Chapter 8 Chapter 6 The science of conflict

In 1787 a man in New Jersey—who exactly it was, seems to have been forgotten—found a huge femur poking out of a bank in Woodbury Creek.That bone clearly did not belong to any surviving species, and certainly not from New Jersey.From what we know now, it is thought to belong to a hadrosaurus, a large dinosaur with a duck bill.At that time, people had not heard of dinosaurs. The bones were sent to Dr. Caspar Wista, the most eminent anatomist in America at the time.That fall, he gave a description at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.Wistar didn't fully realize the significance of this bone, but only carefully said a few words that didn't hurt, to the effect that it was really a giant.In this way, he missed the opportunity to discover dinosaurs half a century before others.In fact, the bone didn't attract much interest and was put in storage before disappearing altogether.Therefore, the first dinosaur bone discovered in history was also the first lost dinosaur bone.

It's somewhat puzzling that the bone hasn't attracted much interest, since it was discovered just at a time when Americans were fascinated by the remains of large ancient animals.The great French naturalist, the Comte de Buffon--the man who experimented with the heated sphere mentioned in the previous chapter--made a curious assertion about the cause of this fascination: the creatures of the New World were in almost every respect superior to Creatures in the Old World are inferior.Buffon wrote in his highly regarded masterpiece "Natural History" that in this land of America, the water stank, the land did not grow grain, the animals were small and lifeless, and their bodies were taken from rotting swamps and sunburnt. The "poisonous gas" escaping from the sunless forest made him very weak.In such an environment, even native Indians lacked fertility.

"They don't grow beards, they don't have hair on their bodies," Buffon said privately, with dignity. "Women don't have passion." Their genitals are "small and weak." Buffon's observations have found surprisingly enthusiastic support among other writers—particularly among those who were not really familiar with the country and whose conclusions were therefore ill-founded.A Dutchman named Comeyer Pove declared in a popular work entitled Philosophical Studies on the Americans that the native men of America were not only unimpressive in terms of reproduction, but were "so devoid of reproduction ability, their breasts flow with milk."This view persisted for a curiously long time, recurring or echoed in European literature until the close of the nineteenth century.

It is not surprising that such slander has been met with outrage in the United States.Thomas Jefferson, in his "Virginia Notes," angrily (and inexplicably, unless you know the context), retorted and urged his friend John Sullivan in New Hampshire to send 20 soldiers into the northern woods, Find an elk and give it to Buffon, to prove the size and might of the quadrupeds of America.It took the soldiers two weeks to find a suitable target.Unfortunately, when the elk was shot, they found it lacked the pair of majestic horns that Jefferson specifically mentioned, but Sullivan thoughtfully added a pair of moose or red antlers, meaning, which were additionally attached. of.After all, in France, who would know?

Meanwhile, in Wistar's hometown of Philadelphia, naturalists set about assembling the bones of a large, elephant-like animal.At first it was called "the unknown great animal of the Americas", and later incorrectly identified as a mammal.The first such bones were found at a place in Kentucky called Big Bone, but they were soon found everywhere.It appears that America was once inhabited by some great animal-an animal that would certainly disprove the Frenchman Buffon's absurd thesis. In their eagerness to demonstrate the size and ferocity of the unknown animal, naturalists seem to have gotten a little carried away.They made it six times taller and added horrible claws to it.In fact, it was just the paw of a large sloth found nearby.Interestingly, they considered the animal "as nimble and ferocious as a tiger," and depicted it hiding behind boulders in the illustration, poised to pounce on its prey with feline grace.When the tusks were found, they tried to fit them in various ways on his head.One had his tusks screwed upside down, like the canines of a saber-toothed cat, making it look particularly imposing.The other bent its tusks backwards, and the sweet reason was that the guy was originally an aquatic animal, and used his teeth to anchor himself to a tree when he was dozing.The closest thing to the truth, however, was that the unknown animal was extinct—a fact that Buffon hastily seized on as evidence that the animal had indisputably degenerated.

