Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  In 1871, however, Cope turned the tables, and began digging in one of Marsh's fossil localities in Kansas {after hiring away one of his assistants}. Similar incidents followed, with both Marsh and Cope luring each other's collectors away with more money; often, these collectors came with proprietary secrets about the location and extent of fossil beds. {Marsh and Cope did little of the actual collecting themselves. Instead, they hired and directed collecting parties.} In 1872 and 1873, in a nasty exchange of letters, Cope and Marsh accused each other of stealing specimens. Marsh also accused Cope of fudging the dates of publication of certain scientific articles, thus stealing credit for new discoveries away from Marsh. This question of dates was no trivial matter. The actual excavation of a new species meant little; it was the publication date of the report on the find that established to the scientific community who would get credit for the discovery. Often Cope and Marsh were making the same new discoveries, and thus the object of the race was to get into print first. Indeed, Cope even spent a large portion of his fortune buying a controlling interest in the journal American Naturalist, in order to rush his discoveries into print faster. Their scientific papers increasingly contained ad hominem attacks on each other, thinly disguised as "scientific criticism." "It is plain," Cope wrote in one paper, "that most of Prof. Marsh's criticisms are misrepresentations, his systematic innovations are untenable, and his statements as to the dates of my papers are either criminally ambiguous or untrue."

  Before 1877, only scattered dinosaur remains had been found in England, western Europe, and America. But within a six-month period in 1877, three large dinosaur finds—culminating with the spectacular discovery of the vast fossil fields of Como Bluff, Wyoming—intensified the rivalry between Cope and Marsh, and greatly increased the scientific stakes. The find also served to popularize dinosaurs, and indirectly led the American Museum of Natural History into the arena of dinosaur collecting.

  Marsh learned of this first major dinosaur find when he received a letter from a Colorado schoolmaster and geologist, Arthur Lakes, who wrote him of "some enormous bones ... of some gigantic saurian." Lakes enclosed a sketch.

  At first, oddly enough, Marsh showed little interest in this letter and other letters that followed, some of which he didn't even bother to answer. But when Marsh learned that Lakes had then written to Cope, he immediately instructed his chief collector, Samuel Williston, to investigate the locality.

  Coincidental1y, at about that same time, Cope had received a letter from another Colorado resident, informing him of a find of large bones in a different spot. When Marsh learned of this, he again sent Williston out to investigate. Williston soon reported that Cope's men were indeed excavating and shipping large dinosaurs back to Philadelphia.

  The third and most significant discovery came in a letter to Marsh from two men calling themselves Harlow and Edwards. Harlow and Edwards, whose real names were Carlin and Reed (and which they kept secret in an effort to protect their discovery), worked for the Union Pacific Railroad, and they told Marsh they had discovered dinosaur fossils in Como Bluff, Wyoming Territory. In another letter, they warned Marsh that there were others in the area "looking for such things" (i.e., dinosaurs), and that they were operating in strict secrecy.

  Marsh again dispatched Williston to reconnoiter. After a delay due to ill health, Williston arrived at Como Bluff on November 14, 1877. Williston had been there only hours when he fired off a letter to Marsh, which read in part, "I have seen a lot of bones that they have ready to ship and they tell me the bones extend for seven miles and are by the ton...." Several days later, Marsh received another letter from Williston, confirming the extent of the deposit and warning him that "there will be great danger from competition next summer." Marsh knew, of course, exactly what kind of competition Williston was referring to.

  Marsh's men worked feverishly at Como Bluff though the winter and spring, but despite their efforts at secrecy, word of the finds leaked out to the local newspaper. Shortly thereafter, Williston reported some disturbing news to Marsh: "One of Cope's men was here. He first purported to be selling groceries!! Gave his name as 'Haines,' thick heavy set sullen portly man of about forty, shaven except mustache and whiskers." Later that day, Williston elaborated in a second letter. "I have been talking further with Carlin about this man 'Haines.' There is no doubt he is direct from Cope.... He gained no definite information from Carlin or my brother. He went up into the hill and returning said that he had found no fossils,—of course he lied."

