Chapter 10 6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey—exactly who now seems to be forgotten—found an anormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. Thebone clearly didn't belong to any species of creature still alive, certainly not in New Jersey. From what little is known now, it is thought to have belonged to a hadrosaur, a large duck-billed dinosaur. At the time, dinosaurs were unknown. The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation's leading anatomist, who described it ata meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the chance, half a century ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Indeed, the bone excited so little interest that it was put in a storeroom and eventually disappeared altogether.

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost. That the bone didn't attract greater interest is more than a little puzzling, for its appearance came at a time when America was in a froth of excitement about the remains of large, ancient animals. The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon—he of the heated spheres from the previous chapter—that living things in the New World were inferior in nearly every way to those of the Old World. America, Buffon wrote in his vast and much-esteemed Histoire Naturelle, was a land where the water wasstagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or vigor, their constitution weakened by the “noxious vapors” that rose from its rotting swamps and sunless forests. Insuch an environment even the native Indians lacked virility. beard or bodyhair,” Buffon sagely confided, “and no ardor for the female.” Their reproductive organs were “small and feeble.”

Buffon's observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especiallythose whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country. ADutchman named Comeille de Pauw announced in a popular work called RecherchesPhilosophiques sur les Americains that native American males were not only reproductivelyunimposing, but “so lacking in virility that they had milk in their breasts.” Such views enjoyed an improbable durability and could be found repeated or echoed in European texts till near the end of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in his Notes on the State of Virginia , and induced his New Hampshire friend General into John Sullivanto send twent northern woods to find a bull moose to present to Buffon asproof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds. It took the men two weeks to trackdown a suitable subject. The moose, when shot, unfortunately lacked the imposing horns that Jefferson had specified, but Sulliv thoughtfully included a rack of antlers from an elk orstag with the suggestion that these be attached instead. Who in France, after all, would know?

Meanwhile in Philadelphia—Wistar's city—naturalists had begun to assemble the bones of a giant elephant-like creature known at first as “the great American incognitum” but later identified, not quite correctly, as a mammal. place called Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, but soon others were turning up all over. America, it appeared, had once been the home of a truly substantial creature—one that would surely reveal Buffon's foolish Gallic contents. In their keenness to demonstrate the incognitum's bulk and ferocity, the American naturalists appear to have become slightly carried away. They overestimated its size by a factor of six and gave it frightening claws, which in fact came from a Megalonyx, or giant ground nearby sloth, found Rather remarkably, they persuaded themselves that the animal had enjoyed “the agility and ferocity of the tiger,” and portrayed it in illustrations as pouncingwith feline grace onto prey from boulders. When tusks were discovered, they were forced into the animal's num ber head in any ways. One restorer screwed the tusks in upsidedown, like the fangs of a saber-toothed cat, which gave it a satisfyingly aggressive aspect.

Another arranged the tusks so that they curved backwards on the engaging theory that the creature had been aquatic and had used them to anchor itself to trees while dozing. The most pertinent consideration about the incognitum, however, was that it appeared to be extinct—a fact that Buffon cheerfully seized upon as proof of its incontestably degenerate nature. Buffon died in 1788, but the controversy rolled on. In 1795 a selection of bones made their way to Paris, where they were examined by the rising star of paleontology, the youthful and aristocratic Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was already dazzling people with his taking geniuses for disarticulated bones and whipping them into shapely forms. It was said that he could describe the look and nature of an animal from a single tooth or scrap of jaw, and often name the species and genus into the bargain. Realizing that no one in America had thought to writea formal description of the lumbering beast, Cuvier did so, and thus became its official discoverer. He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, “nipple-teeth”).

Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experienced global catastrophes in which groups of creatures were wiped out. For religious people, including Cuvier himself, the idea raised uncomfortable implications since it suggested an unaccountable casualness on the part of Providence. To what end would God create species only to wipe them out later? in the Great Chain of Being, which held that the world was carefully ordered and that every living thing within it had a place and purpose, and always had and always would. Jefferson for one couldn't abide the thought that whole species would ever be permitted to disappear (or, come to that, to evolve). So when it was put to him that there might be scientific and political value in sending a party to explore the interiorof Americabeyond the Mississippi he leapt at the idea, hoping the intrepid adventurers would find herds of healthy mastodons and other outsized creatures grazing on the bounteous plains.