Buffon died in 1788, but the controversy did not stop. In 1795, a carefully selected batch of bones arrived in Paris to be scrutinized by the young aristocrat Georges Cuvier, a newcomer to paleontology.Cuvier's talent for arranging heaps of disjointed bones into shape without much effort was already admirable.It is said that, by looking at a tooth or a jawbone, he can describe the appearance and temperament of that animal, and often the species and genus of it.Finding that no one in the United States had thought of writing a book about that great animal, Cuvier wrote it himself, and became the first to discover it.He called it a "mastodon" (meaning "elephant with teeth protruding like teats". Surprisingly, it's kind of like that).

Inspired by that debate, Cuvier wrote an epoch-making treatise "A Note on the Living and Fossilized Elephant" in 1796.In this paper, he formally proposed the theory of extinction for the first time.He believed that the earth experienced global catastrophes from time to time; in the process, groups of living things died out completely.For religious people, including Cuvier himself, this view has unpleasant implications, for it implies that God is elusive, inexplicable.God created species and then destroyed them, what on earth is he going to do?This view is absolutely contrary to the belief of the "big biological chain".The belief that the world is orchestrated, that every creature in it has a place, a purpose, has always had, and always will.Jefferson could not accept the idea that entire species would one day die out (or, to that point, evolve).Therefore, when he was asked whether it was scientifically and politically worthwhile to send an expedition to the interior of the United States beyond the Mississippi River, he immediately affirmed the suggestion, hoping that the brave explorers would find groups of healthy baby teeth Elephants and other giant animals graze on the fertile plains.Jefferson's private secretary and confidant, Meriwether Lewis, was chosen to lead the expedition, along with William Clark, and to be the expedition's chief naturalist.It was none other than Caspar Wista who had been chosen to advise him on what live and dead animals to look for.

The famous nobleman Cuvier put forward the theory of extinction in Paris.In the same year—actually the same month—across the Channel, a little-known Englishman was giving his opinion on the value of fossils.His insights also had lasting effects.William Smith was a young supervisor on the Cole Canal construction site in Somerset. Sitting in a coaching inn in Somerset on January 5, 1796, he jotted down the idea that would eventually make him famous.To explain rocks, you have to have some sort of juxtaposition.On that basis, you can tell that those Carboniferous rocks in Devon are younger than these Cambrian rocks in Wales.With each change in rock formations, the fossils of some species disappeared, while others carried on to subsequent rock formations.By finding which species occur in which rock formations, you can calculate the age of rocks, no matter where they are.Armed with his knowledge as a surveyor, Smith immediately set to work mapping Britain's rock formations.After many trials, the maps were published in 1815 and became the cornerstone of modern geology. (Simon Winchester writes about it fully in his popular book The Map That Changed the World.)

Unfortunately, despite Smith's perceptiveness, he was, oddly enough, not interested in figuring out why rocks were buried the way they were. "I did not study the origin of the formation any further, and was content to know that it was the case," he wrote, "for whatever reason, for what reason, that is not the province of a mineral surveyor." Smith's revelations about the rock formations add to the moral embarrassment the extinction theory raises.First, it confirms that God's destruction of living beings is not accidental but regular.In this light, God is not so much careless as unfriendly.Moreover, it is necessary to take some effort to explain why some species became completely extinct, while others survived smoothly into subsequent ages.Obviously, extinction cannot be explained clearly by a "big torrent" in Noah's time-that is, the flood that everyone knows in the Bible.Cuvier gave a self-satisfied interpretation that Genesis refers only to the most recent Flood.God doesn't seem to want to distract Moses or cause him to panic with a previously unrelated extinction.

