Chapter Two
LAWRENCE, KANSAS, IS LOCATED ABOUT TWO HUNDRED miles east of the geographic center of the continental United States, and, perhaps due to this proximity, has a long history of being in the middle of things. The town was settled on the urging of a congressman from Massachusetts named Eli Thayer after the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, which allowed states newly admitted to the Union to choose for themselves whether to allow slavery. “Let us settle Kansas with people who will make it free by their own voice and vote,” he argued. “Come on, then, gentlemen of the slave states. Since there is no escaping your challenge, we will accept it in the name of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers, as it is right.” A party of New England abolitionists traveled along what was then known as the California Road, a path along which thousands of Gold Rushers had flowed west a few years earlier, and selected a spot in the rolling prairie between the Kansas and Wakarusa rivers for a settlement they named Lawrence.
The fighting began not long after the town had a name. An abolitionist settler from Ohio by the name of Charles Dow was shot in the back by his pro-slavery neighbor, Franklin Coleman, the culmination of an argument between the two men that had lasted several weeks over the boundaries of their land. Coleman fled to neighboring Missouri, where he convinced a sympathetic sheriff to arrest one of Dow’s friends who had vowed to avenge his death. That, in turn, provoked a group of at least fifteen abolitionists in Lawrence to form a raiding party and attempt a rescue. “They were armed with all sorts of weapons,” wrote Richard Cordley, an abolitionist minister who eventually received the first degree awarded by the University of Kansas. “Some of them had rifles; some of them had shotguns; and some of them had pistols. They had come with anything they happened to have in the house. One or two had no weapons whatever. One of these picked up two large stones which he clutched in his hands in a way which showed his intensity of purpose, and illustrated the determination of the whole company.”
Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1861, three months before the start of the Civil War, though that did little to settle Lawrence’s future. Two years later, more than four hundred Confederate guerrillas under the command of a former Missouri schoolteacher named William Quantrill torched the city. It rebuilt itself in months, a flurry of activity that Cordley called “a matter of conscience.” Lawrence pressed forward. In 1865, a newly-established Board of Regents officially founded the University of Kansas on a small hill overlooking Lawrence; in 1867, the first locomotive reached the city. “Kansans had suffered from practically every affliction known to man: from violence, murder and territorial civil war, from a bloody and costly national civil war, from drought and famine and disease and poverty, from senseless and unscrupulous political conniving complete with lies, deceit and whole knavery,” wrote one historian of the time. “The creation of the university was not exactly a miracle—miracles were rare in Kansas—but it was still an awesome event.”
Nearly everything about the existence of the University of Kansas was unlikely, and it reciprocated in kind by filling its halls with the sort of students who were not found in the elite institutions of the East Coast. Across the country, the rapid pace of industrialization meant that the raw material of America was for the first time tapped for its potential at a grand scale, refining the base elements of nature into something greater than was there before. Iron ore became steel; coal transformed into power for steam engines and factories; seams of gold glittered into jewelry. And, at the dozens of public colleges and universities sprouting up across the country, young adults whose parents were never given an opportunity for a formal education became a rising class of professionals ready to build new lives that did not rely on their physical labor. The first student body of the University of Kansas consisted of twenty-six women and twenty-nine men, making it one of the first public institutions in the country to admit women on an equal footing, and the university made it its mission to show that the brains of the children of farmers were just as potent as those of the privileged. To do so, it hired professors who were tired of the politics and traditions of liberal arts institutions on the East Coast and welcomed the chance to do things differently, often inserting Lawrence into intellectual disputes with universities founded before the Revolutionary War.
It was a place ideally suited for a young man in a hurry like Barnum Brown. He entered the university as an engineering student in the fall of 1893 after completing two years of high school in Lawrence, setting up his fossil collection in his shared room on the second floor of the only dorm on campus. After years of isolation on the farm, the fact that he was now surrounded by peers was intoxicating. It would soon become clear that despite his intellect Brown was not a natural scholar, finding himself more attuned to the social aspects of the university than to its academic demands. He would tell stories about his college days for the rest of his life, often recounting his adolescent adventures with such joy that it seemed as if they had happened yesterday.
In notes for his never published autobiography, he described how a friend named Baker had forgotten the terms “oviparous” and “viviparous” in zoology class, leading him to stand up and ask the professor, “Professor Dyche, do bats lay eggs or do they ah-ah?” When the professor replied, “Mr. Baker, the bats ah-ah,” Brown wrote that “the girls figuratively swallowed their handkerchiefs and Baker had to leave school for a week to escape ridicule.” In chemistry, Brown learned that metallic sodium would ignite if exposed to water. He put this knowledge to work by sneaking with his roommate into the dorm room of the women who lived below them and laying a coil of the substance in their chamberpot while they were away. In the middle of the night, “a scream came out of their room for one the girls thought she was sitting over a sizzling snake.”