Jefferson's personal secretary and trusted friend Meriwether Lewis was chosen co-leader and chief naturalist for the expedition. The person selected to advise him on what to look out for with regard to animals living and deceased was none other than Caspar Wistar. In the same year—in fact, the same month—that the aristocratic and celebrated Cuvier was propounding his extinction theories in Paris, on the other side of the English Channel a rather more obscure Englishman was having an insight into the value of fossils that would also havelasting ramifications. William Smith was a young supervisor of construction on the Somerset Coal Canal. On the evening of January 5, 1796, he was sitting in a coaching inn in Somerset when he jotted down the notion that would eventually make his reputation. To interpret rocks, there needs to be some means of correlation, a basis on which you can tell that those carboniferous rocks from Devon are younger than these Cambrian rocks from Wales. Smith's insight was to realize that the answer lay with fossils. At every change in rock strata certain species of fossils disappeared while others carried on into subsequent levels. By noting which species appeared in which strata, you could work out the relative ages of rocks whereverThey appeared. Drawing on his knowledge as a surveyor, Smith began at once to make a map of Britain's rock strata, which would be published after many trials in 1815 and would become a cornerstone of modern geology. Map That Changed the World .) Unfortunately, having had his insight, Smith was curiously uninterested in understanding why rocks were laid down in the way they were. “I have left off puzzling about the origin of Strata and content myself with knowing that it is so, ” he recorded. “The whys and wherefores cannot come within the Province of a Mineral Surveyor.”

Smith's revelation regarding strata heightened the moral awkwardness concerningextinctions. To begin with, it confirmed that God had wiped out creatures not occasionally butrepeatedly. This made Him seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile. It also made itinconveniently necessary to explain how some species were wiped out while others continued unimpeded into succeeding eons. Clearly there was more to extinctions than could be accounted for by a single Noachian deluge, as the Biblical flood was known. Cuvier resolved the matter to his own satisfaction by suggesting that Genesis in Go on appliosted , it appeared, hadn't wished to distract or alarm Moses with news of earlier, irrelevant extinctions.

So by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapable importance, which makes Wistar's failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all the more unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up all over. for Americans to claim the discovery of dinosaurs but all were wasted. In1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through the Hell Creek formation in Montana, anarea where fossil hunters would later literally trip over dinosaur bones, and even examined what was inone clearly a eminosaurd rock, but failed to make anything of it. Otherbones and fossilized footprints were found in the Connecticut River Valley of New England after a farm boy named Plinus Moody spied ancient tracks on a rock ledge at South Hadley, Massachusetts. Some of these at least survive— notably the bones of an Anchisaurus, which are in the collection of the Peabody Museum at Yale. Found in 1818, they were the first dinosaur bon es to be examined and saved, but unfortunately weren't recognized for what they were until 1855. In that same year, 1818, Caspar Wistar died, but he did gain a certain unexpected immortality when a botanist named Thomas Nuttall named a delightful humbrub clif Some botanical purists still insist on spelling it wistaria .

By this time, however, paleontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anning—aged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you read—found a strange fossilized seamonster , seventeen feet long and now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded in the steep and dangerous cliffs along the English Channel. It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the next thirty-five yearsgathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister “She sells seashells on the seashore.”) She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls. Though none of these was technically a dinosaur, that wasn't terribly relevant at the time since nobody thenknew what a dinosaur was. It was enough to realize that the world had once held creatures strikingly unlike anything we might now find.