Fossils, therefore, must have assumed some importance by the early nineteenth century.Wista seemed even more unfortunate, not seeing the meaning of the dinosaur bone.In any case, such bones have been found all over the world.There were several more opportunities for the Americans to announce the discovery of dinosaurs, but none of these opportunities were seized. In 1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition traversed the Hale Gap Formation in Montana.In this place, they actually had dinosaur bones everywhere under their feet, and they also found something embedded in the rock, which was obviously a dinosaur bone, but they didn't take it seriously.In New England, a boy named Plinus Moody found ancient tracks on a ledge in South Hadley, Massachusetts; later, bones and tracks were found in the Connecticut River Valley fossil.At least some of them have survived—notably the bones of an angelosaurus—now housed in the Peabody Museum at Yale University.Discovered in 1818, this batch of dinosaur bones is the first batch of dinosaur bones to be examined and preserved. Unfortunately, no one identified them before 1855.That year, Casper Wista died.However, what Wistar didn't expect was that the botanist Thomas Nuttle named a lovely climbing shrub after him, which made Wista immortal in a sense.Some purists in the plant world still insist on writing the name of this type of plant as "Wistalia".

By this time, however, the craze for paleontological research had moved to England. In Lyme Regis, Dorset, in 1812, there was a remarkable little girl named Mary Anning -- 11, 12 or 13, depending on who you read -- A 5-meter-long, bizarre-looking marine animal fossil has been found embedded in a steep and dangerous cliff on the shore of the English Channel.These animals are now called ichthyosaurs. An Ning thus began her extraordinary life.For the next 35 years, Anning collected fossils and sold them to tourists. (She is widely believed to be the original material for the famous tongue twister "She Sells Shells by the Sea.") She also discovered the first fossil of a plesiosaur (another marine animal) as well as the first and finest A piece of pterodactyl fossil.Technically, none of these were dinosaurs, but that didn't matter much, since nobody knew what a dinosaur was at the time.It is enough to know that there lived in the world animals that were completely different from what we can see now. Anning is not only good at finding fossils - she is clearly unrivaled at this - but also digging them up with care and intact.If you ever get the chance to visit the Ancient Marine Reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London, I urge you not to miss it.It is only here that you can appreciate the enormous and splendid achievements of this young woman, using the simplest of tools, under extremely difficult conditions, practically alone.She spent 10 years patiently digging the plesiosaur fossil alone.An Ning is not trained, but she can also provide decent pictures and descriptions for scholars.But despite her skills, major discoveries were few and far between, and she spent most of her life in extreme poverty. In the history of paleontology, it's hard to think of a lesser-regarded figure than Mary Anning, but there's actually one more.His name was Gideon Algernon Mantel, and he was a country doctor in Sussex. Mantel has a whole host of deficiencies—he's vain, self-absorbed, pretentious, and unconcerned with family—but you won't find another amateur paleontologist as dedicated as he is.He was also lucky to have a devoted and observant wife. In 1822, when he was on a medical call in rural Sussex, Mrs. Mantle was walking along a nearby path when she discovered something curious in a pile of rubble used to fill potholes—a piece of Curved brown bones, about the size of a small walnut.She thought it was a fossil.Knowing that her husband was interested in fossils, she gave them to him.Mantel saw right away that it was a fossilized tooth.After a little research, he concluded that it was a tooth of an animal, that animal lived in the Cretaceous period, ate herbivores, crawled, and had