertebrae, he has supposed that those as ordinarily existing are substituted by the second set of articular processes are found in surface iguanas. Fuckin' whatever. He said that he fucking put the neck on wrong is what that meant. Othniel Marsh claimed he first noticed the error when he came to the Academy of Natural Sciences to view Cope's reconstruction.

He later reported he was the first to point out Cope's mistake and that Joseph Leidy then confirmed it. Cope, once others caught on to his mistake, he was humiliated. Once it was clearly proven that he had made a mistake, he flipped the creature's neck and tail. He ended up publishing a mistake. He flipped the creature's neck and tail. He ended up publishing a correction after he first tried to purchase all known copies of the printing of the American Philosophical Society journal that contained his air so no one else could read about it. He was that embarrassed. While this would be his most infamous blunder, Cope was more prone to mistakes over the course of his career than March was. He was a prolific writer, publishing approximately 1,400 papers in his lifetime.

At his peak, he was publishing over 75 papers a year, more than one a week. However, due to his tendency to publish his findings very, very quickly, his accuracy would suffer. In order to try and improve his reputation after his mistake with the Elasmasaurus, Cope would use some of his family fortune to purchase the journal, the American Naturalist in 1877 Which he would later use as a platform to continually criticize Marsh and his work. Don't you mock me Marsh? Let's see how you like it when I buy one of the most prestigious publications in our field and wield it as a weapon at your expense. It's like daddy always said if you don't like what's being written about you in the paper buy the paper and fire everyone who won't write something else.

Marsh was a much slower writer than Cope. He published 270 papers in his lifetime, over 1100 fewer papers. But because he really took his time to write and polish his work, his papers held a lot more esteem amongst the scientific community and would be published in more prestigious journals. He was a quality not quantity guy. Not that Cope's work was didn't also have good quality though. Many people would actually prefer Cope's work to Marsh's due to the way that Cope wrote. Cope's publications were often more relatable to the common man, common woman, although these publications were being sent out to just men at this time. He wrote with a lot more passion and excitement, would sometimes include

mentions of his wife Annie and his daughter Julia, which helped him come across as, I don't know, more normal, endearing. Cope had a vivid imagination and created images of the creatures he discovered was something he loved to do. He once wrote about a pterodactyl. He once wrote about a pterodactyl. These strange creatures flapped their leathery wings over the waves, and often plunging, seized many an unsuspecting fish. Or soaring at a safe distance, viewed the sports in combats of the more powerful soaring at sea. At nightfall we may imagine them trooping to the shore and suspending themselves to

the cliffs by the claw-bearing fingers of their wing-limbs. One of Cope's field assistants recalled that when he, quote, "...began to speak of the wonderful animals of the earth, those of long ago and those of today, so absorbed did he become in his subject that he talked on as if to himself, looking straight ahead and rarely turning towards me while I listened entranced." Back to Othniel now. After his uncle George Peabody died in 1869, Marsh received a sizable inheritance and would be financially comfortable for most of the rest of his life. He actually received no salary from the majority of his tenure at Yale and lived almost entirely off of his

inheritance going forward. Also, with his uncle no longer threatened to cut off funding if he ever got too focused on the ladies, Marsh quickly turned his basement into a fuck dungeon and would pay local women exorbitant amounts of money to come and strip and dance for him and engage in bizarre sex acts involving dinosaur bones and put on elaborate dinosaur costumes that would allow him to pretend to do things like fuck a pterodactyl or be fucked by T-Rex or Stegosaurus. I wish, I wish for this story he did something that outlandish. No, he did not date anyone as far as we know for his entire life. Just kept his asexual ass completely focused on those sweet old dinosaur bones!

Why is playing that silly kid's song so enjoyable? Marsh made national headlines in 1869 when he traveled to Syracuse, New York to look at the renowned Owendaga Giant, aka the Cardiff Giant, an enormous petrified man found on a farm. The Cardiff Giant was one of the most famous archaeological hoaxes in American history. The so-called giant was 10 feet tall, weighed 3,000 pounds, discovered October 16th, 1869. Man, 10 feet tall and 3,000 pounds. That's a fucking thick dude. We have seven footers, right, and they don't rarely exceed 400 pounds. This guy, man, fucking cart of giant. Meaty, meaty boy.

This thing was discovered October 16th, 1869 by some workers digging a well on the property of William C. Newell. He turned the giant into an attraction. A former Time Suck subject, P.T. Barnum, made a copy of the infamous giant, advertised it as the original. Marsh went to have a look at this thing and quickly spotted clear chisel marks in the crevices of the gypsum block. Excuse me, used to carve the giant's head which debunked the giant. At least for some it debunked the giant. Others were like chisel-smizzle! That giant's real because I want it to be. And I bet they said like the fossil weighed 3,000 pounds, not the actual guy. That'd be fucking crazy if some guy was thought to be 10 feet tall and 3,000 pounds.

In the 1870s, Cope and Marsh set their sights west after they received word of large fossil finds in Kansas and Wyoming. Between 1870 and 1873, Marsh made four trips out west with some of his Yale students. Marsh and his team hunted buffaloes, saw different indigenous tribes, and through his connections in DC, Marsh often had a military escort with his team to make sure no one tried to stop them or interfere with their dicks. Cope, on the other hand, rarely traveled with a military escort and only armed himself with a geologist hammer as carrying a gun went against his Quaker upbringing. One student of Marsh recalled about their adventures,

instead of riding along looking for a gigantic telltale vertebra, it was necessary literally to crawl over the country on hands and knees. Often a quarter of a mile of the most inviting country would be carefully gone over with no result, and then again someone would chance upon a butte, which seemed almost made of teeth. Cope would make multiple trips as well, officially marking the start of the Boner Wars, which would precede the Bone Wars by a couple of days and lead directly to the Bone Wars. Let's talk about that. The Boner Wars began when Cope ran into Marsh in Kansas and claimed out of nowhere that many years

down the road when future paleontologists discovered his fossil, they would name him Erectus megapinicus because of how big his boner was. Then he added that Marsha's remains would be labeled Erectus micropinicus patheticus because of how small and sad his boner was. That, as you might imagine, did not set well with Othniel Marsh. No, sir! So Marsh challenged Cove to a boner off where both men would jerk off in front of one another with Marsh's students in attendance as witnesses and every 30 seconds a pre-chosen student would shout out, compare! At that moment both men would immediately stop jerking off and stand face to face no more than a distance of one foot apart and then a

student would grab both their hard dicks, squish them together, time and place with some rubber bands, lining up the tips evenly to see which paleontologist truly had the longest boner. Measurements would quickly be taken, then the cocks would be unbound, and each scientist would start furiously jerking off again, getting as hard as possible, until 30 seconds later, COMPARE would be yelled out again. After the end of 10 of these rounds, the 10 measurements for each man would be averaged out and the average score for each would be presented to determine a boner champ. And Cope would

win with an average score of 5 and 7 eighths inches to Marsh's 4 and 5 sixteenths inches. But Marsh would cry foul. He would challenge the results, claiming that using his students put him at an enormous wink-wink disadvantage because it was more embarrassing for him to jerk off in front of them and have them hold and measure his cock than it was for Cope, who would never have to see him again. Marsh refused to accept this excuse and demanded that the two men be called King Big Cock and Prince Baby Dick going forward for the rest of their lives. The two men be called King Big Cock and Prince Baby Dick going forward for the rest of their lives. And that particular insult is what led to the Bone Wars being born out of the Boner Wars.

Are you fucking kidding me? I said, are you fucking kidding me? Okay, yeah, I was kidding you, Miles. Also, you're way too young to be listening to that filth. Let's talk about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now.

I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone Wars for real now. I'm going to be talking about the Bone. Also, you're way too young to be listening to that filth. Let's talk about the Bone Wars for real now. After today's second of two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors, and now let's head to 1871 and watch the Bone Wars really take off.

