Read an Excerpt

The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

The first American Jurassic dinosaur rush began in April 1877, when Arthur Lakes and Henry C. Beckwith unearthed gigantic bones from a now-famous hogback ridge near Morrison, Colorado (see figure 1). Lakes sent samples to two prominent Eastern paleontologists: Othniel Charles Marsh, a brooding, of American solitary Yale professor, and Edward Drinker Cope, a brilliant and combative Quaker from Philadelphia. The two pillars of vertebrate paleontology, Cope and Marsh were already bitter rivals. Indeed, Marsh showed interest in the fossils of Lakes only when he learned that his competitor had received some samples, also. Cope wrote to Lakes and offered to hire him as a collector, but he was too late. Lakes had already agreed to work for Marsh. Worse still, he asked Cope to forward the fossils he had sent him to Marsh in New Haven. Marsh published his first announcement of Lakes's discovery in the July 1 issue of the American Journal of Science. Later in the month, he received a letter from "Harlow and Edwards" (William Harlow Reed and William Edward Carlin) disclosing the existence of another locality for large fossil vertebrates somewhere near Laramie, Wyoming. (They initially kept their real names and the exact location of their discovery, Como Bluff, secret from Marsh.) When another letter from Wyoming warned about rival collectors nosing around at the site, Marsh worked quickly to secure the new locality and its mysterious discoverers for his own purposes. Meanwhile, Oramel W. Lucas alerted Cope to a site near Cañon City, Colorado, one hundred miles south of Morrison, where more enormous fossils had been found. Cope hired Lucas to dig them up and send them to Philadelphia for study and description. In an article dated August 23, he published his own notice of the discovery of gigantic fossil reptiles. With that, the first race for American Jurassic dinosaurs was under way.

The ensuing fossil feud between Cope and Marsh netted a wealth of new data that revolutionized the study of Jurassic dinosaurs. Before 1877, Jurassic dinosaurs were a very poorly known group, thanks in large part to a dearth of good fossils in Great Britain, Germany, France, and other traditional centers of paleontology. The Jurassic beds of the American West, on the other hand, showed themselves to be far more extensive and more fossiliferous than their European equivalents, and they yielded a superabundance of new dinosaurs, better preserved and often far more complete than anything found previously. The relative completeness of the specimens found in America provided, for the first time, a much clearer picture of dinosaur morphology, while the richness of the American fossil record opened a new window onto dinosaur diversity. New World fossils were an invaluable scientific resource that lent a considerable competitive advantage to any paleontologist who could acquire them. Cope and Marsh hired collectors to exploit this resource whenever and wherever possible. They found spectacularly productive fossil localities and excavated thousands of important specimens, many destined to become types. Back East, Cope and Marsh described and named dozens of new genera and species of dinosaurs, often on the basis of fragments or isolated elements, but sometimes from relatively complete skeletons. Many of the most familiar dinosaurs are the products of the first American Jurassic dinosaur rush, including the bizarre, dorsal-plated Stegosaurus, the fearsome, meat-eating theropods Ceratosaurus and Allosaurus, and the gigantic, long-necked, and whip-tailed sauropods, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, and Apatosaurus (aka Brontosaurus).

Marsh was the clear winner in the race for Jurassic dinosaurs, but his victory made him the object of Cope's envy. Although Cope enjoyed a fair number of successes, his Yale rival took the lion's share of the finest fossils. Marsh's final tally of specimens is not precisely known, but his several Jurassic localities in Colorado and Wyoming yielded not less than 1,115 crates of (mostly) dinosaur bones. From that rich harvest, he described twenty-one new genera and forty-one new species. Cope, who described about fifteen new species of Jurassic dinosaurs, Cope, was not one to accept defeat gracefully, however. With time, his resentment of Marsh's accomplishments festered into a thirst for revenge. In short, he was jealous, and he conspired with some shady characters to try to put an end to his troubles with Marsh. "Either he or I must go under," he wrote to a colleague. Marsh, for his part, could afford to be magnanimous in his relations with Cope, but he chose not to be. He was once overheard muttering about his archrival, "Godamnit! I wish the Lord would take him!"