a huge body—tens of meters long.He was quite right in his estimation; but he was also quite bold, for no one had seen anything like it before, even in imagination. Mantel realized that his discovery would completely overturn people's understanding of the past.William Buckland - the robed, experimental scholar - also advised him to proceed with caution.So Mantel spent three years trying to find evidence to support his conclusions.He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for his opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as nothing more than the tooth of a hippopotamus. (Cuvier, who had a high profile, later apologized for the infrequent mistake.) One day, while doing research at the Hunter Museum in London, Mantel strikes up a conversation with a colleague.The colleague told him it looked a lot like the tooth of the animal he had been studying, the South American iguana.They compared them right away, confirming their similarities.Therefore, the animal in Mantel's hand was named after a tropical lizard that loved to bask in the sun, and it was called Iguanodon. In fact, there is no relationship between the two. Mantel wrote a paper to be submitted to the Royal Society.Unfortunately, it just so happens that yet another dinosaur bone has been found in a quarry in Oxfordshire and has just been formally described by someone—by none other than the Reverend Buckland, who urged Mantel not to rush.It was named Megalosaurus.The name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr. James Parkinson, the future radical and the originator of Parkinson's syndrome.You may recall that Parkinson was originally a geologist, and his work on Megalosaurus shows his achievements in this regard.In a report for the Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, he noted that the animal's teeth were not attached directly to the jaws, as in lizards, but in sockets, as in crocodiles.That's all Buckland noticed, though, and didn't realize the significance of it, that Megalosaurus was an entirely new animal.But while his report lacked sharp eyes and insight, it was the first published description of Megalosaurus.Buckland, therefore, is given the credit for discovering the ancient animal, not the more entitled Mantel. Mantel, unaware that disappointment would accompany him throughout his life, continued to hunt for fossils—in 1833, he discovered another behemoth, Hylaosaurus—and bought others from quarry workers and farmers, who would eventually become The largest collection of fossils in the UK.Mantell was a brilliant doctor and equally talented at collecting bones, but he couldn't maintain both talents at the same time.As he became more and more interested in collecting work, he neglected the medical profession.Before long, his home in Brighton was nearly full of fossils, and he was spending most of his income.The rest of the money was used to pay for the publication of his books, which few people would buy. The Geological Notes of Sussex, published in 1827, sold only 50 copies, for an unhappily reposted £300 - a considerable sum at the time. In desperation, Mantel had an idea and turned his house into a museum, charging entrance fees.However, he later realized that such business practices would damage his status as a gentleman, not to mention a scientist - and gave free admission to his home museum.Hundreds of people came to visit, week after week, disrupting both his practice and his family life.In the end, he had to sell most of his collection in order to pay off his debts.Not long after, his wife left him with his four children. Remarkably, his troubles were just beginning. In Sydenham, south London, there is a place called Crystal Palace Park.There stands a forgotten wonder: the world's first life-size dinosaur models.Not too many people go there these days, but at one point it was one of London's most visited attractions - in fact, as Richard Foty says, it was the world's first theme park.Strictly speaking, those models are incorrect in many respects.Iguanodon's thumb turned into a spike on its nose; it had four thick legs and looked like a fat, disproportionate