In 1871, Cope traveled to a site in Kansas that had been abandoned by Marsh and his team. With a bit of luck on his side, Cope discovered something Marsh and his team had missed. The skeleton of an ancient flying reptile that was larger than a similar skeleton that Marsh had found which infuriated Marsh. Size really did sometimes matter for these two. Cope was then able to get a position with the U.S. Geological Survey under geologist Ferdinand Hayden, who was known for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains. Hayden had been appointed geologist in charge of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories in 1867. The U.S. Geological Survey, the USGS by the way, is the nation's largest water, earth,

and biological science and civilian mapping agency. It collects, monitors, analy biological science and civilian mapping agency. It collects, monitors, analyzes, and provides scientific understanding of natural resource conditions, issues, and problems. I remember coming across some USGS markers from years and years ago hiking around the mountains of central Idaho where I grew up. There's actually one on the big peak right across the Salmon River from the center of Riggins. And sometimes while doing their mapping they did a little digging for dinosaurs. Or at least you know had people along with them who would do some digging. While Cope's new job was not a paid gig it gave him the opportunity to find more fossils and publish his work without having to fund

the entire expedition himself since the government would provide help in terms of tools and some manpower. Hayden thought Cope was useful because of his dramatic writing which would make a good impression on anyone reading official survey reports. So you know one guy helped the other you know they look kind of like I'll scratch your back you scratch mine. All this really pisses Marsh off because it gave Cope a huge advantage in finding fossils. In June of 1872 Cope set off for a government-sponsored fossil hunting expedition of the Eocene bone beds of Wyoming. Eocene, by the way, means noting or pertaining to an epic of the Tertiary period occurring from 55 to 40 million years ago and characterized by the advent of modern mammalian orders. So after the asteroid when mammals get going. And the feud between Cope and Marsh deepened when the two men

and Joseph Leidy, Cope's mentor, were independently collecting fossils in Wyoming's Bridger Basin and Washakie Basin. Leidy had been receiving many of Hayden's fossils until Cope joined the survey and now his former student is getting in the way. U.S. geologist Ferdinand Hayden who we just met tried to smooth things over between the two with the following letter writing, I asked Cope not to go into that field that you were going there. He laughed at the idea of being restricted to any locality, said he intended to go whether I aided him or not. I was anxious to secure the cooperation of such a worker as an honor to my core.

I could not be responsible for the field he was selected in as much as I pay him no salary in a portion of his expenses. You will see therefore that while it is not a pleasant thing to work in competition with others it seems almost a necessity. You can sympathize. Sorry professor but Cope's kind of a dick but he's good at what he does and I need him. So yeah you can see this early dilemma here in the dinosaur wars where you know you can't really uh forbid one guy from digging where another guy is digging all the time. After receiving a from another geologist a cope decided to investigate reports of some big bones found near the black buttes Their cope discovered the skeletal remains of a dinosaur He called fuck you off Neil Charles Marsh and fuck you too Joseph Lide you traitors a cuss

No, their cope discovered the skeletal remains of a dinosaur He called fuck you off Neil Charles Marsh and fuck you too Joseph Leide you traitor a cuss. No. There Cope discovered the skeletal remains of a dinosaur he called, Ogothamus Sylvesteros, Marvelous Forest Dweller or Great Forest Wanderer. Kind of. He rediscovered it actually. The bones of that beast were discovered by two other paleontologists, Fielding Bradford Meek and Henry Martin Bannisterm,

while they were looking for fossil shells in the lands formation near the Black Butte and Bitter Creek. That sounds like a fucking name of a like a Americana song or something. Black Butte and Bitter Creek. Down at the Black Butte and Bitter Creek! I don't know where I was going to go with that. Meek and Bannister were employed by Ferdinand Hayden's Geological Survey of the territories and notified Cope of the find. Cope himself then searched the ridge near Black Butte later in 1872 and rediscovered Meek's site, finding huge bones protruding from the rocks near a coal vein.

Cope and his team eventually recovered complete hip bones, sacral vertebrae, and several ribs from the Agathomus sylvestris, which Cope thought looked a lot like triceratops. And that might be because some of the bones were from a triceratops. Why am I having trouble saying that word now, too? Triceratops. Agathomus sylvestris never walked the earth as Cope imagined did. Late analysis revealed that the bones found were likely from different dinosaurs and that Cope had basically Frankensteined them together into a creature that never actually existed in his haste to name the beast.

Whoops! When Cope left to find this thing, he believed he had the full support of Hayden and the geological survey behind him on the dig, so he traveled alone to Fort Bridger in June. But there he didn't find any men, wagons, horses, or archaeological equipment waiting for him. Frustrated but not deterred, Cope put together his own outfit of two teamsters, a cook, a guide, and three men from Chicago who were eager to study with him. And two of those men happened to be employees of Marsh. And when Marsh found out his men were now working with Cope, not happy.

The pair tried to reassure Marsh. They were still loyal to him, mostly, with one even suggesting that they only took the job to lead Cope away from the good fossils. Totally. Marsh still not happy, but wasn't much he could do. Wasn't much he could threaten them with to deter them. Marsh had a bad reputation for being very late to pay his assistants, sometimes not paying them at all or not paying them what he should have paid them, which is probably why they took to dig with Cope in the first place. He couldn't prevent any men he worked with from working with Cope. Marsh eventually did become so fearful that Cope would outdo him that he literally hired spies to track Cope's progress and he used the code name Jones when he would speak about Cope. And yes, if you are curious upon And he used the code name Jones when he would speak about Cope.

And yes, if you are curious upon first hearing of that code name, as I was, Harrison Ford's character of Indiana Jones in the George Lucas films is thought to be based, at least in part, on Edward Drinker Cope. Let's take a brief side quest, look at that. In addition to the code name of Jones, both Cope and Indiana Jones were driven by a passion

for paleontology and exploration, venturing into the wild to uncover ancient secrets. Cope's rivalry with Marsh as part of the Bone Wars mirrors the competitive spirit and sometimes unethical actions seen in Indiana Jones's adventures. Some sources have referred to Edward Drinkard Cope in recent decades as the Indiana Jones of paleontology because of assumptions about this basis. And Cope was excellent with the bullwhip and not afraid to shoot a guy with a sword. I wish. Anyway, during his trip to the Fort Bridger area, Cope's team discovered dozens of new

species legitimately. They didn't frankenstein everything. That summer, Cope, Marsh, and Leidy each found the bones of a creature with elephant-like legs tusks and bony knobs on its skull Around the same time they would all think they had found the same beast which was not actually true There was no a race to see who would get to name it right who would uh, you know You know get their information out first who would get their name attached to the discovery Who would send the first telegram and thus claim it. They would have so many of those races.

Each man wanted to describe their discovery before they left the field. And because they were in a remote area, they would have to leave their camps to send a telegraph. Joseph Leidy won this early race. He was the first to publish. His note dated August 1st, 1872, described the Eointhe, Eoin, oh my gosh, Eointhe theorem robustum, the beast

of the Eointhe mountains that is robust. It was a creature that looked to me a bit like a cross between a rhinoceros and hippopotamus. Most usually just refer to a rhinoceros to describe it. It was five feet tall at the shoulder, weighed up to two tons, legs were robust to sustain its weight, were equipped with hooves, was a plant eater that had two big old teeth to help defend itself that remind me of a saber-toothed tiger's big teeth. And on August 17th, over two weeks after his mentor had already named it, Cope sent a telegram from the Black Buttes in the Washakie Basin naming the same animal Eobacillus

cornitus. Horned Dawn King. Better name. Meanwhile on August 20th, Marsh sent a note naming his specimen Dinosaurus mirabila or Marvelous Terrible Horn. That's pretty good name too. Cope and Marsh then worked on longer description to their discoveries when they returned back east. Each man believed they found a fossil of the same animal and of course that their name was the correct name. In actuality, Cope found an Eobacillus and Marsh found a specimen of that Ewentatherum, the creature already discovered by Lydie. So Cope won that battle. He got to name a new species, Marsh didn't. And that kind of shit would happen a lot in these early days. Multiple paleontologists finding different specimens of the same kind of dinosaur, but thinking they had found different dinosaurs or

multiple paleontologists would find different but similar dinosaurs and all think they had found a new species. All three of these early dinosaur hunters, Joseph Leidy, Edward Cope, Othniel Marsh, began to dispute their rivals right to collect in their area. Everyone started getting more territorial. But since none of them owned any of this land, it was impossible in most instances for them to legally stop one another from jumping into each other's digs. Or at least to stop one another from digging right next to where somebody else had started to dig.