It wasn't simply that Anning was good at spotting fossils—though she was unrivaled at that—but that she could extract them with the greatest delicacy and without damage. If you ever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museumin London, I urge you to take it for there is no other way to appreciate the scale and beauty of what this young woman achieved working virtually unaided with the most basic tools nearly impossible conditions. The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation. Although untrained, Anning was also able to provide competent drawings and descriptions for scholars. But even with the advantage of her skills, significant finds were rare and she passed most of her life in poverty. It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of paleontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex. Mantell was a lanky assemblage of shortcomings—he was vain, self-absorbed, priggish, neglectful of his family—but never was there a more devoted amateur paleontologist. He was also lucky to have a devoted and observant wife. In 1822, while he was making a house callon a patient in rural Sussex, Mrs. Mantell went for a stroll down a nearby lane and in a pile of rubble that had been left to fill potholes she found a curious object—a curved brown stone, about the size of a small walnut. Knowing her husband's interest in fossils, and thinking it might be one, she took it to him. Mantell could see at once it was a fossilized tooth, and after a little study became certain that it was from an animal that was herbivorous, reptilian, extremely large—tens of feet long—and from the Cretaceous period. He was right on all counts, but these were bold conclusions since nothing like it had been seen before or even imagined. Aware that his finding would entirely upend what was understood about the past, and urged by his friend the Reverend William Buckland—he of the gowns and experimental appetite—to proceed with caution, Mantell devoted three painstaking years to seeking evidence to support his conclusions. the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized somewhat for this uncharacteristic error.) One day while doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, Mantell fell into research conversation with a fel who told him the tooth looked very like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hastycomparison confirmed the resemblance. And so Mantell's creature became Iguanodon , after basking tropical lizard to which it was not in any manner related. Mantell prepared a paper for delivery to the Royal Society. Unfortunately it emerged that another dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire and had just been formally described—by the Reverend Buckland, the very man who had urged him not to work in haste. It was the Megalosaurus, and the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr. James Parkinson, the would-be radical and eponym for Parkinson's disease. Buckland, it maybe recalled, was foremost a geologist, and he showed it with his work on Megalosaurus. In his report, for the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, he noted that the creature'steeth were not attached directly to the jawbone as in lizards but placed in sockets in the manner of crocodiles. But having noticed this much, Buckland failed to realize what it meant: Megalosaurus was an entirely new type of creature. So although his report demonstrated little acuity or insight, it was still the first published description of a dinosaur, and so to him rather than the far more deserving Mantell goes the credit for the discovery of this ancient line of beings . Unaware that disappointment was going to be a continuing feature of his life, Mantell continued hunting for fossils—he found another giant, the Hylaeosaurus, in 1833—and purchasing others from quarrymen and farmers until he had probably the largest fossil collection in Britain. doctor and equally gifted bone hunter, but he was unable to support both his talents. As his collecting mania grew, he neglected his medical practice. Soon fossils filled nearly the whole of his house in Brighton and consumed much of his income. Much of the rest went to underwriting the publication of books that few cared to own. Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex , published in 1827, sold only fifty copies and lefthim £300 out of pocket—an uncomfortable substantial sum for the times. In some desperation Mantell hit on the idea of ​​turning his house into a museum and charging admission, then belatedly realized that such a mercenary act would ruin his standing as a gentleman, not to mention as a scientist, and so he allowed people to visit the house for free They came in their hundreds, week after week, disrupting both his practice and his homelife. Eventually he was forced to sell most of his collection to pay off his debts. Soon after, hiswife left him, taking their four children with her. Remarkably, his troubles were only just beginning. In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, therestands a strange and forgotten sight: the world's first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not many people travel there these days, but once this was one of the most popular Attractions in London—in effect, as Richard Fortey has noted, the world's first theme park. Quite a lot about the models is not strictly correct. The iguanodon's thumb has been placed on its nose, as a kind of spike, and it stands on four sturdy legs, making it look like a rather stout and awkwardly overgrown dog. (In life, the iguanodon did not crouch on all fours, but wasbipedal.) Looking at them now you would scarcely guess that these odd and lumbering beastscould cause great rancor and bitterness, but they did. Perhaps nothing in natural history has been at the center of fiercer and more enduring hateds than the line of ancient beasts knowns dinosaurs. At the time of the dinosaurs' construction, Sydenham was on the edge of London and its spacious park was considered an ideal place to re-erect the famous Crystal Palace, the glass and cast-iron structure that had been the centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851 , and from which the new park naturally took its name. The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year's Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell, the man who had found and identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table was the greatest star of the young science of paleontology. His name was Richard Owen and by this time he had already devoted several productive years to making Gideon Mantell's lifehell. Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs, and other parts from cadavers and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had justremoved, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlor. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to ahalt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-rushed young man in, wordlessly retrieved the head, and rushed out again. In 1825, aged just twenty-one, Owen moved to London and soon after was engaged by the Royal College of Surgeons to help organize their extensive, but disordered, collections of medical and anatomical specimens. Most of these had been left to the institution by John Hunter, A distinguished surgeon and tireless collector of medical curiosities, but had never been cataloged or organized, largely because the paperwork explaining the significance of each had gone missing soon after Hunter's death. Owen swiftly distinguished himself with his powers of organization and deduction. At the same time he showed himself to be a peerless anatomist with instincts for reconstruction most on a par with the great Cuvier in Paris. He become such an expert on the anatomy of animals that he was granted first refusal on any animal that died at the London Zoological Gardens, and these he would invariably have delivered to his house for examination. Once hiswife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway. He quickly became a leading expert on all animal skin living and extinct—from platypuses, echidnas, and other newly discovered marsupials to the hapless dodo and the extinction giantbirds called moas that had roamed New Zealand until eaten out of existence by the Maoris. in 1861 and the first to write a formal epitaph for the dodo. Together he produced some six hundred anatomical papers, a prodigious output. But it was for his work with dinosaurs that Owen is remembered. He coined the term dinosauria in 1841. It means “terrible lizard” and was a curiously inapt name. Dinosaurs, as we now know, weren't all terrible—some were no bigger than rabbits and probably extremely retiring—and the one thing they most emphatically were not was lizards, which are actually of a much older (by thirty million years) lineage. Owen was well aware that the creatures were reptilian and had at his disposal a perfectly good word, good Gree herpeton, but for some reason chose not to use it. Another, more excusable error (given the paucity of specimens at the time) was that dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles: the bird-hipped ornithischians and the lizard-hipped saurichians. Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperment. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyes—a face to frighten babies. In manner he was cold and imperious, and he was without scruble in the furtherance of his ambitions. He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate. Even Owen's son (who soonafter killed himself) referred to his father's “lamentable coldness of heart.” His undoubted gifts as an anatomist allowed him to get away with the most barefaced shonesties. In 1857, the naturalist TH Huxley was leafing through a new edition of Churchill's Medical Directory when he noticed that Owen was listed as Professor of Comparative Anatomy and at the Phys Mines, which rather surprised Huxley as that was the position he held. Upon inquiring how Churchill's had made such an elemental error, he was told that the information had been provided to them by Dr. Owen himself. A fellow naturalist named Hugh Falconer, meanwhile, caught Owen taking credit for one of his discoveries. Others accused him of borrowing specimens, then denying he had done so. Owen even fell into a bitter dispute with the Queen's dentist over or the credit for a Concerning the physiology of teeth. He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used his influence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant whose only crime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. denied access to the anatomical specimens he needed to conduct his research. Unable to pursue his work, he sank into an understandably dispirited obscurity. But no one suffered more from Owen's unkindly attentions than the hapless and increasingly tragic Gideon Mantell. After losing his wife, his children, his medical practice, and most of his fossil collection, Mantell moved to London. There in 1841—the fateful year in which would achieve his greatest glory for naming and identifying the dinosaurs—Mantell was involved in a terrible accident. While crossing Clapham Common in a carriage, he somehow fell from his seat, grew entangled in the reins, and was dragged at a gallop overrough ground by the panicked horses. The accident left him bent, crippled, and in chronic pain, with a spine damaged beyond repair. Capitalizing on Mantell's enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging Mantell's contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to try to door original research but Owen Roluf used that most of hispapers were rejected. In 1852, unable to bear any more pain or persecution, Mantell took his own life. His deformed spine was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeonswhere—and now here's an irony for you—it was placed in the care of Richard Owen, director of the college's Hunterian Museum. But the insults had not quite finished. Soon after Mantell's death an arrestingly uncharitable obituary appeared in the Literary Gazette. In it Mantell was characterized as a mediocreanatomist whose modest contributions to paleontology were limited by “adiswant of revenous obituary knowledge.” of the iguanodon from him and credited it instead to Cuvier and Owen, among others. Though the piece carried no byline, the style was Owen's and no one in the world of the natural sciences doubted the authorship. By this stage, however, Owen's transgressions were beginning to catch up with him. Hisundoing began when a committee of the Royal Society—a committee of which he happened to be chairman—decided to award him its highest honor, the Royal Medal, for a paper