dog. (Actually, Iguanodon didn't squat on four legs, but a biped.) Looking at them now, you'd hardly expect these eccentric, slow-moving creatures to cause rancor and hatred, but they did.Perhaps never in the history of nature has an animal been the center of a more intense and persistent enmity than that ancient animal named the dinosaur. When the dinosaur models were built, Sydenham was on the edge of London, and the spacious park was considered ideal for recreating the famous Crystal Palace.The glass and cast-iron Crystal Palace was the centerpiece of the 1851 Great Exhibition.The newly built park is naturally named after this.Dinosaur models built of concrete are a very cost-effective landscape. On New Year's Eve 1853, a famous dinner was held for 21 scientists inside the unfinished model of Iguanodon.Gideon Mantel, the man who discovered and identified Iguanodon, was not among them.Sitting at the table was the greatest figure in the young science of paleontology, and his name was Richard Owen.By this time, he had spent several years with fruitful results, making Geddith Mantel's life very difficult. Owen grew up in Lancaster, in the north of England, and trained to be a doctor.A natural anatomist, he spared no effort in his research work, sometimes illegally removing limbs, organs and other parts from corpses, taking them home and slowly dissecting them.Once, he used a sack to carry back the head he had just taken from the corpse of a black African sailor, accidentally tripped over the wet stone and slipped, watching the head bouncing along the road in panic. Rolled down the alley, entered the open doorway of a house, and stopped in the front hall.We can only imagine what the owner of that family would say when he saw a head rolling to his feet.Some people said that before they had time to figure out what was going on, suddenly a very anxious young man rushed in, picked up the head, and rushed out again. In 1825, at the age of 21, Owen moved to London and was soon hired by the Royal College of Surgeons to help clear up the clutter of medical and anatomical specimens.Most of these, bequeathed to the College by the eminent surgeon and tireless collector of medical treasures, John Hunter, were never sorted and cleared, in large part because, shortly after Hunter's death, every Textual material on the meaning of the item is missing. Irving quickly gained attention for his playmaking and deduction skills.At the same time, he proved himself to be an unrivaled anatomist, with a strong instinct for restoration, almost comparable to the great Cuvier in Paris.He became a specialist in dissecting animals and had first refusal to any animal that died in the London Zoo, and that kind of thing was delivered to his house for his inspection without exception.Once, his wife came home to find a freshly dead rhino blocking the front porch.He quickly became a preeminent expert on animals of all kinds, living and extinct -- from the platypus, echidna, and other newly discovered marsupials, to the hapless dodo and extinct species The big bird - moa.The latter lived freely in New Zealand, but was finally eaten up by the Maori. In 1861, he discovered Archeopteryx in Bavaria, was the first person to describe Archeopteryx, and was also the first person to write an official epitaph for the dodo.In all, he published about 600 papers on anatomy, which is a huge number. However, it is for his work on dinosaurs that Irwin is remembered.He coined the name "dinosaur" in 1841.It means "dreadful lizard", which is a very inappropriate name.We now know that dinosaurs weren't scary -- some were no bigger than rabbits, and they were probably solitary.One thing is for sure: they are not lizards.In fact, dinosaurs are a much older family (about 300 million years ago).Owen knew very well that they were reptiles, and the Greek already had a very suitable term - reptiles, but for some reason he would not use it.He also made a more forgivable mistake (given how few specimens were available at the time) in not noticing that dinosaurs consisted not of one but of two reptiles: the bird-like ornithischia and the A