Unfriendly rivalry exploded into public scandal in January 1890, when Cope and Marsh traded insults in the pages of the New York Herald. A headline that read "Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare" was the opening salvo in an ugly press campaign initiated by Cope and contrived to bring down Marsh and his chief accomplice, John Wesley Powell, director of the U.S. Geological Survey. To make his case, Cope mucked liberally from a desk drawer full of what he called "Marshiana"—a decades-old collection of notes on his archrival's alleged transgressions and errors. Marsh, too, had kept a careful record of Cope's most humiliating miscues, which he gleefully recounted in his published rebuttal. The result was an embarrassment for American science, replete with unsavory accusations of plagiarism, incompetence, dishonesty, fraud, theft, trespassing, and misappropriation of government funds. A number of Marsh's scientific assistants were implicated in the scandal. Many prominent American scientists also were drawn unwittingly into the fray. Others took sides, including Cope's Princeton allies William Berryman Scott and Henry Fairfield Osborn. When the reading public quickly lost interest in the strange scientific feud, the story disappeared, but not before Cope and Marsh were both permanently tarnished by the scandal. Marsh suffered the most when, as part of the fallout, he lost his lucrative federal funding in 1892. Forced to scale back his field and lab operations, he recalled his field-workers and continued his work at the museum in New Haven with more limited means.

Jurassic dinosaur collecting, however, had already ground to a halt. The great size and weight of Jurassic dinosaur bones rendered the effort to excavate, transport, and prepare them very costly and labor-intensive. For economy's sake, Cope and Marsh had directed their collectors to concentrate on the very best, the biggest, or the newest materials. Productivity eventually reached a point of diminishing returns, which brought an end to collecting before the localities were exhausted. Marsh transferred Lakes to Como Bluff in 1879, and thus abandoned the Morrison locality after two short seasons. Cope's collectors quit their Cañon City locality in 1883. A local rancher named Marshall P. Felch then opened two nearby quarries for Marsh in 1877, and worked them again from 1883 to 1888. Como Bluff proved to be Marsh's longest lasting Jurassic endeavor. Starting in 1877, a long series of field-workers mined this area continuously on the Yale professor's behalf. When Marsh's collectors finally abandoned the field in 1889, they left it open to any takers.

Several able paleontologists stepped into the breach. Wilbur Clinton Knight, professor of geology and mining at the University of Wyoming in Laramie seized the initiative in 1895–97, when he and Reed, one of Marsh's former collectors, and codiscoverer of the Como Bluff locality, made a local collection of Jurassic dinosaurs and marine reptiles. Reed had been collecting these specimens independently for years, and offering them for sale to any number of paleontologists, including Marsh and Osborn. Knight hired him to collect fossil vertebrates and develop exhibits exclusively for the university, which he proceeded to do with abandon. By the late 1890s, the Jurassic dinosaur collection at the University of Wyoming was probably the second largest in the world—after Marsh's storied collection at Yale. The sheer size of this collection, which weighed over eighty tons, prompted university officials to build a new science building to house and display it. Knight, meanwhile, inspired to unprecedented flights of fossil vertebrate generosity by the Jurassic riches available in southeastern Wyoming, began devising a means to spread the wealth more broadly.

Samuel Wendell Williston was an ally of Knight and Reed in the Jurassic of Wyoming. Williston earned an MD in 1880 and a PhD in entomology in 1885, both from Yale. He also had an abiding interest in fossil vertebrates. But Marsh, for whom he was working as a field and lab assistant, jealously guarded access to the precious Yale collections, including the Jurassic dinosaurs that Williston had had a hand in collecting at Morrison, Cañon City, and Como Bluff. Frustrated by Marsh's despotism, Williston quit the museum in 1885, but remained at Yale to teach anatomy. Cope then dragged him into his feud with Marsh when he published excerpts of a letter Williston had written that was exceedingly critical of his former boss. New Haven was now not nearly big enough for the two of them. When an opportunity to teach geology opened in April 1890 at the University of Kansas (KU) in Lawrence, Williston eagerly accepted. At KU he rekindled his interest in paleontology, beginning with the abundant marine reptile fauna of the western Kansas Cretaceous. He also made the acquaintance of Knight, who had similar research interests. In 1895, Knight invited Williston to bring a group of his best students to collect Jurassic dinosaurs in a new locality near Lusk, Wyoming. Williston was still a little bitter about his experience at Yale, and he viewed Knight's new locality as an opportunity to make inroads into Marsh's Jurassic dinosaur monopoly. He wrote to Osborn, predicting, "I propose to go into the Jurassic and I trust will make it interesting for [Marsh]. I learn ... that he ... proposes now to write a book.... I shall await the results with interest, and may, perhaps, if I get the material from a brand new locality that I am after, undo some of his work." But the new locality proved relatively unproductive. Williston and his enthusiastic students cleaned it out completely in only a few short days.