And that would be fucking maddening. You find some cool bones way out in the woods wherever you get permission to dig from whoever owns the land or from the government. Then a few weeks later, dude, you hate your rival is digging in the same area specifically because he wants to find similar bones and put his name in the history books as the guy who first documented some new dinosaur even though he would have never found out about those dinosaurs if you wouldn't have started digging where you did. Well, Lydie would soon retire now and that would leave the feud

solely between Cope and Marsh. And Marsh would consider the Bridger Basin his fossil hunting territory and he felt that Cope was encroaching on his space but Cope didn't see it that way. Cope would become sick in October of 1872 and have to be brought back to Fort Bridger to recover, but he would still manage to publish 16 different articles about new dinosaurs. Marsh would also publish 16 articles between August of 1872 and June of 1873. Cope and Marsh would also both ignore the names of species other paleontologists were coming up with, including Joseph Flidy's work, and according to the authors of From Horns, Tusks, and Flippers, the Evolution of Hoofed Mammals, as a result, Unita Theory names reached a state of chaos, with multiple names for the

same species. Marsh lashed out at Cope and print over this, writing, Cope has endeavored to secure priority by sharp practice, and failed. For this kind of sharp practice in science, Professor Cope is almost as well known as he is for the number and magnitude of his blunders. Professor Cope's errors will continue to invite correction, but these, like his blunders, are hydraheaded, and life is really too short to spend valuable time in such an ungracious task, especially as in the present case, Professor Cope has not even returned

thanks for the correction of nearly half a hundred errors. He repeats his statements as though the Unite Theorem were a rosa nante and the Ninth Commandment a windmill. Holy shit, that was the nerdiest put down I've ever read. Dude made a Don Quixote reference and a biblical reference in the same sentence to make fun of a dude's dinosaur classification blunders. That was a joke directed at a very small audience. Also I do understand how Marsh was frustrated. He's trying harder to be methodical, trying

to be accurate when it comes to uncovering, naming new dinosaurs, and Cope seemed to have been taking a throw a bunch of shit against the wall and see what sticks approach. Marsh would then write the following about Cope in the spring of 1873, I have of late been subjected to a very unscrupulous rivalry and have thus lost more than half of the discoveries for which I risked my life during my Western explorations. Dude was pissed. I'm trying so hard to find all these dinosaur bones and he's taking them away from me is really making me mad! It does feel like two kids obsessed with dinosaurs just getting mad at each other. Oftentimes to me here.

Marsh went on to allege that Cope falsified dates on his publications to establish prior discovery. He's cheating! Teach him he's cheating! Meanwhile, Cope sent word to his father about Marsh, writing, as to the learned professor of copology in Yale, he does not disturb me and I will not notice him again. I'm just gonna know him daddy. He's so naughty. Cope then soon named a new fossil. Anesoconus copator. Thanks to the hate he was getting from other dinosaur hunters or fans of dinosaur hunters who were decidedly on Team Marsh. When a friend searched up Greek dictionaries to find the root of the name, Cope told him it's no use looking up the Greek

derivation, Jesus Christ, derivation of Cope hater because it's not a classic in origin. It's derived from the union of two English words, Cope and hater, for I have named it in honor of the number of Cope haters that surround me. Everyone's against me and being really mean! Marsh made his last trip back by Yale in 1873 with a group of 13 students. For the rest of the Bone Wars, Marsh would prefer to hire local collectors who sent fossils to him. He made brief trips to check on his hired bone hunters but it was nothing like the lengthy expeditions of the early 1870s. And he's funding most of this himself with his pea body money. He's not getting again a

salary from Yale. Cope meanwhile had a productive fossil collecting season in 1873. He got tired of working under Hayden, found another job, a paying job, with the Army Corps of Engineers now. Cope and Marsh would soon both focus their sights on the Dakota Territory, where gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, which exacerbated existing tensions with indigenous peoples. Still in 1874, Marsh made a short excursion to the Sioux Reservation in the Black Hills. He was only permitted to enter after he promised Chief Red Cloud that he would go to Washington DC to lobby on the tribe's behalf about their poor treatment, which he would do. His deal

with Red Cloud would bring his name to prominence once again. In 1874, Marsh was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, a non-profit founded in 1863, will be a member for four years, and will later be elected vice president. By 1875, Cope and Marsh were both forced to pause their expeditions due to financial strains. They were both funding most of what they were doing out of their own pockets, and they paused out of a need also to catalog the overwhelming amount of fossils they'd already discovered or hired others to dig up on their behalf. In 1876, Marsh was back in the headlines for supporting Darwin's theory of evolution. While Marsh accepted and promoted evolution and natural selection, Cope was reluctant to do so and even wrote essays against Darwinian evolution, many of which were compiled into a volume titled Origin of the Fittest in 1866.

Cope believed in neo-Lamarckism, whereas Darwinism posits that evolution occurs through natural selection and random mutations with advantageous traits being passed down to offspring, you know, those with favorable mutations more likely to live and breed, essentially creating positive changes within a species over a long period of time. Neo-Lamarckism suggests that acquired traits during an organism's lifetime can be directly inherited by its descendants, which would be a much more rapid form of evolution. Essentially with neo-Lamarckism, if I dedicated years to bench pressing, got a

really big chest to my younger years, then after I did this, I, you know, fucking donate sperm to create Kyler Monroe. They would then have a head start at being really good at the bench press from birth. Because I would have fucking benched strength into my sperm. And I would have worked so hard, you know, fucking my nuts felt those lifts. Almost no one supports this theory today. And even in the late 19th century century most evolutionists favored Darwinism. So Cope supporting Neil Lamarckism caused him to lose even more respect for many of his peers and Marsh supporting Darwinism led him to gaining more respect. So Marsh now really clearly

winning the bone wars. From 1877 to 1879 Cope and Marsh both maintained crews at various dig sites, including in the Como Bluff area of Wyoming, described as an expanse of sagebrush prairie, a desolate place with brutal winds that ripped through the bone hunters' camps. Doesn't sound fun. It's near the Little Remote, a 284-person town of Medicine Boat, Wyoming, in the southeast part of the state, a town mostly known for having a lot of paleontologists traveling through for various decades. A lot of important dinosaur discoveries being made near it and for

Butch Cassidy and his wild bunch robbing a train just outside of town. Then blowing up an entire bridge with dynamite in order to evade capture. The competition between the Cope and Marsh still going strong. In 1877 Marsh receives a letter from school teacher, artist, and geologist for hire Arthur Lakes which will be important. Arthur Lakes lived from December 21st, 1844 to November 21st, 1917. And then in 1877 Marsh receives a letter from school teacher, artist, and geologist for hire Arthur Lakes. Arthur Lakes lived from December 21st 1844 to November 21st 1917 and he

became famous for his sketches and watercolors of his paleontological fieldwork. He's also credited with successfully deciphering much of the geology of Colorado and guiding a lot of early exploration in the state. Lakes told Marsh that he was hiking in the mountains near Morrison, Colorado, which is very near Denver, and that there he discovered massive bones embedded in the rocks, quote, apparently a vertebrae and a humerus bone of some gigantic saurian, aka a giant lizard. While awaiting Marsh's reply, Lakes dug up more giant bones and then sent them to Yale and New Haven, Connecticut for Marsha to check them out.

But Marsha was very slow to respond to him. And because of that, Lakes got tired of waiting around and he sent another shipment of bones to Cope, his rival. When Marsha finally responded to Lakes, he paid him a hundred bucks to keep his findings a secret. But too late for that. Marsha then learned that Lakes had already contacted Cope, so now he sent his field collector, a man named Benjamin Mudge to Morrison, Colorado, to secure Lakes services for him and him alone.

Marsh would publish a description of Lakes discoveries in the American Journal of Science, July 1, 1877. He sent a quote, notice of a giant and excuse me, notice of a new and gigantic dinosaur to the press. The discovery was 50 to 60 feet long, larger than any other known land animal at the time. And Cope was fucking pissed because he had also been sent bones from this same dinosaur and he'd examined them before Marsh did and he wanted credit for naming it. According to the BBC, safe to say both Marsh and Cope were very much obsessed with naming new

species. They gathered vast quantities of fossils, many of which were extraordinary specimens that remained in sealed boxes until their deaths. Owning these fossils and ensuring their rival did not own them had become more important than analyzing them. One of Cope's allies later would even accuse Marsh of attending one of Cope's lectures on reptiles, then rushing to his office to write it up and send it to the Journal of Science under Marsh's name. They were that competitive. Cope's ally wrote, in science, priority of discovery is secured by first publication. It is in this manner that Professor Marsh won his laurels as a scientist. Conversely, there were times when Marsh was so infuriated

by Cope's success he wished death upon his rival. Marsh was once seen in his lab at Yale bending over a specimen with one of Cope's papers in his hand, exclaiming, God, God, God, God damn it! I wish the Lord would take him! Meanwhile, after Marsh named the new Big Beast first, Lakes then wrote to Cope to inform him the bones he had sent to him should have really been shipped along to Marsh, which Cope took as an insult. Cope then received a letter from naturalist O.W. Lucas, who was collecting plants near Canyon City, Colorado, a town southwest of Colorado Springs,