lizard-like saurischian dinosaur. Owen was not a very attractive man, neither in appearance nor temperament.In a middle-aged photo, he looks thin and sinister, with long, straight hair and bulging eyes, like a villain in a Victorian melodrama - with a face you could use to frighten young children .In demeanor, he is cold and arrogant, with no scruples in realizing his ambitions.He was the only person Charles Darwin was known to hate.Even Owen's son (who committed suicide not long after) referred to his father's "pathetic cruelty of heart." As an anatomist, his talent is unquestionable, so he can do the most shameless evil without being blamed. In 1857, when the naturalist TH Huxley was flipping through a new edition of "Churchill's Guide to Medicine", he suddenly noticed that Owen was listed as a professor of comparative anatomy and physiology at the Government Mining College. Darwin now holds the position.When he asked how the guide could have made such a crude mistake, he was told that the information was provided by Dr. Owen himself.Meanwhile, a naturalist named Hugh Falconer, who worked with Owen, exposed Owen on the spot as taking credit for one of his discoveries.He was also accused of misappropriating specimens, later denying that he had done so.Owen even got into a bitter quarrel with the Queen's dentist over the credit of a theory about the physiology of teeth. He doesn't hesitate to persecute those he doesn't like.Early in his life he used his influence with the Geological Society to repel a young man named Robert Grant, whose only crime had been to show that he had great promise as an anatomist.Grant was startled to find himself suddenly deprived of the access to the dissected specimens that were essential to his research. Unable to do his job anymore, he has understandably become discouraged and unknown. No one hurt more than the increasingly miserable hapless Gideon Mantle by Irving's bluntness.After losing his wife, children, his career as a doctor and most of his fossil collection, Mantel moved to London. 1841 is the fateful year when Irwin is in London to be honored with the naming and discovery of a dinosaur - and Mantell has a terrible accident.As the carriage crossed Clayham Common, he somehow fell out of the saddle and got tangled up in the reins as the frightened horses galloped across the rough ground.The accident left him with a bowed back, a limp to walk, years of pain and a damaged spine from which he never recovered. Taking advantage of Mantell's frail state, Owen set out to systematically expunge his contributions from the archives, renaming species that Mantell had named years earlier, taking credit for their discovery.Mantel also wanted to do some innovative research, but Owen used his influence at the Royal Society to ensure that most of Mantel's papers were rejected. Unable to bear the pain or persecution any longer, Mantel took his own life in 1852.His deformed spine was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeons - in another irony - for the custody of Richard Owen, curator of the College's Hunter Museum. However, the stigma was not entirely over.Shortly after Mantel's death, Literary magazine published an extremely unforgiving eulogy.In that article, Mantel was described as a second-rate anatomist whose modest contributions to paleontology were limited "by lack of solid knowledge."The eulogy even erased the credit for his discovery of Iguanodon, and attributed this credit to Cuvier and Owen.The obituary was not signed, but its style was Owen's, and no one in the natural sciences would doubt the authorship. However, by this time, Owen's bad deeds were coming to an end.His day of downfall had come.A committee of the Royal Society — of which Owen happened to be chair — decided to award him its highest honor: the British Royal Medal, for a treatise on an extinct mollusc called Arrowstone. . "However," says Deborah Cadbury, who has an excellent account of that history in "The Dreadful Lizard," "the achievement was not as original as it seemed." It turned out that Arrowstone had been discovered 4 years earlier by an amateur naturalist named