  Soon Cope's collectors had opened a quarry not more than three hundred yards from one of Marsh's, and once again their rivalry heated up. At Como Bluff, the two collectors resorted to such schemes as destroying minor or incomplete fossils in their own quarries to prevent the rival party from collecting them, and filling up abandoned quarries with stones and dirt. On at least one occasion, rival parties nearly came to blows over sites, and one of Marsh's collectors felt it necessary to have several "strong men" with him whenever he was in the field.

  For a while this battle was known only within embarrassed scientific circles. But all that changed on January 12, 1890, when the New York Herald announced in a headline on its front page, "Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare." Elizabeth Noble Shor, author of The Fossil Feud, wrote about the reaction of the scientific world:

  Most scientists of the day recoiled in horror—and read on with interest, to find that Cope's feud with Marsh had at last become front-page news. Those closest to the scientific fields under discussion, geology and vertebrate paleontology, certainly winced, particularly as they found themselves quoted, mentioned, or misspelled. The feud was not news to them, for it had lurked at their scientific meetings for two decades. Most of them had already taken sides.*14

  The series of Herald articles, which were shamelessly slanted against Marsh, continued for several weeks. Cope and Marsh, unable to restrain themselves, made many rash and eminently quotable tatements. Cope, for example, was quoted as saying such things as:

  Professor Marsh has shown that he never was competent to do work of this kind. Unable to properly classify and name the fossils his explorers secured, he employed American and foreign assistants who did the work for him.... His paper on the mammals of the Laramie formation ... is the most remarkable collection of errors and ignorance ... ever displayed.... To cause the government to father the most monumental ignorance and pretension and plagiarism in quarto volumes.

  Marsh was quoted in a subsequent article:

  Professor Cope's mental and moral characteristics unfit him for any position of trust and responsibility. In addition to his great vanity, which leads him into vicious species work, he is inordinately jealous and suspicious of every other worker, and these two traits combined give him that hysterical temper and gift of voluble denunciation rarely found in persons of his sex.

  It goes without saying that, even without the aid of this scientific feud, dinosaurs had riveted the public's attention. From being obscure and almost unknown in the 1860s and early 1870s, dinosaurs had now become big business. The end results of Cope and Marsh's rivalry were streams of extraordinary fossils of huge dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures Rowing eastward and being assembled and mounted in such cities as Philadelphia and New Haven.

  At the American Museum of Natural History, President Jesup saw the commotion in both scientific and popular circles over dinosaurs and other prehistoric life, and quickly realized that the Museum would be left behind if it didn't get into fossil collecting with all haste. Jesup first approached Marsh and tried to woo him (and his fossils) away from the Peabody Museum at Yale. Marsh was not to be budged. Then, in 1891, the president of Columbia University proposed to Jesup that Columbia and the Museum hire a young paleontologist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, to take a joint appointment at the two institutions. Jesup liked the articulate, tall, brilliant, and very rich young man, and Osborn was hired in June of that year to start the Museum's Department of Paleontology.

  Osborn gradually began
to gather about him a group of fossil hunters and paleontologists who would put the Museum on the paleontological map, turning it into the center of vertebrate paleontology research in the United States. Osborn would stay at the Museum until 1933, eventually succeeding Jesup as President. Jesup had given the Museum its life, but Osborn would develop it into one of the three foremost museums of natural history in the world.

  Osborn has been called, with justification, "the father of American paleontology." While Cope and Marsh were perhaps perceived as erratic scientists and collectors who embarrassed their colleagues in England and Europe, Osborn was the supreme scientist. His academic credentials were impeccable, his publications voluminous and important, his memberships in the most prestigious scientific societies outstanding. By all accounts he was also an egotist of the first rank—a man who could (and did) destroy the scientific reputations of those who opposed him. He presided over the Museum during its zenith of fame and influence.

  It was Osborn who brought dinosaurs to the Museum. Osborn's star dinosaur hunter was a man named Barnum Brown, who, by the end of his life, would dig up more dinosaurs than any other man who ever lived.