about 120 miles from where Lakes had found the bones he had sent to Cope. And this guy stumbled upon more fossils. Lucas sent Cope some samples, and Cope was pleased that the specimen he had found was larger than the shit Lakes had found. So that August, Cope announced his own discovery that, quote, exceeds in its proportions any other land animal Hitherot discovered including the one found near Golden City which he named Camarasaurus Supremis

supreme chambered lizard. Looks kind of like a brontosaurus. Big old neck, little head. Cope compared the big plant eater to a giraffe. These beasts were 50 to 65 feet long, 15 to 25 feet tall, weighed up to 20 tons, aka a little over 44,000 pounds. So big boys. After hearing about this find, Marsh instructed his field collectors to now set up a quarry on his behalf near Canyon City. When one guy starts making new finds, the other guy rushes over to try and steal those

finds. Marshes sources out west and told him that O.W. Lucas was still finding more superior specimens and that he refused to quit working for Cope. Marsh was pissed because he had tried to pay this guy to work for him instead. Then he was more pissed when his new quarry collapsed and almost killed all of his assistants. It seemed like Marsh's prospects in the West were drying up until he received a third letter. The first transcontinental railroad was being built in a remote area of Wyoming near previous discoveries by geologist-for-hire Arthur Lakes. Marsh received a letter from two Union

Pacific workers identifying themselves as William Harlow Reed and William Edwards Carlin. Tail of two billies. They claimed they found a large number of fossils in the Como Bluff area and warned Marsh there were others in the area quote looking for such things and Marsh took that to mean that Cope was already in the area hunting for those fossils. Why does he keep trying to steal my dinosaurs? Marsh now dispatched his former student and fossil hunter Samuel Williston to Como Bluff and Williston sent a message confirming that Cope was indeed there upon his arrival. Marsh then sent money along with Williston for Reed and Carlin and urged them to send any additional fossils to him and only to him.

Williston made a bargain with the men or thought he did but then Carlin decided to travel to New Haven, Connecticut and talked to Marsh directly. At that meeting Marsh agreed to pay a set monthly rate with additional cash bonuses depending on the importance of the fines. Marsh also reserved the right to send superintendents to supervise the digging, and he advised Reed and Carlin to keep Cope out of the area. Don't let that fucking scoundrel steal my thunder again. Although they signed a contract, Carlin and Reed would interestingly both claim later that they felt that Marsh had bullied them into the deal. Initially their deal did work out well for Marsh. Throughout 1877, Reed sent him literal

freight carloads of dinosaur bones. Sweet sweet dinosaur bones! Show me your dinosaur bones! During this time, Marsh described and named important dinosaurs like Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Apatosaurus. Oh man, love Stegosaurus and Allosaurus. And more on Apatosaurus later. Stegosaurus means roof lizard in Greek, referring to the plates that resemble a roof or covering the first bone fragments collected by Arthur Lakes near Morrison, Colorado in 1877. Marsh would name the

dinosaur that year as well. He initially believed the remains were from an aquatic turtle-like animal and the basis for its scientific name or roof or roofed lizard was due to his early belief that the plates lay flat over the animal's back, overlapped like shingles or tiles on a roof. The greatest stegosaurus discovery would come later in 1885 with the discovery of a nearly complete articulated skeleton that included previously undiscovered elements like a complete skull, throat ossicles, and articulated plates. Marshall P. Felch collected that skeleton throughout 1885 and 1886 from his quarry in Garden Park, a dig six miles from Canyon City, Colorado.

The skeleton was expertly unearthed by Felch, who first divided the skeleton into labeled blocks and prepared them separately. That skeleton was shipped to Marsh in 1877 and we put up for display by 1891. Such a recognizable dinosaur with its spiked tail and vertical tall you know kind of vertical plates popping up from its back is very cool. Stegosaurus had an overall length of 21 to 30 feet, stood at a height of 10 feet 8 inches to almost 15 feet and weighed between 6,800 and 8,400 pounds and were prey for the Allosaurus.

The name Allosaurus means different lizard, alluding to its unique, at least the time of its discovery, concave vertebrae. And it was another big win for Marsh in 1877. It was a large bipedal predator very similar to Tyrannosaurus rex. They were up to 38 feet long with their tail and up to 16 and a half feet tall, had a three-foot-long skull with two short brow horns and bony knobs and ridges above its eyes and on top of its head. They had large powerful jaws with long sharp serrated teeth that were up to four inches long. They weighed around one and a half tons compared to T-Rex which

could weigh between five and eight tons. Marcia's field collector, Benjamin Mudge, collected the specimen that would earn the dinosaur its name in 1877 near Canyon City Colorado at that same garden park quarry where the first stegosaurus and more were found. The remains found consisted of a partial skull and jaw, a complete set of presacral and sacral vertebrae, a few ribs, pelvis, virtually complete arms and legs. It would have had a tail as well, but Mudge's crew accidentally threw the tail over a cliff while excavating the skeleton. Sorry. Now let's return to Marsh's precarious relationship with his hired bone hunters, Carlin and Reed.

In early 1878, Marsh learned from former student and fossil hunter Samuel Williston that Carlin and Reed were visited by a man working for Cope, a guy who went by the name of Haynes. And apparently after learning of Marsh's discoveries in Como Bluff, Cope had sent so-called dinosaur rustlers, including this Haynes fella to the area, to try and literally steal Marsh's fossils from him. Just win by any means necessary. Then in early 1878, William Carlin, sick of Marsha's sporadic payments, quit working for him and decided to work for his rival, Cope, just to piss him off. Huge win for Cope and the Bone Wars. But also, when these guys stole the Bone Hunter from one another,

you know, it was because they would agree to pay them more money than their rival, money coming out of their own pockets, so they are burning through their fortunes in a quest to be the dinosaur guy of the day. Carlin also turned on his former ally William Reed. Billy turning against Billy. Carlin started doing stuff like locking Reed out of the Como train station forcing him to haul bones down the bluff putting specimens on train platforms in the cold. Reed spied on Carlin's activities at his Como Bluff quarry then and sent word back to Marsh. Then when Reed's quarry number four dried up, Marsh

ordered Reed to clear out bone fragments from other quarries as in destroy fossils. Possibly not yet classified fossils, you know, or species, fossils from those species, just to make sure Cope did not get to name them. Reed will report to Marsh that he literally destroyed all the remaining fossils, that he blew them up with fucking dynamite, just to prevent sure Cope did not get to name them. Reed will report to Mars that he literally destroyed all the remaining fossils, that he blew them up with fucking dynamite just to prevent Cope from finding them. And that's insane. Now these guys are literally blowing up fossils

or claiming to. Fossils, you know, they don't have time to dig up and catalog themselves just to make sure that the rival doesn't find something before they do. In the summer of 1878, Marsha heads west again, travels to Como Bluff to visit his quarries. Relations between the bone hunter William Reed and geologist Arthur Lakes had soured and they both had resigned in August despite Marsha's attempts to placate them by sending them to opposite

ends of the quarries. Marsha's having a rough go at things. A quick word now about how the about government alliances that these two rivals had. Throughout the 1870s, there were three or four different geological surveys going on in the West at any given time, all trying to properly map out America's new land. Marsh was associated with a survey under Clarence King, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey from 1879 to 1881, while Cope was still working with Ferdinand Hayden. Another survey was directed by John Wesley Powell, a geologist who had previously been part of the first official US government sponsored passage through the Grand Canyon, and Powell wanted to make an alliance with King.

Marsh wrote in April of 1879, you know how our government surveys have been fighting each other for years. Congress decided to stop it and referred the matter to the National Academy of Sciences of which I am at present the presiding officer. We proposed a plan of reorganization. After much opposition from Hayden and others, a new geological survey in place of the three old ones has been established with Clarence King as director. This is a great thing for American science. King had actually retired from the field back in 1873 and spent his time preparing results for publication. He resigned and appointed Powell as his successor and Marsh became the vertebrae paleontologist of the US Geological Survey. Cope called this move a raid on the surveys and a disaster.

And Cope's loss of government support, which is now all going to Marsh and the Bone Wars, will be disastrous for his finances. The merge of the surveys pushed Cope out of the USGS entirely and left him without any government funding for his future expeditions. Based on his research, during this time with the survey, Cope did write a monograph, a detailed written study of a single specialized subject, or an aspect of one, titled the Vertebrata of the Tertiary

Formations of the West, which became known as Cope's Bible, one of his most famous works. That will initially be published in 1883, but only as a first volume. After the release, John Wesley Powell informed Cope that the money needed to finish the publication was gone. Cope blamed Marsh for this lack of funding, but Powell told him, The many delays in your work exhibited in the failure to furnish a manuscript to the printer and the many changes you asked has caused the officers of the Printing Bureau to feel that they could not depend on you for any regular prosecution of the work of publication.