Channing Pierce and had been fully presented at a meeting of the Geological Society.Owen was present at that meeting, but he made no mention of it in his report to the Royal Society.It was no accident that in that report he renamed the animal "Owen's mollusk" in his honor.Although Owen was allowed to retain the Royal Order, the event permanently discredited him, even among his few remaining supporters. In the end, Huxley did what he did: he voted Owen out of many committees of the Zoological Society and the Royal Society.In the end, Huxley became the new professor at the Hunter Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, ending Owen's punishment. Irwin never again engaged in important research, but devoted the latter half of his life to something extraordinary, for which we are grateful. In 1856 he became Director of the Natural History Department at the British Museum, and in that role he promoted the creation of the Natural History Museum in London.That grand and lovely Gothic building in South Kensington, opened to the public in 1880, is almost entirely a testimony to his vision. Before Owen, museums were mainly used and cultivated by a small number of elites, and even they were difficult to enter.When the British Museum was first established, those who wanted to visit had to write an application and go through a simple interview to decide whether they were suitable for admission.Then, they have to come back for tickets -- that is, if they pass their interview -- and finally come back again to see the treasures in the museum.Even at that time, they can only visit together, and they are driven to move forward quickly, and they are not allowed to stop casually.Owen's plan is that everyone is welcome, even encouraging workers to visit in the evenings.He devoted most of the museum to displaying public exhibits.He even went so far as to propose putting descriptions on each exhibit, so that people can appreciate what they have in front of them.He was opposed by TH Huxley on this issue, which was somewhat unexpected.Huxley believed that museums should primarily be research institutions.By making the Museum of Natural History a place where everyone can go, Irwin changed the purpose of our museums. However, his unselfishness towards humanity did not make him forget his opponents.His last official move was to lobby against a proposal for a statue honoring Charles Darwin.He was unsuccessful in this effort—although he inadvertently scored himself a victory, only belatedly.Today, a statue of himself looms masterly from the staircase of the Natural History Museum's lobby, while statues of Darwin and Huxley sit unobtrusively in the museum's coffee shop, gazing gravely at people Drink tea and eat donuts with jam. There is reason to think that Richard Owen's narrow-minded confrontation marked a low point in nineteenth-century geology, but a more serious confrontation occurred again, this time from overseas.In the last decades of that century, there was also a confrontation in the United States that was far more malevolent, though less destructive.The confrontation is between two eccentric and ruthless men: Edward Drink Copp and Osneil Charles Marsh. They have many things in common.Both are spoiled, urgent, self-centered, quarrelsome, jealous, mistrustful, and always unhappy.Together, they changed the world of paleontology. They were friends and admirers at first, even naming fossil species after each other, and happily working together for a week in 1868.Then something went wrong in their relationship - and no one could figure out what - and by the second year it had become an adversarial relationship between them; hate.It is safe to say that there are no other two persons in the natural sciences who despise each other more. Marsh is 8 years older than the opponent.He is a reclusive nerd, well-dressed, with a neat beard, who rarely goes to work in the field, and is very bad at finding things when he does.On one trip to Wyoming to visit the famous dinosaur fields at Comrade Cliffs, he failed to notice—in the words of one historian—that dinosaur bones were "strewn like logs."However, he