  BARNUM BROWN'S BONES

  When Barnum Brown arrived at the American Museum in 1897 at the age of twenty-three, the Museum possessed not a single dinosaur. When he died in 1963,just one week shy of his ninetieth birthday, it was chock-full of them, the largest and best collection in the world. Many of the Museum's finest specimens—including the superb Tyrannosaurus rex—were discovered by Brown during his sixty-six-year career. He worked in every major geographical area of the world except Japan, Australia, Madagascar, and the South Sea Islands. To get to and from those places with his picks and whisk brooms, he once said he had used every available form of transportation except the submarine. Of the two dinosaur halls in the Museum, one, the Hall of Late Dinosaurs, is a virtual monument to Barnum Brown, as he collected most of its skeletons.

  Like Marsh and Cope, Brown found most of his dinosaurs in Western North America, and he became something of a celebrity. Wherever he went, he was feted by the local populace, who came in droves to meet his train, and who would vie for the honor of having him in their carriage. Called "Mr. Bones" by both press and public, Brown's ability to locate dinosaurs became legendary. A scientist wrote that he could "smell fossils, even though they had been buried 200 million years."

  A paleontologist locates fossils in much the same way a sophisticated prospector locates minerals. The fossil hunter begins with an extensive knowledge of geology and a deep study of the geological landscape of the area to be searched. Usually the hunter will try to follow sedimentary beds known to contain fossils across intervening strata to an unexplored outcrop. Like the prospector, the fossil hunter tends to rely on intuition and even hunches to locate fossils, as well as such hearsay evidence as idle bar conversation, chats with ranchers, oilmen, and prospectors, and so forth.

  But like the prospector, the fossil hunter combines this with his knowledge of geology to make a strike. For example, an upfold of strata (called an anticline) is often an excellent formation in which to find fossils. Usually the top of the anticline is eroded away. If fossils have been found on one side of the anticline, where a particular layer of rock has been exposed, one can usually find similar fossils on the other side. However, the other side may be many miles away, with complex terrain in between. The great fossil hunter can map out the intervening terrain and pinpoint where that particular fossiliferous layer will reappear on the far side.

  Brown was a complex man. A photograph in the Museum's archives, taken at a remote site in the desolate badlands of Wyoming, shows him in a magnificent and costly fur coat, gravely examining a fossil through his gold-rimmed pince-nez. He usually dressed impeccably for the field, and one of his crew members who had worked with him as a youth said, "Woe to the boy who spilled plaster of paris on his shiny boots." One colleague reported that he was an accomplished ballroom dancer, in great demand among the ladies. Another said that Brown's "grave, sometimes melancholy countenance" suggested the mien of a Presbyterian minister. Like many great explorers, he was an indifferent scientist. He cared little about publishing his finds, and his colleagues often gently upbraided him for it.

  Barnum Brown was born in Carbondale, Kansas, in 1873. His parents had moved to Kansas by wagon train before the Civil War and had built a pioneer cabin, which later grew into a rather prosperous farm with side businesses. His parents named him, somewhat prophetically, after the great showman P.T. Barnum, because, as Brown explained later, it added alliterative interest to his dull surname. As a boy he would follow farmers' plows through the fields of Carbondale, picking up the hundreds of fossil shells turned up by the blades. His collection eventually filled the laundry building on the family farm. At the University of Kansas he met Professor Samuel Williston, Marsh's former head dinosaur hunter, who initiated him into that arcane profession. In 1896 he came to the Museum to work part-time on a fossil prospecting party, and the following year the Museum brought him on staff.