And it was only by argument and earnest solicitation by myself that they were induced to take it up. So, Cope's years of doing shit the way he wanted to do it, even if that meant pissing off the people he worked with, including government employees, is now coming back to haunt him. Cope will now spend years trying to find private funding in Washington DC, but will not be successful. And he will believe he's not successful because he thinks Marsh is talking shit about him to fucking everybody and turning them against him. According to American Heritage magazine, his attempts to find another paying position showed his error in not associating himself long before with an important college or university. In the final analysis, Marsh's own rise to power rested firmly in that chair at Yale.

The age of the university scientists had arrived and Cope was an isolated individual. Even alone, Cope was a force to be reckoned with and he did have the naturalist as a mouthpiece, but this was no substitute for the prestige and influence of a professorship at a good university. So Indiana Jones is struggling. He is now definitely losing the bone wars. Maintaining Cruz and Como Bluff has almost completely ruined Cope financially. He'd also invested most of what was left of his family's money, aka his inheritance, in a silver mine in New Mexico in a desperate attempt to make some of his fortune back and then lost just about

everything when that fucking mine folded. He still had two homes in Philadelphia, one for his wife and daughter and one for his fossils. But now that he had no regular income, he had to mortgage both of those homes. After Cope's daughter moved out of the house when she got married, his wife Annie moved to the countryside to live with family and they sold that home. And then Cope and his wife will never live together again.

He now moved his bone collection into his primary residence where he would sleep alone on a simple cot amongst piles of bones and stacks of books. That's actually so sad. Cope had also made enemies not just with Marsh, but among the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Damn near everyone in the field is sick of this guy.

Still, he loves his dinosaur bones and continues to write prolifically about those sweet sweet dinosaur bones. Marshwood meanwhile in the late 1870, collect over 30 individual specimens that outline the evolutionary history of the horse. He also wrote a monograph on extinct toothed birds, so fucking gross, thought of a toothed bird, in 1880 that confirmed an earlier European discovery which suggested the reptilian origin of birds. Marsh would receive praise from Charles Darwin himself about all this in 1880, who wrote, I received yesterday the magnificent volume.

I have looked with renewed admiration at the plates and will soon read the text. Your work on these old birds and on the many fossil animals of North America has afforded the best support to the theory of evolution, which has appeared within the last 20 years. Thomas Henry Huxley, an authority on the genealogy of the horse and one of the first to point out the connection between birds and dinosaurs as I mentioned earlier, visited New Haven in 1876 and admired Marsh's evolutionary model of the horse. Marsh's positive reputation would soon spread overseas, yet another disadvantage for Cope. By the early 1880s, thanks to his backing from the U.S. Geological Survey, Marsh

also had more operational quarries than Cope, many more. Definitely one of the bone wars. But then in 1884, Congress began to investigate the proceedings of the Consolidated Geological Survey and soon it will be Marsh's turn to fall from grace. Behind the scenes, Cope had begun searching for disgruntled workers who would speak out against John Wesley Powell and the survey. But Powell and Marsh were unable to refute allegations and ensure they did not reach the mainstream press at this time. By the late 1880s, the attention to Cope and Marsh's rivalry had diminished in favor of international stories about paleontology, but the bitterness and hatred between the two continued. After damn near a decade of searching for a steady employment, Cope finally is offered a professorship position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1889. It'll save him from financial ruin but just

barely, but still his life is not going well. He and his wife had become completely estranged. They might as well have been divorced. They were not even speaking together or speaking to each other. He was still sleeping on a cot surrounded by his fucking papers and dinosaur bones. And by the time he thankfully got that job at the age of 49, his only significant financial asset left was his fossils, his fossil collection, which March had now started to try to take from him. Dinosaur bones, yeah, we want to see them. Dinosaur bones, yeah, where can we see them? Does that keep getting funnier for anyone else?

That happy little song about dinosaur bones as this fucking dude's life falls apart specifically because of dinosaur bones? Life was bleak for the real life Indiana Jones at this point. Speaking of bleak, December 16th 1889, right after Cope finally gets a steady job, the US Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble writes a letter to Cope demanding he relinquish all his fossils that he hand over his entire collection to the Smithsonian because Cope had been working with a government agency at the time he found them. Come on that's all he

has left let me have his fucking dinosaur bones! Come on! Please! I just want my bones! I've given everything for these bones! Cope Fathis prevented evidence that although he was working with the USGS when he collected the samples, he'd also spent over 80 grand of his own fucking money and ruined his life to finance expeditions over the years. Cope believed he's being harassed because of conspiracy against him orchestrated by his fucking nemesis, Oskneel Charles Charles Marsh. So now he ramps up his efforts of plotting revenge against Marsh. Actually, he'd been plotting revenge for quite some time. For the previous five years, he had been collecting evidence of Marsh's alleged misconduct. He called a big secret stash of papers he had regarding his his marshiana. I picture him

storing these papers under some kind of fucking voodoo shrine dedicated to Marsh's death. A bunch of Marsh voodoo dolls he stabs every night before he drinks himself to sleep and passes out on his cot. Cope told a friend William Berryman Scott, who would go on to be professor of geology and paleontology at Princeton, "'In these papers I have a full record of Marsha's errors from the very beginning, which at some future time I may be tempted to publish.'" These nerds just won't quit. According to American Heritage magazine, Cope had discovered the chink in Marsha's armor,

but one thing and another had prevented him from striking home. It was an undeniable fact that at least some of Marsh's assistants in New Haven loathed him. Cope would sniff this out by 1885 when he and Scott traveled to New Haven, ostensibly for a Yale-Princeton football game, but in reality to meet clandestinely with four of these disgruntled employees. Each seemed to have had his own reason for turning on Marsh, but in general three motives prevailed. Marsh was frequently in arrears in payment of salaries. He gave his assistants little opportunity for self-expression by closing the Peabody collections to their own research and publication. And he gave little or no recognition of his debt to assistants in the preparation of his own publications. So Marsh may have been a narcissistic dickhead, and Cope wanted the world to know that.

Cope now reached out to a, quote, news paper man from New York, William Hosea Ballew of the New York Herald. Cope shared his notes with Ballew and alleged that Marsh had plagiarized his colleagues and assistants and also had conspired to steal government funds. Cope alleged that Marsh, King, and Powell of the USGS were, quote, partners in incompetence, ignorance, and plagiarism, and called the survey a gigantic politico-scientific monopoly next in importance to Tammany Hall. On January 12, 1890, the New York Herald runs a story with the headline, Scientists Wage

Bitter Warfare. Marsh and Cope's public battle in the papers would last a full two weeks. As reported by the American Heritage magazine regarding Cope, to the dismay of his friends he quoted private correspondence in which Marsh had been criticized. But the core of his scattershot came from the Marsh assistants. They charged that Marsh's publications had been written by others and that Marsh had stolen his work on the horses from Huxley and a Russian named Kavalevsky. Many of the slanders against Powell given Congress earlier in the decade were aired. Powell replied

in the same edition with the dignified denial of every accusation. He even made the disarming offer to publish Cope's book if he would send the completed manuscript. A shrewd stroke for Cope never came close to completing the book, for which he crusaded so energetically, although the plates would be published after his death. Some of Marsh's former assistants, such as famous paleontologist Samuel Wendell Williston, supported Cope's accusation that Marsh did steal his assistant's work, and that he kept his employee's salaries for himself. After reading the accusations, Marsh now traveled to the University of Pennsylvania

to try to get fucking Cope fired. He met up with the university's president personally, speaking with him of the, quote, shame that has befallen Cope. And he suggested that poor Cope had cracked up and that he could help find a more substantial scientist to replace him as professor. So this rivalry is getting intense. I mean they are truly just going all out to destroy each other's careers, to ruin each other's

lives. On January 19th 1890 the Herald published Marsh's reply to Cope's accusations on page 11. Marsh accused Cope of stealing his specimens and spying on his work when visiting Yale in an effort to publish it as his own. He also readdressed the head-on-the-wrong-end dinosaur mistake that occurred more than 20 years earlier because he knew how much that humiliated Cope. Marsh wrote, Professor Cope had described an extinct reptile from the Cretaceous of Kansas under the name Elasmosaurus, and his published descriptions made this the most remarkable animal of ancient or modern times. Besides his original description, he had read

a paper on the subject before the American Association in which he explained the marvelous creature. In a communication published by the Boston Society of Natural History in 1869, he placed it in a new order, Streptptosoria. In The American Naturalist, he gave a restoration of the animal, represented as alive. This was afterward copied in Appleton's Cyclopedia. Finally, an extensive description was published in The Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 14, in which a full restoration of this wonderful creation was given. 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 to at least know one end from the other. It seems he did not, for Professor Lydie in his quiet way took the last vertebrae 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. The single observation of America's most distinguished anatomist, whom Cope has wronged grievously in name and fame, was a demonstration that could not be questioned. And when I informed

