2014-03-23 13:43:37
In 1802, a boy named Plinius Moody found traces of large animal tracks imprinted in rock in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. They were the footprints of a huge bipedal animal with three toes on each foot. Since no one had ever heard of dinosaurs at that time, the word had not even been invented, these traces were popularly interpreted as bird tracks, and were also identified much later, in 1845, by Edward Hitchcock, a professor of geology at Amherst College.
Shortly after Moody’s discovery, starting in 1815, scientists such as William Buckland and Gideon Mantell in Europe discovered and described the first species of dinosaurs: Megalosaurus, Iguanodon… But in America, dinosaur discoveries were expected.
The first American dinosaur fossils were unearthed in 1838, when a crew of laborers for a landowner named John Estaugh Hopkins unearthed enormous bones by digging marl, then used as fertilizer, from a well next to a small tributary of the Copper River. , in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Hopkins used the bones to decorate his house, and there they caught the attention, twenty years later, of a visitor, William Parker Foulke, a lawyer, abolitionist, philanthropist, and also an amateur naturalist and geologist. The year was 1858. By then, in Europe, several species of these large reptiles had already been discovered, and the English paleontologist Richard Owen had coined the term dinosaur for them.
Foulke contacted paleontologist Joseph Leidy, a curator at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Leidy had described two years earlier, in 1856, several dinosaur teeth discovered in Montana. Foulke and Leidy dug up where the bones had been found, unearthing the nearly complete skeleton of the first North American dinosaur. When Leidy published the formal description of the dinosaur, he named it Hadrosaurus foulkii (“Foulke’s Robust Lizard”), in honor of his collaborator.
Hadrosaurus was a herbivorous bipedal dinosaur. It measured between seven and ten meters in length, and between three and four in height, and weighed seven tons. With its front legs, it leaned on the trunks of the trees to feed on their leaves, which it tore off with a beak similar to that of a duck. It lived in North America at the end of the Cretaceous, about 80 million years ago. Although no further remains of the species have been found, Hadrosaurus gave its name to the group of hadrosaurs, or duck-billed dinosaurs, which were the dominant herbivorous dinosaurs during the Cretaceous.
The discovery of Hadrosaurus triggered a wave of dinomania in the United States that culminated in the last quarter of the century. XIX with the so-called Bone Wars, a period of intense search and discovery of fossils marked by the fierce rivalry between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope, of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and Othniel Charles Marsh, of the Peabody Museum of Natural History in Philadelphia. Yale.
Cope and Marsh met in Berlin in 1864. Their relationship, friendly at first, grew strained due to their different social backgrounds, their disagreements on scientific issues, and their strong personalities. After a series of misunderstandings and dirty maneuvers, hostilities began openly in 1873.
For years, both paleontologists used their personal fortunes and reputations to organize expeditions to the rich fossil beds of the western United States, primarily in search of dinosaurs. In their attempt to achieve supremacy and to discredit and ridicule their rival, they did not hesitate to resort to bribery, fraud, theft, espionage, sabotage, the destruction of fossils and personal attacks. Cope and Marsh ended up financially ruined. and socially, but his contributions to paleontology were enormous. In addition, the Bone Wars stimulated public interest in dinosaurs, which has not waned since.
In numbers, Marsh “won” the war; he discovered eighty new dinosaur species, while Cope “only” discovered fifty-six. This is explained, however, because Marsh took longer to go bankrupt and was only looking for reptiles and fossil mammals, while Cope’s interests were broader. Among the dinosaurs discovered by Marsh are some of the most famous: Triceratops, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus…
The Bone War also had negative effects; The animosity between the two scientists affected the reputation of all American paleontology in Europe for years, and with good reason: fossils were destroyed to prevent them from falling into enemy hands, deposits were buried to hide them, and even other, more methodical paleontologists had to abandoning their excavations given the impossibility of competing with them… One of those paleontologists was precisely Joseph Leidy, the one who had described the hadrosaur with which dinomania began, and who had been Cope’s teacher.
In their eagerness to outdo their rival, both Marsh and Cope described many new species based only on incomplete and insignificant fossils; species that after time have turned out not to be such, in a confusion of names that has plagued paleontology for many decades.
In 1877, Marsh published a short two-paragraph article in the American Journal of Science describing the spinal column of a fifty-foot-long dinosaur that he named Apatosaurus ajax. Two years later, he published another short article in the same magazine describing a larger dinosaur, twenty to eighty feet long, which he named Brontosaurus excelsus. The nearly complete skeleton of this brontosaurus was mounted in the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University in 1905. Brontosaurus was the largest dinosaur yet discovered, and was the first sauropod, a long-necked, quadrupedal dinosaur. that it was exhibited in a museum; thus, it achieved great popularity throughout the world, unlike the poor apatosaurus, of which no more bones were found.
But in 1903, paleontologist Elmer Riggs of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History concluded that Marsh’s apatosaurus was nothing more than a juvenile brontosaurus. One of the rules that govern the nomenclature of living beings is the rule of priority: the oldest name, in this case Apatosaurus, has precedence over the most modern. Apatosaurus became the official species name, and Brontosaurus became what zoologists call a synonym; technically not incorrect, but it is a name that is no longer used in scientific publications. However, the name brontosaurus had already caught on in the popular imagination; Sixty years after the Riggs study was published, the Flintstones were still eating brontosaurus chops.
A case similar to that of the brontosaurus served to inflame the enmity between Cope and Marsh. In 1866, the discovery in a New Jersey marl mine of the fossil bones of a gigantic animal reached the ears of Cope, who hastened to study them. The remains included an enormous claw, leading Cope to say it was “the most formidable type of predatory terrestrial vertebrate we know of.”
Cope named the new dinosaur Laelaps, the Greek name for Lelaps, the infallible dog in Greek mythology that always caught its prey when hunting.
Laelaps was the first predatory dinosaur discovered in the United States, and the fact that it had much shorter front legs than its hind legs caused some paleontologists to reconsider the traditional image of dinosaurs as clumsy quadrupeds, and to imagine Laelaps more like a bird, nimbly jumping on its prey. An image that has not changed much to the present.
But Cope didn’t know that the name Laelaps had already been used for a mite, so it wasn’t available; it was what zoologists call a namesake. In 1877, Marsh realized the problem and “stole” Cope’s Laelaps by renaming it Dryptosaurus (“tearing lizard”); To add to the derision, he made it into a simple footnote to the description of another dinosaur, Titanosaurus. Enough to get priority and take away from its rival the merit of naming the species.
Interestingly, Titanosaurus was also a namesake, having already been used by the English geologist Richard Lydekker that same year for an Indian dinosaur, and Marsh later had to change it to Atlantosaurus. And even the latter, based only on two vertebrae, is currently considered doubtful, and various paleontologists have associated it with Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, or other better-established species.
The Bone War ended with Cope’s death in 1897; and Marsh soon followed two years later.
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