Amid the juvenile pranks, Brown found time to pursue the explanations that had eluded him as a boy. The University of Kansas was still new, and that sense of being at the beginning encouraged students to seek out those who could answer their questions. A box full of seashells he’d found at his family’s farm sat in his room, a daily reminder of what had once animated him to stretch beyond the limits of home. Though he had yet to have him as a teacher, Brown made his way to the office of the professor whom he would credit with changing his life.
Like Brown, Samuel Wendell Williston was the son of migrants who came to Kansas in search of better opportunities, and he spent his early life crammed in a one-room cabin with a family of six who never had enough to eat. Despite the hardships of the frontier, Williston was naturally more bookish than his brothers, and at the age of fifteen he escaped to the Kansas State Agricultural College, where he began collecting insects and fossils. Thanks to the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin Mudge, a renowned professor at the university who wrote the first book on the geology of Kansas, Williston was hired as the primary assistant to Othniel Charles Marsh at Yale. There, he had a front-row seat to a bitter feud that greatly expanded the number of prehistoric creatures known to have once lived on the Earth, conducted at the cost of one man’s fortune and the other’s reputation.
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THE TERM “DINOSAUR” DATES TO April 1842, when a wealthy professor of anatomy named Richard Owen published a paper in which he argued that a new term was needed for the strange, enormous bones that were popping up throughout England. He landed on it by combining the Greek word deinos, which not only means terrible or fearfully great but also implies a sense of the inconceivable, with sauros, which means lizard. The animals that made up the order of Dinosauria “attained the greatest bulk, and must have played the most conspicuous parts . . . as devourers of animals and vegetables, that this earth has ever witnessed,” he wrote. And then, in a moment of self-congratulation altogether in character for a tall, intense man known for his unblinking stare, he added, “A too cautious observer would, perhaps have shrunk from such speculations. . . . But the sincere and ardent searcher after truth, in exploring the dark regions of the past, must feel himself bound to speak of whatever a ray from the intellectual torch may reach, even though the features of that object should be but dimly revealed.”
Owen’s decision to label what we now think of as dinosaurs as a new order was inspired less by the intellectual torch than by resentment of a less-connected rival. He grew up in the town of Lancaster as the wealthy son of a draper who had made a fortune in trade with the West Indies, and seemed uninterested in any particular profession, bouncing through life as if intent to make good on his childhood tutor’s warnings that he was “lazy and impudent” and would “come to a bad end.” With his father’s help, Owen secured a position as an apprentice to a local surgeon, and began treating prisoners at a county jail with leeches and other natural remedies. He was soon called to assist in his first autopsy, conducted on the remains of an inmate who died while in the state’s care and had no relatives to object to a procedure that was by many considered a sin. Convinced that he had seen a ghost while walking to the jail tower, Owen was late to recover the body, and as soon as the procedure started regretted every decision that had led him to that moment. He felt such an overwhelming sense of revulsion the first time he saw the organs and bones of the dead man whom he had failed to heal that he vowed to “never, never again . . . desecrate the Christian corpse and to quit a profession that could only be learned by such practices so repugnant to the best feelings of one’s nature.”
Yet something made him stay. He grew fascinated with anatomy, seeing in the perfect architecture of muscle and bone the hand of God. He began collecting the skulls of dogs and cats, as well as any human remains that he could secure through whatever means necessary. (He once paid a jailer for the severed head of a Black prisoner who had died in custody and, while carrying it in a bag back to his laboratory, slipped on some ice; the head went tumbling down a snowy hill and into the open door of a cottage, where Owen raced inside and grabbed it without stopping to calm the terrified people who lived inside. The red spots in the snow the next day led to whispers that the Devil was raising an army conscripted of the ghosts of the enslaved.)
The focus on the anatomical structure of life led Owen to consider the intent of its Creator. Were all species just as God had originally made them, with the strong jaws and narrow vision of a carnivore a sign that it was designed for predation while the hooves and flat teeth of herbivores signaled they were predestined for evasion, or did lifeforms change over time? Already, science had abundant evidence in the form of folklore that the history of life on Earth was not a straight line, though few who considered themselves scholars would stoop to believing that stories of fancy could have a basis in fact.