Professor Cope of it, his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy. Professor Cope had actually placed the head on the end of the tail in all his restorations, but now his new order was not only extinct but extinguished. His first act was eminently characteristic of him. He had once endeavored to recall the part of the transactions of the American Philosophical Society in which his erroneous description and restoration was published, but he did not succeed. He thereupon issued the following printed circular, dated Philadelphia, March 25, 1870, a few days after I had informed him of his error and Professor

Leidy's demonstration of it. Professor's Cope Circular it read, In error, having been detected in the letter press of the synopsis of the extinct Batrykia and Reptilia of North America by Edward D. Cope, it will be necessary to cancel and replace one of the forms. The author therefore requests that the recipient of this notice would please return his copy of said work to the author's address, at his expense. The volume will be returned, postpaid, with part two of the same work, which will be sent to those who have received the corrected part one. Later, he issued a second edition of the volume containing a new restoration with the head in

its proper position, but there was nothing to show that a previous edition of the work had been published. Of the first edition numerous copies are extant. I return to Professor Cope at his request the one he sent me, but I have two others which I since purchased. There is one copy in the British Museum, several in Philadelphia, and doubtless many others in this country and Europe, and their existence cannot be ignored, much as Professor Cope desires it. I give this transaction as one sample of Professor Cope and his methods. One taste of the cheese.

Ha! What a funny way to end it. One taste of the cheese! Mike Drop. Cope is a fraud and a scoundrel. I fucking knew it all along. Uh, Cope's reply to all this was published the next day on January 20th 1890. He probably barely had time to cry himself to sleep on his cot the evening before. He was up all night writing furiously. And he wrote, Pachavi to the lizard story. To the change of turning a

lizard without a head. Wrong end, about, I answer, Pocavi. Latin I have sinned to some extent. But I wonder at Mars to repeat this ancient story, since it compels me to bring into prominence another scientist, my predecessor in the same field, who has done exactly the same thing and worse. I was able to correct part of the error of this author, but did not reverse the animal as I should have done.

In a very short time, my predecessor saw the error he and I had committed and corrected it in print without previously informing me. After all this, Congress will open up an investigation into Cope's allegations against Marsh and the survey and demand an itemized budget. Two years later, in 1892, Marsh will be forced to resign from the U.S. Geological Survey. Big win for Cope. When the budget for the U.S. Geological Survey was brought before a House committee that year, Congressman Hillary Herbert of Alabama found Marsh's recent publication on toothed birds from the Cretaceous seas of Kansas.

And while waving the publication dramatically on the House floor, Herbert shouted, Birds with teeth! That's where your hard-earned money goes, folks! On some professors silly birds with teeth! He then urged Congress to cut off the funds of these godless activities. Doesn't sound like he much cared for evolution. John Wesley Powell, still the director of the USGS, sent March the following telegraph shortly thereafter. Appropriations cut off. Please send your resignation at once. And then the Smithsonian demanded Marsh turn over a large part of his own fossil collection to them.

Dudes down and getting kicked. Meanwhile, Cope received a new paid position with the Texas Geological Survey. Things looking up for him. And he was even promoted to Joseph Leidy's former position as professor of zoology and was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science the same year Marsh had to step down from the Academy of Sciences. So things are turning around a little bit. But...

Cope's fortunes would soon fall again. Cope was forced to sell a significant portion of his fossil collection at a loss in the mid 1890s due to ongoing financial troubles. A fellow at the American Museum of Natural History paid 32,000 for a portion of Cope's collection that would help pay for a lot of Cope's debts. Then on April 12, 1897, Edward Cope died. He was just 56 years old. He died of renal failure. He also, how sad is this, he literally died alone on his fucking cot in his study where he was still sleeping by himself, still surrounded

by stacks and stacks of papers, published and unpublished, still surrounded by 13,000 fossils, roughly, for future study. That's all he had left. It was a dinosaur bones in the end. Cope's rivalry with Marsh would then not end with his death. Check out how ridiculous this is. He, in his will, he donated his skull to science specifically so that his brain could be measured in hopes that it would be bigger than Marsh's brain. Because at that time, brain size was believed to be a measure of intelligence.

Marsh would refuse to accept his challenge. He must have been like, you motherfucker, you're dead and you're still trying to embarrass me. You just won't quit Some believe that copes the skull is still at the University of Pennsylvania today, but the university claims they lost it in 1970s So somebody's got it probably After copes death one of his allies wrote about the rivalry. Perhaps it was a scientific providence in all this Perhaps such antagonistic spirits were necessary to enliven and disseminate interest in this branch of science throughout the country. This rivalry was tonic to Cope. Okay, now let's return to Marsh's continued downfall. By 1899, two years after Cope's

death, Marsh had spent all of his inheritance from Uncle Peabody. He'd mortgaged his home, he was nearly broke, he had to ask Yale for a salary which they did not give him. He had blown all his fucking money on dinosaur bones and on trying to ruin Cope's life, which he pretty much did, but the rivalry ruined his own as well. He caught pneumonia in early 1899, died on March 18th at the age of 67 with only $186 to his fucking name. Then after his death the Smithsonian would acquire over 80 tons of his fossils. Marsh had left the majority of his collection to the Peabody Museum. And now with both of these super competitive nerds dead, let's get out of this timeline. So after all that, who won the bone wars?

I mean, really, they both lost. But technically, it would be Othniel Marsh. He outlived his rival, and he was able to discover and name 80 species of dinosaur compared to Copes 56. Marsh also arguably discovered cooler dinosaurs. He was able to name Triceratops, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, and the dinosaur we now know as Brontosaurus. More on that later. Yeah, so that was the Bone Wars, the bitter rivalry between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

The competition between the two kicked off during their western expeditions of the 1870s. They would resort to bribery, alleged theft or plagiarism, even destruction of fossils in an attempt to ruin the other's reputation and cut off funding. Before their discoveries there were only nine named species of dinosaur in North America. The Bone Wars came to an end in the early 1890s after Cope went public with a list of allegations against Charles Marsh. And Marsh was then forced to resign from his position within the USGS. So yes, in the end neither guy really came out as much of a winner. They both died broken alone, literally surrounded by thousands of dinosaur bones, which is darkly funny to me.

They both had lost prominence in their fields by the time of their deaths as well. But they did discover more dinosaurs than anyone else of their era. Dinosaurs led directly to kids and adults alike all around the world becoming fascinated with dinosaurs. They did so much at great cost to themselves to ignite a huge sense of curiosity and wonder about what has come before us humans here on Earth. Too bad they couldn't have worked together and enjoyed it all a little bit more. Time for today's takeaways. Time Shuck Top 5 Takeaways Number one, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh were two paleontologists who came from very

different backgrounds. Marsh was born in 1831 into a family of modest means, but his paternal uncle was the extremely wealthy philanthropist George Peabody who finance all of his nephew's education Allowing Marsh to pursue a career He likely never would have dreamed of were it not for Peabody's generosity and influence Edward Cope born nine years later Came from wealthy family that nurtured his scientific interests and artistic talents, but his comparatively smaller fortune would run out before Marsh's would Number two Cope and Marsh were once friends before the rivalry began in 1868 talents, but his comparatively smaller fortune would run out before Marsh's would. Number 2. Cope and Marsh were once friends before their rivalry began in 1868.

They are believed to have been two inciting incidents for the rivalry. Cope showed Marsh around a fossil quarry in New Jersey. Marsh betrayed his trust by asking the quarry owner to then send new fossils to Yale so only he could get them. That same year, Cope published a paper on a dinosaur called Elastmosaurus, but he reversed the head and tail in his recreation in embarrassment Marsh made sure to point out to the academic community on more than one occasion.