Dean of the Terrible Lizards

By the 1890s, Marsh reigned supreme as the dean of American dinosaur paleontology. His Yale successor, Charles Beecher, claimed that "Marsh stood as the sole possessor of an acute and comprehensive knowledge of [the dinosaurs], one of the most wonderful and difficult groups known." In November 1896, Marsh staked his claim to dinosaur supremacy with the publication of his hefty and lavishly illustrated monograph, The Dinosaurs of North America. A second contribution, "Vertebrate Fossils [of the Denver Basin]," which appeared shortly thereafter, bolstered this claim. These works were the first of a kind, presenting a comprehensive account of dinosaur structure and classification, and summarizing the results of a long series of Marsh's own papers, which had been issued scattershot over the previous quarter century. Marsh's biographers have pointed out the significance of the former volume, calling it "the foundation of dinosaur knowledge" and "a testament to [Marsh's] unsurpassed knowledge of [dinosaurs]."

These books also served as a clarion call for Marsh's rivals. Cope, who was grappling with an agonizing ailment that would end his life in April 1897, at age fifty-six, was in no shape to carry on with his infamous feud. Legions of paleontologists of the next generation, however, including Williston, Knight, Reed, and especially Osborn, were eager to take shots at Marsh's prized monographs. Marsh had kept his fossils under lock and key at Yale for years, pending the outcome of his meticulous studies. Now his results were available in print, and rivals could gain access to the collections through his printed descriptions and detailed figures. The books provided a baseline set of facts and ideas that could be tested in the field and confirmed, or, better still, contradicted by new and better specimens. Marsh and his work were now subject to revision. Many field paleontologists would take The Dinosaurs of North America west for ready reference during the second Jurassic dinosaur rush. Others, wishing they had, would write to their respective museums to have the indispensable volume sent out. That they all referred incessantly to Marsh's work was an unmistakable indication of its importance, but it was also a sign that they felt it could be bested.

One of Marsh's most important contributions to dinosaur paleontology was the publication of a series of complete, lifelike drawings of reconstructed skeletons that served to illustrate the probable former appearance of a number of dinosaurs, including Brontosaurus (Figure 2), Stegosaurus (Figure 3), Ceratosaurus (Figure 4), Camptosaurus, and Laosaurus, all from the American Jurassic. By their very nature, skeletal reconstructions were somewhat speculative—Marsh thought of them as working hypotheses. Marsh's paper reconstructions were particularly important visual aids in the late nineteenth century, before mounted dinosaur exhibits proliferated widely in American museums. Indeed, they likely played a crucial part in inspiring museum paleontologists, administrators, and benefactors alike that exhibit-quality dinosaur skeletons displayed in lifelike poses would appeal to the American public.

Marsh's work set a high-water mark in the brief tradition of fossil reconstructions. The earliest known dinosaur reconstructions—some dating to 1838—were crude and based on scant fossil evidence. So too were the boxy, life-size models executed by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and displayed on the grounds of the Crystal Palace, near London, beginning in 1854. Richard Owen oversaw their design, and thus they resembled the "elephantine lizards" he envisioned when he coined the term dinosaur in 1842. Despite their shortcomings, the Crystal Palace models were immensely popular. In 1868, Hawkins, along with Cope and his mentor, Joseph Leidy, mounted one of America's first dinosaurs, Hadrosaurus foulkii, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. It, too, was an immensely popular exhibit. Hadrosaurus was the world's first and only mounted dinosaur fossil until 1883, when paleontologist Louis Dollo and his chief preparator Louis De Pauw exhibited first one and then a series of fully mounted Iguanodon skeletons in Brussels, Belgium.

Marsh, along with many of his contemporaries, was skeptical of the value of mounted fossil vertebrates, and he mocked the Crystal Palace models as an "injustice" to dinosaurs. He declined to mount any of his own invaluable dinosaur skeletons for display. A cautious scholar, he worried particularly that a prematurely mounted restoration would be prone to error, and that such errors, once established, would be impossible to dislodge from the public mind. Besides, paper reconstructions would be much easier to manage for the gigantic Jurassic dinosaurs found in the American West. Cope, however, struck first when he displayed a life-size paper reconstruction of his Camarasaurus supremus at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in December 1877. He showed it again in Europe in 1878, where it excited tremendous interest. Despite its popular reception, he never published this illustration in his lifetime. Marsh, by contrast, brought out a paper menagerie of no less than twelve complete dinosaur reconstructions, beginning in 1883 with Brontosaurus excelsus, in the American Journal of Science. Late in 1895, he compiled these reconstructions on a pair of large plates, privately printed and issued as separates. They also made an encore appearance in The Dinosaurs of North America, which circulated widely among American paleontologists the following year. Marsh's stunning reconstructions were duplicated repeatedly in textbooks, encyclopedias, newspapers, and other popular publications. They served to familiarize working scientists and the general public with the fantastic size and grotesque skeletal appearance of America's Jurassic dinosaurs.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush by PAUL D. BRINKMAN Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---