Ancient discoveries of fossils likely served as the basis for legendary creatures such as dragons and sea serpents, as cultures around the world looked to square the discovery of bones of no-longer living creatures with the fact that they existed at all. Tattoos of griffins—mythical eagle-beaked lions adorned with powerful wings—decorated the skin of nomadic Saka–Scythnians who lived five centuries before the common era and whose mummified remains were discovered in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia in the 1940s. The same sandstone region is now known as an abundant source of Protoceratops, beaked dinosaurs the size of sheep whose profiles look remarkably like those of griffins. The fossil beds on the Greek island of Samos, meanwhile, likely inspired tales of savage monsters known as Neades, thought to be able to tear the earth apart with their cries. In a depiction of Heracles rescuing Hesione from the Monster of Troy on a Corinthian vase dating to the sixth century BCE, the monster’s skull closely matches that of an extinct giraffe whose remains are widespread throughout Greece and Turkey. In North America, Algonquins recognized what they called “the bones found under the Earth” as ancient demons killed by the heroic god Manabozho, while the Blackfeet considered dinosaur fossils “the grandfathers of the buffalo” and the Zuni saw fossils of belemnites—a form of prehistoric squid—as “lightning or thunder stones” and prized them as a form of battle armor. In Asia, what we now call dinosaur fossils were once considered “dragon’s bones” and often ground into fine powders for tonics and medicines, while artwork found in the Mokhali Cave in the southern African nation of Lesotho shows what appears to be a dinosaur leaving footprints across the valley.
Over time, the abundant remnants of prehistoric life became harder to reconcile with the idea that they were the relics of monsters abolished by ancient heroes. While Greeks accepted that enormous footprints found in stone had been laid there by a race of giants known as Titans, and medieval Europeans believed that fossilized animal prints were the works of otherworldly creatures ranging from devils to King Arthur’s favorite dog, Cavall, the ease with which fossils were found in North America made it difficult to find supernatural explanations for something so commonplace. (In what amounted to a last-ditch effort to find a biblical interpretation for what they were encountering in the New World, Puritan colonists convinced themselves that the dinosaur tracks they found were the footprints of enormous birds that had somehow escaped from the menagerie of Noah’s Ark.)
A French baron named Jean-Léopold-Nicholas-Frédéric Cuvier, who was known as Georges, established the concept of extinction in a 1796 lecture that refuted the commonly held notion that all life fit into an unchanging Great Chain of Being that culminated in God. After examining bones found in Siberia that included a three-and-a-half-foot-long femur and several teeth that weighed more than five pounds each, Cuvier argued that they corresponded with no living animal, proving that life is made up of innumerable single flames that can be extinguished, rather than one solid bonfire whose composition always remains the same. “What has become of these two enormous animals of which one no longer finds any living traces,” Cuvier asked his audience, unveiling the bones of what we now know as a mammoth. They “seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.”
Though he recognized that some forms of life have disappeared from the Earth, Cuvier did not make the jump that those that remained could evolve based on their environment, and argued fiercely with anyone who did that anatomy cannot take half-steps on the way toward a new species. In this, he made allegiances with religious scholars who thought that the concepts of extinction and evolution would inspire humankind to abandon all morality by lessening the value of human life. “I am not quarreling or finding fault with a crocodile; a crocodile is a very respectable person in his way,” said the Reverend William Buckland, a theologian known for his attempts to prove that fossils were the record of the biblical flood and for accidentally eating the mummified heart of Louis XIV of France because he thought it was a rare mineral. “But I quarrel with finding a man, a crocodile improved.”
Owen enrolled at the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1827, and was given the job of dissecting and identifying some of the ten thousand animal specimens that had sat untouched in its collection for over twenty-five years because someone had misplaced the manuscripts that labeled them. When Cuvier, whose collection of prehistoric life at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris had made him the most well-known of what were then called fossilists, traveled to London to view the Royal College’s collection of fossilized fish, Owen was named his assistant, in large part because he was one of the few students who spoke fluent French. They struck up a friendship, with the young, gangly Owen becoming a constant companion of the obese, sixty-one-year-old Cuvier, whom people unflatteringly called the Mammoth behind his back. Owen was in his twenties and becoming a part of London’s social and scientific elite, eventually raising his status so high that Prince Albert would one day call on him to tutor the nine royal children. Interacting with a giant in the field only increased his ambition to rise higher at a time when the discovery of the prehistoric world made it seem that humans were coming close to fully understanding God’s designs. Once, when he was introduced as the “Cuvier of England,” he complained in a letter that “I wish they would be content to let me be the Owen of England.”