  Henry Fairfield Osborn had plans to make the American Museum the foremost repository for vertebrate fossils and, indeed, the center of fossil vertebrate research in the world. In many ways Osborn was to vertebrate paleontology what Boas was to anthropology; just as Boas is called the father of American anthropology, Osborn was named the father of American vertebrate paleontology. He was mainly interested in fossil mammals; but he knew that it was the mounted skeletons of dinosaurs, more than mammals, that would attract attention, publicity, and money to the Museum. In the summer of 1897, Osborn sent Brown and a collecting party to Como Bluff, Wyoming, to explore the Upper Jurassic beds where Othniel C. Marsh had earlier made spectacular discoveries. (Marsh was none too pleased by this "raid" on one of his quarries, and he and Osborn became lifelong opponents as a result of this and of Osborn's support of Cope.) After spending most of the summer excavating barren rock, Brown concluded that Marsh had pretty well exhausted the quarry's fossils.

  Perseverance, however, paid off in the end. Later that summer Osborn himself arrived to inspect the site, and he and Brown explored a nearby bluff. Brown noticed some bones weathering out of an outcrop, and the two men examined them with mounting excitement. The bones were undoubtedly saurian—the Museum's first dinosaur. Brown and another member of the expedition traced these fossil-bearing beds to an unexplored outcrop known as the Medicine Bow Anticline—and here they struck pay dirt. A photograph in the Museum's archives showing the unexcavated spot gives an idea of just how rich this area was. It reveals a hillside strewn with hundreds of dinosaur bones—more common than the surrounding rocks. The bones lay about in such profusion that, years before, a sheepherder had built an entire cabin out of them. Naturally, the locality became known as Bone Cabin Quarry.

  This site yielded some of the most impressive dinosaurs yet discovered. In 1898 the Museum party cut into the hillside and surrounding strata, and over the next six years they uncovered dinosaur after dinosaur. In the fall of 1898 alone they shipped thirty tons of bones in boxcars to New York; in 1899, another twenty tons; in 1900, ten tons; and in the last year of excavation, when everyone had begun to complain that the quarry was petering out, they brought back a mere five tons.

  During the excavations, some of the paleontologists took side trips to outcrops of the same formations, hoping for another mother lode of fossils. In 1898, some five miles south of Bone Cabin Quarry, at a place known as Nine Mile Crossing of Little Medicine Creek, Walter Granger, one of Osborn's paleontologists, discovered a promising site where some bones had weathered out of the rock. The succeeding summer they established a separate camp and started removing the fossil—a magnificent Brontosaurus.

  It was an exceedingly difficult excavation because of the size and weight of the specimen (the right thigh bone alone weighed 570 pounds). Enormous blocks of matrix (the stone in which a fossil is embedded) were quarried out of the bank and shipped to the Museum, where it took another tw
o years to chip away the matrix, piece together the brittle, shattered bone, cement it, and restore areas of missing bone. Another three years passed while the skeleton was being mounted, and when at last it went on display in the Museum, it was the largest fossil skeleton ever mounted anywhere.

  As with most mounted dinosaurs, missing bones were either replaced with fossils from other finds or modeled in plaster. Even though the Brontosaurus was unusually complete, it required bones from Como Bluff and vertebrae and toe bones from Bone Cabin Quarry to fill in the gaps; various other bones were modeled in plaster after specimens in the Yale Museum.

  Unfortunately, an exhaustive search failed to turn up a skull for the Brontosaurus. This was not the first time such a thing had happened. Marsh, the original discoverer of the Brontosaurus (now correctly termed Apatosaurus), had first described the animal from a headless skeleton found in 1879. But in his haste to beat Cope, he had crowned the creature with a restoration made from two fragmentary skulls found miles from the site. Osborn accepted Marsh's restoration, and topped his Brontosaurus with a cast of the Marsh skull. In 1915, however, Earl Douglass, a paleontologist from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, discovered a Brontosaurus skeleton with a completely different skull right underneath it. Douglass suggested in a paper that Marsh might have given his Brontosaurus the wrong skull. Perhaps because this challenged the Museum's reconstruction, of which Osborn was so proud, Osborn, "in a bantering mood" (Douglass said), dared the Carnegie paleontologist to mount the new skull. Apparently, Douglass was disinclined to pick a scientific fight with the great and powerful Osborn, and 'he never did mount his skull—or any skull. The Carnegie Brontosaurus went headless until Douglass' death in 1932, when a copy of the old Marsh head was finally mounted.