Number three, the Bone Wars ramped up when Cope and Marsh traveled out west in the early 1870s. The two men fought for fossil hunting territory, with Marsh going as far as to hire spies to keep an eye out for Cope. It was a mad rush to find and describe as many new species as possible. With Marsh's strong connections in DC, he was able to have government backing for his

expeditions while Cope brought himself to financial ruin, funding his trips largely himself. Number 4. Cope and Marsh are credited with defining over 130 species of dinosaur. Although many in the scientific community disapproved of their rivalry and their errors did cause some confusion over the classification of new species, their massive contributions to the field of paleontology cannot be denied. And number five, new info.

One of Marsh and Cope's biggest battles centered around fossil beds in Morrison, Colorado. As mentioned in the timeline, these fossil beds were discovered in 1877 by Arthur Lakes, a teacher and geologist for hire. Lakes wrote that he discovered bones so monstrous, so utterly beyond anything I had ever read or conceived possible. During Marsha's time working with Lakes, bone hunters found the first fossils of Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus aka Bronzosaurus. Yeah, most people know Apatosaurus as Bronzosaurus because of one of Marsh's mistakes. In 1879, two years after naming the first Apatosaurus, meaning deceptive lizard, one of his workers found a more complete specimen in Wyoming. Marsh thought it was a new species. Named it Bronzosaurus, meaning thunder lizard. Because you know, fucking shook the ground like thunder when it walked, it was so big. But it wasn't a new species.

It was another specimen, a bigger specimen of the same species. The error was soon discovered, but scientific nomenclature required the keeping of the first name. However, the cooler name of Brontosaurus is the one that made its way into popular culture. And this mistake proved that Cope was not the only one who made mistakes during his paleontology career. It's tricky work, figuring out which big old dinosaur bones are truly new and which are replicates of previously discovered big old cool dinosaur bones!

Top 5 Takeaways The Bone Wars have been sucked. Nerdy but fun topic, I think. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for helping making time suck. Thank you to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins, for giving me the space to kick out this content. Thank you, Logan Keith, helping to publish this episode, designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. And thank you to Olivia Lee again for her initial research. Also, thanks to the all-seen eyes who moderate the culturally curious private Facebook group, the Mod Squad making sure Discord keeps running smooth, and all the peeps at the Time Suck subreddit and Bad Magic subreddits. And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates.

Starting off with such a fun update. Sent in by such a fun Susie and sucker Brian Shippers, who emailed this to Bojangles at TimeSuckPodcast.com, an email with the subject line of nerd alert. I love this. Oh, hello there Dan and the Time Suck crew. I've got a small gripe I must share with you. I just heard about your Sue Suck, a wonderful ride. But one little fact left me sad deep inside. Now maybe I'm late, just a few shows behind, and perhaps another bright nerd of your kind has written already to settle the score. But just in case not, I must knock on your door.

You spoke of the cat, the Grinch, and the Zaks, of sneeters and speeches and Soosian facts, but missed one fine gem that made my heart hurt, that Soos was the first to give us the nerd. It came from his book If I Ran the Zoo, back in the 50s, 1905 or two. He named a weird beast a nerd on a whim, and the rest of the world ran off after him. Now I'm a big nerd and I wear it with pride. My head in the clouds and my books at my side. So hearing that word has Soosian roots. Just adds to the charm of my nerdy pursuits.

Thanks for the suck and the knowledge you share. From cults to conspiracies, always with flair. Please keep on sucking the way that you do. This Spaceless is grateful for all of your crew. With love and some brain goo, Brian." Well Brian, what a wonderful update! Yeah, holy hell, I had no idea. The Dr. Seuss coined the word nerd. Very cool. Thanks for letting me know.

And... Bravo to you with your Seussian prose. You hit all those rhymes right on their nose. I was so impressed, I have to say, your crafted words really made my day. Next up. I was so impressed, I have to say, your crafted words really made my day. Next up, Alaskan sack Taylor White, sent in an email with the subject line of serum run additional info. Dear Master the Suck, currently listening to Short Suck 33, The Great Race of Mercy. I was born and raised in Ninana.

Currently live in Fairbanks and for reasons that are probably obvious, I usually avoid this topic when it's covered by Chichacos, the mushmouth pronunciation of Chicago that was originally used for newcomers during the gold rush. But now more generally used for outsiders. However, you guys have never let me down before so I figured I'd give it a shot. I did cringe the first couple times you mispronounced Ninana. Yeah, for some reason I wrote it down as Nun. Nunana. I don't know why. But you caught it later so all is forgiven.

It should be mentioned that mush rhymes with crush, not bush. Yeah, I always say mush. Mush. You're right. I appreciate that you were telling the real story that includes Togo. Even growing up in Alaska, we mostly only heard the version that made Balto out to be the biggest hero.

My mom grew up racing sled dogs in Ninana. My dad came in to it later in life but that was how they met. He always said he married the first girl he found that had her own chainsaw. The attached newspaper clipping features my mom number one when she participated in the 1995 commemorative serum run. The start had been widely advertised so the organizers were unwilling to change the date even though it was 54 degrees below zero at two in the afternoon. No one was actually at risk of dying other than the participants and their dogs. They only went a short distance outside town and then bedded the dogs down for the night in someone's yard. The next day was a balmy negative 35 so they completed their leg of the relay. Just thought you would find that interesting. Thank you so much for

all that you do, Taylor White. Taylor, love to hear from somebody from the tiny town of Nenana, Alaska. And love the pic of your mom. Oh my God, she's a fucking badass. And she is bundled up in that photo. And I guess you'd have to be to stay warm in that much cold. Just reminds me of Ralphie's little brother

in a Christmas story, just barely able to move in that snow suit. Man, she did not bail on that run when it was 54 below zero out. Tough meat sack. And love that your dad loved that she had her own chainsaw. Y'all are hearty folk up there. Enjoy your long way to summer.

Next up, a funny little sucker, anonymous, a funny anonymous little sucker, maybe is a better way to say that, send in a funny little email, with the subject line of people named Blaze. Dear semi-professional amateur sucker, long time listener, multiple time emailer that you never read on the podcast because you hate me like my parents do. I know this is a little bit behind in your podcast schedule, but I just finished the episode with the upstanding citizen named Blaze

and I've heard some updates about people emailing in about being named Blaze themselves or friends named Blaze. I too know a Blaze. I went to college with him and when asked how he got his name he said his dad wanted to name him Tiger and his mom wanted to name him after a saint. There's a Saint Blaze so his parents agreed to name him after Saint Blaze but spell it B-L-A-Z-E instead of B-L-A-I-S-E. The Blaze I went to school with sold Ed Hardy t-shirts and other merch that would quote fall off of trucks to friends for cash. That should give you an idea of the type of guy he was. I looked up information on St. Blaze and he is the patron saint of throat ailments.

Now all I can do is think that this saint would go around and tell women he can cure their sore Throat with his dick and then a hundred percent sounds like something a person in place would do Sorry for the long email best podcast in the universe would not change a thing three to five stars If you read this on air, please keep my name anonymous just in the off chance that blaze listens to the show Thanks, anonymous Anonymous sucker that is that is the kind of blaze I was expecting to hear about. A guy who sells stolen Ed Hardy t-shirts. So good. And I love that you're worried about this guy finding you and doing whatever a guy named blaze might do to you. And now one more. A very

thought-provoking message from a very thought-provoking sucker named Jake Hutchinson, who sent in an email with the subject line of open-minded Mormon sucker. Dear Suckmaster, Mormon Time Sucker Jake here. I wanted to share a story that popped into my head when you were talking about Christ and his favorite daily piece of clothing, a soft and comfortable tunic. The year is about 1989 and my dad was a Mormon missionary in the great state of Oklahoma. I know, exhilarating. One day he and his companion went to the mission home where the president of the mission lives and is kind of like the headquarters of the mission. One day he and his companion went to the mission home where the president of the mission lives and it's kind of like the headquarters of the mission. When my dad and his companion were walking up to the house,

my dad noticed his mission president gardening on his hands and knees in the dirt while wearing dress slacks and a white shirt and tie. The classic Mormonary missionary fit or the classic Mormon missionary fit. My dad proceeded to ask, President, what are you doing gardening in that? His mission president responded with, Elder, you have to learn to love what the Lord loves. My dad snapped back, I hear he loves loose robe. His mission president just shook his head and went back to gardening. I think my dad's a great example of how most members choose to live in my faith and likely most faiths. While some get lost in the culture of a church worrying about what to wear, eat, drink, watch, listen to, etc. most of us try and

always remember the big picture and know that the whole point is to be as Christ like as we can to our fellow men and simply try and be good human beings. I think this is becoming more and more true for members of all faiths, especially in younger generations. In your recent suck, the light of the world sex cult, there seemed to be a bit more of a tone shift from previous sucks on similar subjects. In the past you've always been critical of religion, especially Christianity. However, it was done with more of a respectful tone and was usually followed up with, I know this doesn't apply to everyone. This past episode however, you seemed angry and all Christians regardless of sect making us all seem to be

irrational hypocrites. Statements like, it's almost like this is all one big stupid fucking game. And I'm pretty sure my application of basic logic there is upsetting to some of you. Seemed a little more aggressive and demeaning than statements made in the past. It wasn't your use of logic, I'm well aware of hypocritical and irrational practices within my own faith, but it was the tone and words you used to express your opinion. Christianity is not a stupid game, it's a form of spiritual worship that brings peace and joy to millions of people around the world.