The only problem was that others kept getting in his way. In 1811, the same year that Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility, a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Anning living about a hundred miles away from her in southwest England unearthed the complete skeleton of an unknown bug-eyed creature below the cliffs at Lyme Regis that looked to have the head of a crocodile, the beak of a bird and the body of a giant, slender fish. Anning, whose father had died in debt and whose mother relied on charity to feed her children, sold the skeleton to a local lord for twenty-three pounds, a sum large enough to support the family for six months. The creature was soon taken to the British Museum, where English and French naturalists debated what exactly it was (the French soon lost patience with their British counterparts, with one of Cuvier’s contemporaries declaring that English papers were “abstruse, incomprehensible and for the most part, uninteresting”). Charles Koning, who was then the Keeper of Natural History at the British Museum, named the animal Ichthyosaurus, meaning fish-lizard.
Curious what else Lyme Regis had to offer, naturalists began showing up at the Anning house and asking if Mary had anything new to sell them. She was often seen venturing below the cliffs wearing a long, dark dress, red scarf and white bonnet, clutching a pickaxe in one hand and a basket to hold her finds in the other. One friend who went on a prospecting trip with her later said that “we climbed down places, which I would have thought impossible to have descended had I been alone. The wind was high, the ground slippery, and the waves beating against Church Cliff. When we had clambered to the bottom our dangers were by no means over. . . . In one place she had to make haste to pass between the dashing of two waves. . . . She caught me with one arm round the waist and carried me some distance.”
Anning’s specimens were the chief attraction in a small shop her family opened a few blocks from the shore. It was there that she interacted with some of the wealthiest men of the era on a near-equal footing in the specialized realm of fossil discovery, a dizzying turnabout for a girl whom the local townsfolk had always found a bit odd even before she started pulling strange bones out of the ground—an opinion perhaps formed after she survived a lightning strike that killed three adults standing near her. “She frankly owns that the society of her own rank is become distasteful to her,” one of her friends wrote.
Anning had neither the wealth nor the status to formally study the fossils she found, leaving others to claim the credit for her discoveries. She attempted to teach herself French in order to read Cuvier’s essay about her specimens, desperately trying to connect with a world that shunned her despite her contributions. She was paid small sums for each specimen she unearthed, while well-connected scholars and naturalists used her work to brighten their own careers. Among them was Owen, whose attempt to flatter Anning by going on a prospecting trip with her was one of the very few times he set foot in a fossil dig in the field. Anning was guarded around him, and he left empty-handed. “She says the world has used her ill and she does not care for it,” a friend wrote. “According to her account, these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal by publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.”
Anning was not the only one digging through England for fossils in hopes of securing a foothold in a better life. While she prospected in Lyme Regis, a shoemaker’s son named Gideon Algernon Mantell could be found on the banks of the river Ouse sifting for what he called “medals of creation” that represented “the wreckage of former lives turned to stone.” Mantell’s preoccupation with the past stemmed in part from the fact that his now-lowly family could trace its lineage to a knight who had accompanied William the Conqueror in the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Sir Walter Mantell took part in a 1554 attempt to block the Catholic marriage of Queen Mary to Philip of Spain; when the plot failed, Sir Walter was among those executed by the monarch known as “Bloody Mary,” and the family’s estates in Kent, Sussex and Northamptonshire were seized by the Crown. “In my boyish days I fancied I should restore its honors and that my children would have obtained the distinctions our knightly race once bore,” Gideon Mantell wrote.
He became a country doctor, immersed in everything from treating smallpox and burns to amputating the legs of men and boys injured in the local mills, all while delivering between two and three hundred babies a year. When he was not healing others, he was a fixture at the Lewes library, devouring the work of James Parkinson, a doctor now best known for his description of Parkinson’s disease but who at the time was famous for his work as a geologist. Mantell was drawn to Parkinson’s attempts to square religion with science, such as his conclusion that the biblical story of Moses is “confirmed in every respect, except as to the age of the world, and the distance of time between the completion of different parts of creation.” When Mantell came across a newly-opened quarry in the rolling, wooded hills of the Weald region of southeast England, which exposed layers of sediment up to forty feet deep, he climbed down into it and began collecting fragments of teeth and shells. He soon found the stump of what seemed to be a prehistoric palm tree and brought it home to add to what was becoming a small private museum.
He spent much of his free time chiseling through rock to unveil the fragments of what he soon identified as the femur and ribs of unknown animals. If not for the fact that he was holding the fossils in his own hands, he would not have believed that they existed, largely because of the size of the lifeforms they implied. One section of a rib stretched twenty-one inches long; a thigh bone measured almost thirty. The practicalities of sustaining such huge animals seemed impossible. How much food would something so giant need to consume each day? How could a muscle ever be strong enough to move the bones of a creature that was larger than a house? “I may be accused of indulging in the marvelous, if I venture to state that upon comparing the larger bones of the Sussex lizard with those of the elephant, there seems reason to suppose that the former must have more than equaled the latter in bulk and exceeded thirty feet in length!” he wrote. “This species exceeded in magnitude every animal of the lizard tribe hitherto discovered, either in a recent or a fossilized state.”