had enough money to buy almost anything he wanted.Although he came from a moderately wealthy family—his father was a rancher in upstate New York—his uncle was George Peabody, the extraordinarily rich and tolerant financier.When Marsh showed an interest in natural history, Peabody built him a museum at Yale and gave him enough money to fill it with pretty much anything he set his sights on. Born into a privileged family—his father was a wealthy Philadelphia businessman—Copp was more adventurous than Marsh, and in the summer of 1876, in Montana, when George Armstrong Custer and his troops Cope was still looking for bones nearby when Little Bighorn was wiped out.Someone reminded him that it might be very unwise to come to the Indian territory to fetch treasure at this time.He thought for a moment and decided to move on.His gain is too great.Once he encountered a few suspicious Crow Indians, but he won their trust by taking out and putting on his dentures. For a decade or so, the hostilities between Marsh and Copp took the form of mainly the Cold War, but by 1877 the Cold War suddenly turned into a large-scale conflict.That year, a Colorado elementary school teacher named Arthur Lex was out hiking with a friend and found several bones near Morrison.Lex thought the bones belonged to a "monitor lizard"; thoughtfully, he sent some samples to both Marsh and Kopp.Copp was delighted, and sent Lex $100 as a reward, with instructions not to tell anyone, especially Marsh, about his discovery.Lex didn't quite understand, so he asked Marsh to hand over the bones to Kopp.Marsh did so, but was met with a humiliation he will never forget. This incident also marked the beginning of a confrontation between the two.The confrontation gets hotter, dirtier, and ridiculous.Sometimes, it was so vile that the excavators of one side threw stones at the excavators of the other.At one point, Kopp was caught prying open Marsh's box.他们在文章中互相污辱对方，瞧不起对方取得的成果。科学往往是--也许从来是--在对抗之中发展得更快、更有成果。在随后的几年里，通过两个人的共同努力，美国已知的恐龙种类数量从9种增加到将近150种。普通人说得出的每一种恐龙--剑龙、雷龙、梁龙、三角龙--差不多都是他们两人中的一位发现的。 1不幸的是，他们干得过于拼命，过于草率，往往把已经知道的当做一项新的发现。他俩"发现"一个名叫"尤因他兽"的物种不下22次。他们乱七八糟的分类，别人花了几年时间才整理出来，而有的至今还没有整理清楚。 两人当中，柯普的科学成果要多得多。在他极其勤奋的一生中，他写出了大约1400篇学术论文，描述了近1300种新的化石（各种各样的化石，不仅仅是恐龙的化石）--在这两方面都超过马什的成果两倍以上。柯普本来可作出更大的贡献，但不幸的是，他在后来的几年中急速走下坡路。他在1875年继承了一笔财产，不大明智地把钱投资于金融业，结果全部泡汤。他最后住在费城一家寄居宿舍的单人房间里，身边堆满了书、文献和骨头。而马什的晚年是在纽黑文一栋富丽堂皇的房子里度过的。柯普死于1897年，两年后马什也与世长辞。 在最后的几年里，柯普产生了另一个有意思的念头。他殷切希望自己被宣布为"人类" 的模式标本--即，把他的骨头作为人类的正式样板。在一般情况下，一个物种的模式标本就是被发现的第一副骨头，但由于"人类"的第一副骨头并不存在，就产生了一个空缺。柯普希望填补这个空缺。这是一个古怪而又没有价值的愿望，但谁也想不出理由来加以反对。 为此，柯普立下遗嘱，把自己的骨头捐献给费城的威斯塔研究所。那是个学术团体，是由好像无处不在的卡斯珀·威斯塔的后裔捐资成立的。不幸的是，经过处理和装配以后，人们发现他的骨头显示出患了早期梅毒的症状，谁也不愿意把这种特征保留在代表人类本身的模式标本上。于是，柯普的请求和他的骨头就不了了之。直到现在，现代人类仍然没有模式标本。 至于这个舞台上的其他人物，欧文于1892年去世，比柯普或马什早几年。巴克兰最后精神失常，成了个话都说不清的废人，在克莱翰的一家精神病院里度过了最后的岁月，恰好就在离造成曼特尔终生残疾的出事地点不太远的地方。曼特尔那变了形的脊椎在亨特博物馆展出了将近一个世纪，后来在二战快结束时突袭伦敦的闪电战中大慈大悲地被一枚炸弹击中，不见了踪影。曼特尔死后，剩下的收藏品传给了他的子女，其中许多被他的儿子沃尔特带到了新西兰，他于1840年移居到那个国家。沃尔特成为一名杰出的新西兰人，最后官至土著居民事务部部长。1865年，他把他父亲收藏品中的主要标本，包括那颗著名的禽龙牙齿，捐赠给了惠灵顿的殖民博物馆（就是现在的新西兰博物馆），此后一直存放在那里。而那颗引发这一切的禽龙牙齿--很可能是古生物学里最重要的牙齿--现在不再对外展出。 当然，寻找恐龙的工作，没有随着19世纪伟大的恐龙搜寻家的去世而结束。实际上，在某种出人意料的程度上，这项工作才刚刚开始。1898年，也就是柯普和马什两人相继去世的中间一年，发现了--其实是注意到--一件比以前发现过的任何东西都要了不起的宝贝，地点是在"骨屋采石场"，离马什的主要搜寻场所--怀俄明州的科摩崖只有几公里。人们发现成百上千块骨头化石露在山体外面任凭风吹雨打。骨头的数量如此之多，竟有人用骨头盖起一间小屋--采石场的名字由此而来。仅仅在最初的两个季节里，发掘出来的古代骨头就达5万千克之多；在之后的6年里，每年又挖出成千上万千克。 结果，进入20世纪的时候，古生物学家实际上有着几吨重的古骨来供他们选择。问题在于，他们仍然搞不清这些骨头的年龄。更糟糕的是，大家公认的地球的年龄，与过去的岁月所显然包含的时期、年代和时代的数量不大吻合。要是地球真的只有2000万年历史，就像开尔文勋爵坚持认为的那样，那么各种古代生物都会在同一地质年代产生和消亡。It doesn't make sense at all. 除开尔文以外，别的科学家也把注意力转向这个问题，得出的结果只是加深了那种不确定性。都柏林的三一学院有一位受人尊敬的地质学家，名叫塞缪尔·霍顿。他宣称，地球的年龄约为23亿年--大大超出了任何人的看法。他注意到了这个情况，用同样的数据重新算了一遍，得出的数字是1.53亿年。也是三一学院的约翰·乔利决定试一试埃德蒙·哈雷提出的海盐测算法，但这种方法是以许多不完善的假设为基础的，他只好顺水推舟地干了一下。他得出的结果是：地球的年龄是8900万年--这个年龄与开尔文的假设完全吻合，不幸的是与现实根本不符。 情况如此混乱，到19世纪末，你可以获知--取决于你查的是哪种资料--我们距离开始出现复杂生命的寒武纪的年数是300万年、1800万年、6亿年、7.94亿年或24亿年--或者是这个范围里其他数量的年。直到1910年，美国人乔治·贝克尔才作出了一个最受人尊重的估计，他认为地球的年龄也许不超过5500万年。 正当事情似乎乱作一团的时候，出了另一位杰出人物，有了一种崭新的方法。他是个直率而又聪明的新西兰农家孩子，名叫欧内斯特·卢瑟福。他拿出了无可辩驳的证据：地球至少已经存在许多亿年，很可能还更古老。 值得注意的是，他的证据是以炼金术为基础的--天然，自发，科学上信得过，毫不神秘，尽管是炼金术。结果证明，牛顿毕竟没有大错。那种方法到底是怎么知道的，当然要等下一章来叙述。