I don't know, I think at this point I'm rambling. I'm sorry for such a long message, I love the show, it will continue to be a loyal space lizard. I guess I'm just curious why you come down so hard on Christians as a whole. I also wonder why you never bring up the positive aspects of religion. One example being the amount of charity work and global welfare a lot of churches provide to their disenfranchised regardless of their religion, ethnicity, or political stance. Three out of five stars and a hail Nimrod. I hope you have a great week, and I look forward to the next Suck, same as always, Jake.

Well, Jake, thank you for such a thoughtful message. And I love that you included that anecdote about your debt, truly. First off, to address what you're saying here, yes, I am only especially critical of Christianity because I live in a Christian culture. And so the stories I tell are stories placed within the confines of and greatly influenced by Christianity. It's not because I have a problem specific to Christianity that I don't have with other religions, which I hope makes sense. Like if I lived in and told stories set in a Hindu or Buddhist culture, I imagine I would be equally critical

of those religions. Second, ironically, I'm trying to defend victims of Christianity when I do harshly critique the religion. My main problem with almost all religion, and you know, and definitely with Christianity and these examples, is that whether or not all believers follow all the rules or not, the rules are written into the sacred texts and those rules can be and are held over believers heads in many instances and unscrupulous people can and do use them way more than I would like to make others think that if they do not follow

these rules they will burn in hell and and that's a crazy amount of fear to put out on somebody especially a little kid. I mean, I think about my dad still complains, talks about the nightmares he had growing up thinking about burning in hell. Like he was fucking terrified of God growing up because of all the fire and brimstone talk. And there's millions and millions of people with that story. And, you know, when you have that kind of fear mmongering element within your texts, it can be used to convince someone to say, stay quiet about sexual abuse, in order to not have their soul be damned to hell.

And I sadly have known people personally who have had that happen to them, who have been sexually abused within their faith by people who claim to be big believers, and people who made them think that if they told they would twist scripture around and make them think that they're gonna like burn because of that. It's the abuse so frequently dished out in the name of religion that greatly bothers me. A lot of good things have been done and continued to be done in the name of religion, especially, you know, Christianity. As you said, you are absolutely right. But I do feel like those good deeds

always come with some kind of string attached. Even if you're alone, it's like missionary work and the people aren't, you know, they don't have to convert to receive food at a, you know, a fucking food bank or whatever. There is still this element in the background of but we're giving you this because of our God and we strongly want you to believe it and we want you to follow this path and this is a path of choose us or you will be burned alive forever. Like that's some pretty heavy shit in the background. Or at the very least you're not going to be rewarded like those who do follow the teachings when you die. And I just, it does just bother me. I just

feel like why can't you do good things without any attachment at all? Because like I'll just use myself as example. We do good things here at Bad Magic, zero strings. And to me that should be the only way to give. I don't expect fucking anyone we've ever made a charitable contribution to to listen to me, to even like me. We don't we don't weigh that. I know in this episode we were touched by somebody who wrote in, but in general we don't pick from within our community, we don't want to be nepotism like I guess in that sense, we want to just you know spread it around and give to you know we've given to religious

organizations, non-religious organizations, veteran organizations, LGBTQIA plus organizations, all kinds of organizations because a lot of people are hurting in the world, a lot of people from different demographics and we want to spread it around. And we want to do it just because it's the right thing to do, not because there's any message behind it. I started the charitable aspect of Bad Magic a long time ago simply because a lot of people are just hurt in the world. They need help. If you're able to do a little better than some other people, you should help, I think. And that's, and that's kind of it. There's no fucking, there's no agenda.

There's no fear mongering. There's no call to join us. No obligations of any kind. Uh, I don't think less of you at all for being religious. Some of the, my favorite people in life are very religious. I use her as example a lot, but my mother-in-law truly one of the best people I've ever fucking met. Very Catholic. You know, a lot of my best friends over the years have been, you know, from various Christian denominations.

So I bet you're an awesome dude, Jake. But I do wish that if you, if someone you cared about deeply left the church, you just wouldn't have to worry about them being eternally punished. It's that eternal punishment part that bothers me the most. That little dangling fucking horrible thing of hell out there of, and there is a message within Christianity of it doesn't matter if you're a good person, if you don't accept this, if you don't accept Jesus into your heart, if you don't accept you know these rules, you will fucking be like burned forever and that is abhorrent to me. And I will never understand how a supposedly loving God could fucking burn his children alive for not bending the knee to him.

Because I'm definitely not godly and I would never fuck. My fucking son could turn his back on me for the rest of his life and I would still love him. And I would never want to punish him. It's just it's just something that will never ever ever ever ever compute with me and I will always hate that aspect of it. So my anger, my judgment, it actually comes from a place of love. I don't want people to be afraid of that. I don't want people to feel that heavy fear and hatred. So I'm sorry that that did not come across like I wanted it to in that recent episode. I will work on that, truly. I don't want to keep beating this fucking drum. I actually, believe it or not, try not to speak out too much on that. I'm sure it doesn't come across that way, but I try. And I do thank you for taking the time to remind me to not be a fucking dick.

Or at least to, you know, not to work on not coming across as such a dick. fucking dick or at least to you know not to work on not coming across is such a dick and again if it works for you I'm happy that you feel good about it I just I just think personally that like you can be just as good as you are right now and not carry around any of that not care any of that rules but that be you know I know that you and I will differ forever I know that I'm gonna be the minority about this for the rest of my life without a doubt. But that's where it all came from. I hope that makes sense. I feel like I'm rambling now. That's all I got this week, you guys. All right.

Well, thank you for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast. Be sure and rate and review this show if you haven't already. Please and thank you. Helps keep us around. Scared to death, time suck each week, short sucks and nightmare fuels on the time suck and scared to death podcast feeds twice a month. Please don't let a rivalry with a peer get so intense it leaves you broke, alone and sleeping on a cot surrounded by stacks

of papers and boxes of dinosaur bones. Also, as always, please keep on sucking. Did you suckers hear about the Menendez brothers? I'm guessing you did. If you didn't, they shared emotional testimony, described as emotional testimony, on Tuesday, May 13th, admitting, quote, full responsibility for their parents' murders following a bombshell decision by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Jessick to resentence their original terms. Lyle Menendez said, amongst other things, I take full responsibility. Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Jesick to resentence their original terms.

Lyle Menendez said, amongst other things, I take full responsibility. I killed my parents. I made the choice to kill my mom and my dad in their own home. His brother, Eric, said, I made the choice to make a mockery of the justice system. I offer no excuse. I don't blame my parents. Lyle, 57 years old, Eric, 54, were dressed in blue jail garb and flashed big grins following their re-sentencing. They are both now eligible for parole. Doesn't mean they will get out, but probably they will. And probably soon. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Niyama Romani said that Eric and Lyle will likely be freed

in a matter of months. And if they are released soon, can we all just hope that as quickly as possible those two get down to business that maybe they get down to I don't know 1-800-BUSINESS 1-800-BUSINESS call 1-800-BUSINESS if you like business business business 800 with the one in front Business, business, Princeton money Profit, business, so much

Menendez, business, Menendez Investment enterprises, business for some business I'm lonely, I need to pay money I need a girlfriend, I need a rich lady To take care of me or give me her business. 1-800-BUSINESS PLEASE. Dear God, hurry. We no longer have our parents' money. We don't have resumes. We don't have jobs. We spent most of our lives in prison. We don't have new parents to kill and get more money Just have a phone number

1-800-BUSINESS-BUSINESS 800 with a 1 in front Business business please marry me If you're good at business give me some money I need money money business I want a business where you just give me money And I lay by the pool Can't we talk about it on the phone?

I need a phone I don't have a phone When I get a phone I'm gonna ask for the number to be 1-800-BUSINESS Business, business, business, business Business, business