One morning in 1820 or 1821, Mantell brought along his wife, Mary, on his medical rounds. While he was with a patient, she passed the time by sorting through a pile of stones on the edge of the road. Among the items she picked up was a smooth object the color of mahogany that was more than an inch long and, upon closer inspection, looked to be a fossilized tooth. When Mantell returned, he immediately seized on the importance of her discovery. The tooth had a broad, flattened surface like those of mammalian herbivores, yet nothing in science at the time suggested that mammals had lived in the prehistoric era. (Indeed, Parkinson’s essays argued that while the time elapsed in the Bible was off, the order was not, implying that God had begun creating mammals only after completing work on lesser forms of life, improving on each one until he made humans in his own image.) The tooth was unlike any fish, turtle or amphibian fossil, and seemed to imply something else entirely. “As no known, existing reptiles are capable of masticating their food I could not venture to assign the tooth in question to a lizard,” Mantell wrote.
A tooth was not enough to prove the existence of an entirely new form of life, nor were fossilized fragments of bone. Yet together, they provided a wealth of evidence that was impossible to disregard. Mantell, forever looking for a chance to restore his family’s past glory, grew convinced that he had discovered “one or more gigantic animals of the Lizard Tribe” that were altogether different from the type of fish-lizard uncovered by Anning. He began sending the bones and teeth he found to eminent geologists such as Cuvier, clawing his way into a social echelon from which he had long been excluded. “I am resolved to make every possible effort to obtain that rank in society to which I feel entitled both by my education and my profession,” he wrote in his journal.
In his letters, he argued that he had found evidence of what he called an Iguanodon, a name derived from the fact that the tooth Mary Mantell found resembled those of an iguana yet was many times larger. When, in 1832, workers at a quarry in Tilgate Forest discovered fragments of petrified bone after blasting a particularly hard section of rock, Mantell bought the lot and had them carted to his home some thirty miles away. He spent weeks chiseling away until he could identify several vertebrae, ribs and a sternum, along with more than ten strange bones that were seventeen inches long and had no apparent purpose. Only after trying to place them in different sections of the body did he realize that they were in fact a form of armor that ran down the spine. He called the creature Hylaeosaurus, meaning forest lizard, and with that identified the first of what are now known as a family of armored dinosaurs called ankylosaurs.
With Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus, Mantell was responsible for the discovery of two of the three species of what we now call dinosaurs that were known to science at the time (the other, a carnivore with serrated, bladelike teeth known as Megalosaurus, was found by Reverend Buckland at a slate quarry in Stonesfield, though he considered the find a minor accomplishment compared to his attempt to taste every living animal on Earth). Unable to shake the feeling that he might find a beast that measured over two hundred feet long, Mantell recentered his life around fossils, letting first his marriage and then his medical practice dissolve. As he rose up the social ladder, he received invitations to speak before the celebrated Geological Society in London, where he conversed with the sort of privileged men inclined to look down on country doctors who survived on the money they made delivering babies.
Among them was Richard Owen, who felt his chance at becoming the Owen of England slipping away. A proposal by the Geological Society to reclassify geological time based on the evidence of lifeforms, rather than type of stone, heightened Owen’s desire to put his stamp on the biological record. In 1841, the layer of Earth’s history that was once known as the primary rocks was rechristened the Azoic era, implying the absence of life. The layer of transition rocks was renamed the Paleozoic era, meaning ancient life, while the secondary rock layer became known as Mesozoic era, meaning middle life. The tertiary rock layer became known as the Cenozoic era, identifying it as the home of newer forms of life.
The pages of the history of life were waiting to be filled in, and Owen wanted to be the one who did it—or least received the credit. Though he never found any fossils of importance, Owen began to criticize Mantell’s interpretations of the anatomy of Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus and the similarities between species, and at times implied that he was the first to identify anatomical features that Mantell had previously observed. Mantell considered such acts “piracy” and resolved to no longer share his work with Owen.
In October 1841, Mantell was riding in a carriage across Clapham Common in London when the driver lost control of the horses. Mantell fell while trying to grab the tangled reins and was dragged along the ground, severely damaging his spine. Over the following days, Mantell felt a sensation of numbness spreading through his legs and soon found that he was unable to walk. His work scouring quarries and chiseling away stone appeared to be over.