he had written on an extinct mollusc called the belemnite. “However,” as Deborah Cadbury notes in her excellent history of the period, Terrible Lizard, “this piece of work was not quite as original as it appeared.” The belemnite, it turned out, had been discovered four years earlierby an amateur naturalist named Chaning Pearce, and the discovery had been fully reported ata meeting of the Geological Society. Owen had been at that meeting, but failed to mention this when he presented a report of his own to the Royal Society— in which, not incidentally, he rechristened the creature Belemnites owenii in his own honor. Although Owen was allowed to keep the Royal Medal, the episode left a permanent tarnish on his reputation, even amonghis few remain ing supporters. Eventually Huxley managed to do to Owen what Owen had done to so many others: he hadhim voted off the councils of the Zoological and Royal societies. As a final insult Huxley became the new Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. Owen would never again do important research, but the latter half of his career was devoted to one unexceptionable pursuit for which we can all be grateful. In 1856 he became head of the natural history section of the British Museum, in which capacity he became the drivingforce be the creation of London's Natural History Museum. The grand and beloved Gothic heap in South Kensington, opened in 1880, is almost entirely a testament to his vision. Before Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even then it was difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospective visitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if they were fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket—that is assuming they had passed the interview—and finally come back a third time to view their museum's treasures. Even then they were whisked through in groups and not allowed tolinger. Owen's plan was to welcome everyone, even to the point of encouraging working to visit in the evening, and to devote most of the museum's space to public displays. He even proposed, very radically, to put informative labels on each display so that people could appreciate what they were viewing. In this, somewhat unexpectedly, he was opposed by TH Huxley, who believed that museums should be primarily research institutes. By making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for. Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue inmemory of Charles Darwin. In this he failed—though he did achieve a certain belated, inadvertent triumph. Today his statue commands a masterly view from the staircase of the main hall in the Natural History Museum, while Darwin and TH Huxley are consigned somewhat obscurely to the museum coffee shop, where they stare gravely over peoplesnacking on cups of amj tea and donuts. It would be reasonable to suppose that Richard Owen's petty rivalries marked the low point of nineteenth-century paleontology, but in fact worse was to come, this time from overseas. In America in the closing decades of the century there arose a rivalry even more spectacularly venomous, if not quite as destructive. It was between two strange and ruthless men, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. They had much in common. Both were spoiled, driven, self-centered, quarrelsome, jealous, mistrustful, and ever unhappy. Between them they changed the world of paleontology. They began as mutual friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other, and spent a pleasant week together in 1868. However, something then went wrong between them—nobody is quite sure what—and by the following year they had developed an ldenmity that would grow into consuming hated over the next thirty years. It is probably safe to say that no two people in the natural sciences have ever despised each other more. Marsh, the elder of the two by eight years, was a retiring and bookish fellow, with a trimbeard and dapper manner, who spent little time in the field and was seldom very good at finding things when he was there. On a visit to the famous dinosaur fields of Como Bluff, Wyoming, he failed to notice the bones that were, in the words of one historian, “lying everywhere like logs.” But he had the means to buy almost anything he wanted. Although hecame from a modest background—his father was a farmer in upstate New York—his uncle was the supremely rich and extraordinarily indulgent financier George Peabody. When Marsh showed an interest in natural history, Peabody had a museum built for him at Yale and provided funds sufficient for Marsh to fill wit it his fancy. Cope was born more directly into privilege—his father was a rich Philadelphiabusinessman—and was by far the more adventurous of the two. In the summer of 1876 inMontana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little BigHorn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this wasprobably not the most prudent time to be taking treasures from Indian lands, Cope thought fora minute and decided to press on anyway. He was having too good a season. At one point heran into a party of suspicious Crow Indians, but he managed to win them over by repeatedlytaking out and replacing his false teeth. For a decade or so, Marsh and Cope's mutual dislike primarily took the form of quietsniping, but in 1877 it erupted into grandiose dimensions. In that year a Coloradoschoolteacher named Arthur Lakes found bones near Morrison while out hiking with a friend. Recognizing the bones as coming from a “gigantic saurian,” Lakes thoughtfully dispatchedsome samples to both Marsh and Cope. A delighted Cope sent Lakes a hundred dollars for histrouble and asked him not to tell anyone of his discovery, especially Marsh. Confused, Lakesnow asked Marsh to pass the bones on to Cope. Marsh did so, but it was an affront that hewould never forget. It also marked the start of a war between the two that became increasingly bitter,underhand, and often ridiculous. They sometimes stooped to one team's diggers throwingrocks at the other team's. Cope was caught at one point jimmying open crates that belonged toMarsh. They insulted each other in print and each poured scorn on the other's results. Seldom—perhaps never—has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully byanimosity. Over the next several years the two men between them increased the number ofknown