Rattle the Bones

The bones have been lying hidden for much time—decades, a millenia, or more, depending on who is questioned. It matters not how long. Time is meaningless to these bones that once made up living creatures. 

Now these bones which have been lying hidden for so long are being sought and squabbled over. 

Edward Drinker Cope, son of a well-to-do quaker farmer, strides across a fossil quarry in Haddonfield, New Jersey, near his home. Following him is his friend Othniel Charles Marsh. Othniel is nine years Edward’s senior. They met in Germany while studying in Berlin, and have had an amicable relationship.

Edward is happily telling his friend about all of the interesting fossils he’s found in this quarry. Othniel’s eyes light up as he listens, and when Edward leaves, Othniel finds the quarry owner. Money changes hands, and from then on any new and odd specimens are sent to Othniel Marsh’s office at Yale University. 

Not long after, Edward invites Marsh to view a new creature’s skeleton which he has assembled. 

Othniel walks around Edward’s mounted work, scrutinizing it. “There’s something wrong with the vertebra,” he declares. 

“What do you mean?” Edward asks. 

“The whole thing is backwards. You’ve put the head on the wrong end.”

“It can’t have had such a long neck as that.” Edward gestures at what he is sure is the tail. 

Othniel snorts. “Haven’t you ever heard of the giraffe?”

“This is hardly a giraffe. It’s aquatic, and has sharp needle-like teeth for catching fish. Think about it: no other animal has a neck like a giraffe’s,” Edward argues. 

“Except, it seems, for this one.” Othniel has planted his feet in a wide stance, holding his ground both literally and metaphorically. 

Like the stubborn, thick-headed farm boy he is, thinks Edward. “I’ll get Joseph Leidy to look at this,” Edward says hotly. “He’ll be able to tell if something’s wrong with my reconstruction.” But he’s sure he’s right. He must be. His article describing the Elasmosaurus has already gone to print, accompanied by an illustration of what his reconstruction might have looked like in life.

“By all means, get Leidy,” Othniel agrees. 

Joseph Leidy, esteemed paleontologist and Edward’s mentor, examines his student’s work carefully. Finally, he removes the head and silently carries it to the other end of the skeleton. He squints down the length of it, then lowers the skull and nods at Othniel. “Well done, Marsh. I believe this longer part must be the neck. The shorter end seems to be the tail.”

Edward’s face goes red, then white. He looks sick.

“Don’t feel too badly, Cope,” Leidy says, turning to his student. “Mistakes are easy to make.”

Leidy turns to Othniel. “Well done, Marsh. Not everyone has an eye that can catch something like that.” 

Leidy leaves the room, and Edward and Othniel alone together. After this incident, the friendship wanes. 

Edward, terribly embarrassed, tries to buy back all copies of his incorrect reconstruction, but doesn't succeed; Leidy and Othniel both choose to keep their copies.

In the 18790s, at Como Bluff, Wyoming, two Union Pacific Railroad workers, a foreman and a station agent, find strange bones buried in the ground. They send a letter to Othniel Marsh, detailing the area of rock in which they found the bones. Marsh writes back that he is very interested, and requests that they not tell anyone else about their find. They don't comply, instead leaking the finds to the newspaper the Laramie Sentinel, and word of the discoveries reaches Edward.

For the next fifteen years, Othniel and Edward fight a remote proxy war that consists of paying their teams to dig up and find more bones than the enemy has. Once, when working within a stone’s throw of each other, the teams proved the aptness of the saying by picking up rocks and lobbing them at each other. 

As the proxy war in Wyoming is being fought, Edward works for government geological survey teams. While the position does not pay extremely well, it does provide opportunities for bone hunting as the surveyors travel. When his friend who got him the position on the geological surveys is removed, Edward loses his funding and turns to silver mining in hopes of making more money to pay for further paleontology. His mines are not fruitful, and he eventually loses a deal of money on the venture.

When Edward lost his place as a surveyor, the multiple survey teams were consolidated into the US Geological Survey, with a friend of Othniel’s being put in charge. Othniel is made the Chief Paleontologist, and later asks another friend, John Wesley Powell, to try to get Edward’s fossil collection seized on the grounds that it was collected with government funds while Edward still worked for the survey.

This is too much for Edward, who goes to the editor of the New York Herald and promises him a juicy and scandalous story. Pulling from the journal he’s been keeping for years, full of wrongs done to him and mistakes made by Powell, and more importantly, his former friend Othniel, Edward's article asserts that men previously employed by Othniel complained of terribly low wages, and that he himself had worked on the surveys as a volunteer, often paying his own expenses out of pocket as a surveyor, let alone when fossil hunting. 

The headline Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare brings the fight that had so far been contained within the scientific community into the public eye on January 12, 1890. For weeks afterward, Othniel, Powell, and Edward fire articles back and forth at each other in the papers. Perhaps because of their extremely bad press, Othniel eventually loses his position on the Geological Survey, and Edward his at the University of Pennsylvania. The funding for the Bureau of Paleontology is completely cut.

And what of the fossils they fought so fiercely over the amassing of?

From the fantastic rivalry came a knowledge of prehistoric North American creatures previously unknown and unimagined, including mammals, toothed birds, and dinosaurs. Othniel discovered 80 species of dinosaurs, and Edward, 56. 

Among Othniel’s discoveries are such well-known dinosaurs as Allosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, and the infamous Brontosaurus. 

Brontosaurus was for a time argued to be an Apatosaurus’s body with a Camarasaurus’s skull. In 2015 it was reclassified as a distinct and valid species, though to this day paleontologists still debate over the validity of the creature. 

Othniel’s Brontosaurus excelsus stands mounted in the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. The body of the animal it once was is long gone, though the memory of the life lived lingers as a skeleton. 

It was painstakingly removed from its hiding place at Como Bluff, Wyoming, cleaned, studied, and set up in specially-made frames (first conceptualized and built by Edward Cope, Joseph Leidy, and artist Benjamin Hawkins) for people to gawk at or admire. 

Perhaps the bones would have preferred to remain in dark soil and rock, some pieces slowly being exposed to the air, and then weathered away to indiscernible fragments, becoming even more an invisible part of the earth. But the disembodied bones can do nothing of their own accord, and the whims of men will ever choose their fate.