Owen, meanwhile, continued to focus on the anatomical structures of Mantell’s discoveries, and realized that the shaft of the Iguanodon femur was at a right angle to the pelvis, much like that of a mammal. By implication, this meant that it walked with its legs below it, like an elephant or deer, rather than with its legs splayed to the side, like a crocodile. Taking this line of thought further, that meant that the creature’s tail—which, curiously, had proven difficult to find in the fossil record—would be drastically shorter than Mantell had estimated, leaving its overall size well below 200 feet.
In late 1841, a wealthy wine merchant and amateur geologist named William Saull purchased the first known sacrum, or lower spine, of an Iguanodon and installed it in his private museum. With Mantell unable to travel, Owen was one of the first to view it, and soon grasped its importance: the vertebrae of the lower spine were fused, just like the spine of Megalosaurus. That small adaptation allowed a creature’s backbone to become incredibly strong, making it capable of supporting a body consisting of gigantic bones and mammoth muscles. The feature was not found on Ichthyosaurus nor on any of the other apparent sea creatures that Mary Anning had discovered, suggesting to Owen that there had once been a distinct group of enormous reptiles that, like contemporary mammals, were designed to walk upright on land with their legs tucked under them.
Though he excluded other prehistoric reptiles that would eventually become recognized as belonging to the same group, Owen focused on the similar anatomical characteristics of Iguanodon, Hylaeosaurus, and Megalosaurus, and argued they were large, unintelligent beasts that walked on all fours—a sort of reptilian rhinoceros. Over the next several weeks, he played around with different names for them, before settling on the term “dinosaur,” which he introduced in an 1842 speech. With that, he claimed for himself the work that Mantell had done over the past twenty years, and within months attained the glory that would forever elude his rivals. The prime minister commissioned an oil portrait of Owen to hang in his home, and followed it up with a letter to the Queen recommending that Owen receive a royal pension equivalent to $20,000 a year in today’s dollars. Mantel seethed in a letter to a friend that Owen had “altered names which I had imposed, and stated many inferences as if originating from himself when I had long since published the same,” but had little recourse. His health continued to deteriorate, leaving him with few distractions beyond kindling his loathing of Owen. “It is astonishing with what intense hatred Owen is regarded by most of his contemporaries, with Mantell as arch-hater,” said Thomas Henry Huxley, a prominent backer of Darwin at the time whose grandson, Aldous, would go on to write the novel Brave New World.
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THE STUDY OF DINOSAURS REMAINED largely confined to England for the next thirty years until Arthur Lakes, an Oxford graduate who immigrated to the United States and later settled in Colorado to work as a schoolteacher, uncovered bones the size of tree trunks while on a walk with his friend Henry Beckwith in the spring of 1877. With a few minutes searching, they uncovered a vertebra nearly three feet in circumference that required the strength of three men to lift it into a cart. “It was so utterly beyond anything I had ever read or conceived possible that I could hardly believe my eyes,” Lakes would later write.
He sent a few representative samples of the fossils to Othniel Charles Marsh, a professor at Yale whose fame rested on his perch as the first professor of paleontology in the United States. As a solitary child who had often clashed with his father after his mother’s death from cholera, Marsh spent much of his time alone exploring minerals exposed by the digging of the nearby Erie Canal, and at the age of twenty received a portion of his mother’s marriage dowry that allowed him to enter boarding school at Phillips Academy at the comparatively old age of twenty. He graduated from Yale University at the age of twenty-eight and led some of the first paleontology expeditions in the United States through what would become South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming. Hasty, possessive, and disinclined as he aged to go out into the field himself, Marsh held a chair at the university that was endowed by his uncle, George Peabody, who had built a fortune through setting up a transatlantic trade in commodities and a banking firm in London. Peabody’s success made him one of the richest men in the United States, and his attempts to give most of his wealth away made him one of the most famous.
The gulf in personality between an uncle and nephew could not have been more vast. At his death, Peabody was praised for a life that was “illustrated and adorned by the constant practice of the most conspicuous probity, charity and good will toward mankind.” Marsh, on the other hand, seemed inherently cold and suspicious, his temperament marked by “an absence of the complete exchange of confidence which normally exists between intimate friends,” one of his longtime assistants would later write. “Even where perfect confidence existed, he seldom revealed more about any particular matter than seemed to him necessary.” The seriousness with which he held himself was striking, even in an environment like Yale where self-importance was as common as a Gothic building on the three-hundred-year-old campus. “It was as if we had been two ministers of state having little acquaintance with each other, who had met for the settlement of some great question of public concern,” wrote Timothy Dwight, a president of the university. “All was serious with a dignified solemnity, and measured with a diplomatic deliberateness.” There was little daylight between his work and his conception of himself; he was a man with whom “close association . . . soon revealed both his unrestrained jealousy and his love of popular adulation,” another contemporary noted. Had it not been for his uncle’s support of Yale’s Peabody Museum and his position as its director, Marsh would have been too disliked to rise higher, doomed to be forever a king in want of subjects.