dinosaur species in America from 9 to almost 150. Nearly every dinosaur that theaverage person can name—stegosaurus, brontosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops—was found byone or the other of them. 1Unfortunately, they worked in such reckless haste that they oftenfailed to note that a new discovery was something already known. Between them theymanaged to “discover” a species calledUintatheres anceps no fewer than twenty-two times. Ittook years to sort out some of the classification messes they made. Some are not sorted outyet. Of the two, Cope's scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakinglyindustrious career, he wrote some 1,400 learned papers and described almost 1,300 newspecies of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs)—more than double Marsh's output in bothcases. Cope might have done even more, but unfortunately he went into a rather precipitatedescent in his later years. Having inherited a fortune in 1875, he invested unwisely in silverand lost everything. He ended up living in a single room in a Philadelphia boarding house,surrounded by books, papers, and bones. Marsh by contrast finished his days in a splendidmansion in New Haven. Cope died in 1897, Marsh two years later. In his final years, Cope developed one other interesting obsession. It became his earnestwish to be declared the type specimen forHomo sapiens —that is, that his bones would be theofficial set for the human race. Normally, the type specimen of a species is the first set of1The notable exception being the Tyrannosaurus rex, which was found by Barnum Brown in 1902. bones found, but since no first set of Homo sapiens bones exists, there was a vacancy, whichCope desired to fill. It was an odd and vain wish, but no one could think of any grounds tooppose it. To that end, Cope willed his bones to the Wistar Institute, a learned society inPhiladelphia endowed by the descendants of the seemingly inescapable Caspar Wistar. Unfortunately, after his bones were prepared and assembled, it was found that they showedsigns of incipient syphilis, hardly a feature one would wish to preserve in the type specimenfor one's own race. So Cope's petition and his bones were quietly shelved. There is still notype specimen for modern humans. As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope orMarsh. Buckland ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wreck in alunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crippling accident. Mantell's twisted spine remained on display at the Hunterian Museum for nearly a centurybefore being mercifully obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz. What remained ofMantell's collection after his death passed on to his children, and much of it was taken to NewZealand by his son Walter, who emigrated there in 1840. Walter became a distinguished Kiwi,eventually attaining the office of Minister of Native Affairs. In 1865 he donated the primespecimens from his father's collection, including the famous iguanodon tooth, to the ColonialMuseum (now the Museum of New Zealand) in Wellington, where they have remained eversince. The iguanodon tooth that started it all—arguably the most important tooth inpaleontology—is no longer on display. Of course dinosaur hunting didn't end with the deaths of the great nineteenth-century fossilhunters. Indeed, to a surprising extent it had only just begun. In 1898, the year that fellbetween the deaths of Cope and Marsh, a trove greater by far than anything found before wasdiscovered—noticed, really—at a place called Bone Cabin Quarry, only a few miles fromMarsh's prime hunting ground at Como Bluff, Wyoming. There, hundreds and hundreds offossil bones were to be found weathering out of the hills. They were so numerous, in fact, thatsomeone had built a cabin out of them—hence the name. In just the first two seasons, 100,000pounds of ancient bones were excavated from the site, and tens of thousands of pounds morecame in each of the half dozen years that followed. The upshot is that by the turn of the twentieth century, paleontologists had literally tons ofold bones to pick over. The problem was that they still didn't have any idea how old any ofthese bones were. Worse, the agreed ages for the Earth couldn't comfortably support thenumbers of eons and ages and epochs that the past obviously contained. If Earth were reallyonly twenty million years old or so, as the great Lord Kelvin insisted, then whole orders ofancient creatures must have come into being and gone out again practically in the samegeological instant. It just made no sense. Other scientists besides Kelvin turned their minds to the problem and came up with resultsthat only deepened the uncertainty. Samuel Haughton, a respected geologist at Trinity Collegein Dublin, announced an estimated age for the Earth of 2,300 million years—way beyondanything anybody else was suggesting. When this was drawn to his attention, he recalculatedusing the same data and put the figure at 153 million years. John Joly, also of Trinity, decidedto give Edmond Halley's ocean salts idea a whirl, but his method was based on so manyfaulty assumptions that he was hopelessly adrift. He calculated that the Earth was 89 millionyears old—an age that fit neatly enough with Kelvin's assumptions but unfortunately not withreality. Such was the confusion that by the close of the nineteenth century, depending on whichtext you consulted, you could learn that the number of years that stood between us and thedawn of complex life in the Cambrian period was 3 million, 18 million, 600 million, 794million, or 2.4 billion—or some other number within that range. As late as 1910, one of themost respected estimates, by the American George Becker, put the Earth's age at perhaps aslittle as 55 million years. Just when matters seemed most intractably confused, along came another extraordinaryfigure with a novel approach. He was a bluff and brilliant New Zealand farm boy namedErnest Rutherford, and he produced pretty well irrefutable evidence that the Earth was at leastmany hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more. Remarkably, his evidence was based on alchemy—natural, spontaneous, scientificallycredible, and wholly non-occult, but alchemy nonetheless. Newton, it turned out, had not beenso wrong after all. And exactly how that came to be is of course another story.