The few friends he had did not stay friends for long. Among them was Edward Drinker Cope, a onetime professor of zoology at Haverford University whom Marsh met while studying in Berlin. The two remained in touch after they returned to the United States, and, as if living parallel lives, both focused their attention on searching the continent for the sort of prehistoric bones unearthed in Europe. The similarities did not end there. Like Marsh, Cope had as a child found the study of the natural world a refuge, and later admitted that he was “not constructed for getting along comfortably with the general run of people.” Despite his affinity for knowledge, he did not complete a university education. As a young boy, Cope could not meet the harsh standards of personal conduct at Westtown, an elite Quaker boarding school, and in his letters home often complained of demerits he had earned for talking too much or poor penmanship. He dropped out of school in frustration and shunned his father’s offer to purchase him a farm, and instead pursued a scientific career without formal training. Throughout his life, he never lost the rough sheen which was at odds with his privileged upbringing; in time, one of his contemporaries would say that “Cope’s mind was the most animal” he had ever encountered and “his tongue the filthiest.”
The pairing of Marsh, who was forever on the alert for a slight that would remind him of the pain of his lowly childhood, and Cope, a man whose anger at not meeting the standards of his upbringing left him always ready to prove his worth, seemed destined to end in ruin. The first sign that their paths would clash came not long after Cope, who had quit his position at Haverford, alerted Marsh to fossils uncovered by diggers searching for the rich mudstone that was prized as fertilizer found in the marl pits of Southern New Jersey just outside of Philadelphia. At the time, just eighteen dinosaur species were known to have existed in North America, and most of those were identified only by an isolated tooth or vertebra—nothing like the nearly complete skeletons uncovered by Anning and Mantell. Cope invited Marsh to accompany him in a horse-drawn carriage on a tour of the pits near the town of Haddonfield in the spring of 1868. There, he introduced him to Alfred Voorhees, a local miner who often sent small bones he uncovered while digging to Cope in exchange for small sums. In the months after his tour with Marsh, however, Cope received no discoveries of consequence from Voorhees. When Cope inquired why the marl pits had apparently gone dry, he received what he felt to be evasive answers. Around the same time, Marsh routinely announced the discovery and acquisition of new fossils without revealing their source. Cope suspected that Marsh had gone behind his back and paid Voorhees to send the best bones to him in New Haven, though he had no proof.
The nascent mistrust between the two men turned darker the following year. Cope came into possession of more than a hundred bones discovered by an army surgeon in Kansas, and attempted to piece them together. The animal appeared to be the first known example of a marine reptile with an oddly flexible neck, the initial member of an order that Cope proposed calling Streptosauria, meaning twisted reptiles. Cope, who was twenty-nine at the time, prepared a paper along with lithographic plates to present to a major conference that summer and fully expected it to validate his work and make his name. Despite his suspicion that Marsh was undermining his ability to acquire more bones, he gave him an early look at his interpretation of the skeleton, seeking recognition from a man nine years his senior who was in a position to give him the respect he craved.
Instead, Marsh seemed to delight in pointing out all of the ways in which Cope erred, starting with the most embarrassing: Cope had put the head where the tail should be. There was no such thing as a twisted reptile. Cope instinctively rejected the critique before discovering for himself the mortifying fact that the skull fitted perfectly into the last vertebra of what he had thought was the rear of the animal. Deflated and angry, he tried to destroy all copies of the erroneous essay he had thought would make him famous. In its place, he found solace in the idea of humiliating Marsh as retribution. “His wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy,” Marsh later wrote.
For the next twenty years, each man attempted to find more fossils, name more species and write more papers than the other, a feud that would later become known as the Bone Wars. Arthur Lakes’s discovery of enormous fossil specimens opened a new front, taking the battlefield away from the marshes of the East Coast and into the canyons and cliffs carving the western half of the country, a land that was newly accessible through the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. There, everything seemed greater: fossils which suggested dinosaurs so big that they stretched imagination; the starkness of the landscape; and the prize of finding what very well could be the largest animal that ever walked on Earth.
In an untamed land, Marsh and Cope raced to find as many bones as they could, a pursuit that was equaled only by their attempts to prevent the other from succeeding. They paid off informants; spread lies about the other; planned to dynamite quarries rather than have them fall into the other’s hands; publicly wished the other was dead. Both fanatically tracked news of any fossil discoveries published in small newspapers in the West, relying on the newly-built railroads to crisscross the country in hopes of a new lead. Marsh, with his abundant wealth and resources, often had the upper hand, directing teams of Yale students to open numerous quarries each summer and move on quickly if they did not immediately find something worthwhile, a policy built on the idea of strength in numbers. Seeking an advantage where he could find it, he made an agreement with Red Cloud, an influential chief of the Oglala Lakota tribe, to lobby Congress in defense of Native American sovereignty in exchange for the exclusive right to prospect in an area of what is now Montana and Wyoming. Even with the field titled his way, Marsh was not above playing dirty. On one of the rare occasions when he found himself prospecting near Cope, Marsh snuck into his rival’s digging site at night and scattered unrelated fossils in hopes of confusing him.
The pettiness touched nearly everyone connected with both Marsh and Cope, often making it hard to tell whether discovering fossils or denying the other glory was each man’s true goal. Their assistants took on the conflict as their own, like sin passed on through generations. At a rural outpost in Wyoming known for its abundant fossil beds, prospectors working for Marsh sent spies into a camp of men working for Cope. In return, Cope’s team locked their rivals out of a train station in order to prevent them from sending their haul back to Marsh on the East Coast. Before long, the opposing camps were throwing rocks at each other, as if all of Wyoming were nothing more than a sandbox.
Cope, consumed by his need to best Marsh, compensated for his dwindling financial resources with a fervent drive to publish, writing more than 1,400 scientific papers on topics ranging from dinosaurs to early mammals. Soon, his collection of fossils was the only thing of worth he owned, his inheritance destroyed by a consuming desire to beat the one person who fully understood his need to find and discover new species. His obsession with proving his superiority prompted Cope in his will to donate his brain to science and challenge Marsh to do the same, convinced that whoever’s brain weighed more would be proven the true intellectual superior.
News of their discoveries appeared regularly in the largest newspapers on the East Coast, seemingly confirming every suspicion that the West was an alien landscape where the bones of enormous monsters could be found sticking out of the ground. Between them, Marsh and Cope discovered and named more than 120 new species, including some of the most familiar dinosaurs we know now, such as the bony-plated Stegosaurus, the long-necked Apatosaurus, a name meaning deceptive lizard for the way some of its bones resembled an unrelated aquatic reptile, and its closely-related cousin Brontosaurus, meaning thunder lizard.
In the process, they created a commodity: because of the well-publicized rivalry, farmers realized that scientists would pay outsized sums for the fossils they often uncovered while clearing land, which provided an incentive to keep and protect what were previously considered novelties at best and nuisances at worst. The new market was not lost on men throughout the West who had failed to find gold or silver and were brave enough to explore unforgiving regions. A new profession—fossil hunter—materialized out of the Bone Wars, like an unexpected side effect of mixing caustic chemicals. On a scale never imagined by Mary Anning, relics of prehistoric life were taken out of the domain of academic essays written by a small community of naturalists and reimagined as precious materials that would make anyone who found them rich.
To narrow the gap between his own published output and Cope’s, Marsh began putting his name on papers written by his assistants, ruining what little loyalty they felt toward him. Williston, who would one day become Barnum Brown’s professor at Kansas, was among those who found their careers blocked by Marsh’s habit of taking credit for others’ work. He wrote a private later to Cope complaining that Marsh “has never been known to tell the truth when a falsehood would serve the purpose as well.” Cope shared the letter with a newspaper reporter in an attempt to discredit Marsh, severing Williston’s ties with Yale.
Williston returned to Kansas as a professor in 1890 and prepared himself for his first expeditions free of the shadow of Marsh, whose own status had been damaged by the scandal of his behavior toward Cope. Funding from the U.S. government to mount further expeditions suddenly became scarce, and Marsh retreated further into the sanctuary of the Peabody Museum, where he remained unrepentant and fearful that someone would one day find dinosaurs that made his achievements look small by comparison.
For the first time in his life, Williston had the money and time to launch his own expedition, blessed in part with a location in Kansas that kept costs lower due to its proximity to great fossil beds filled with the unknown. Through their feuding, Cope and Marsh had effectively sabotaged themselves, making others unwilling to work with them and clearing the stage for the start of another era, like a new layer of sediment laid down on top of their discoveries. Williston had seen some of the great fossils lying scattered in the West, and knew that others must be out there just waiting to be found. All he needed were some students to supply muscle.