The swashbuckling Yale paleontologist, the good, the bad, and the ugly
O. C. Marsh was America’s first Darwinist
In the 1870s, Othniel Charles Marsh was a professor and paleontologist at Yale University who was fighting off Native Americans, meeting with their chiefs, and tramping through the wild frontiers of the American West. He was a leading paleontologist settled in an elite university, but he wanted to be the top fossil finder. That ambition and drive made for one of the ugliest chapters in the history of American sciences.
Marsh was driven to find fossils, and among many of his classic discoveries, like Triceratops and Stegosaurus, he also uncovered a complete series of fossils that beautifully traced the evolution of the horse. Marsh published his fossil history of the horse, which included an illustration of the successive changes in the equine forefoot.
Marsh made many contributions to our understanding of evolution through paleontology. His success with the horse was spectacular and influenced scientists such as English biologist Thomas H. Huxley. Huxley had his conversion moment after meeting with Marsh to review his fossil horses, and shortly after, gave an important lecture on evolution in New York City.
Unfortunately, Marsh’s linear model of evolution was too successful in capturing both the public and the academic imagination. It was unfortunate because it was so wrong. His influence persists to this day, when many still think of evolution as a direct lineal ascendance up a ladder of perfection, with us humans, for example, at the top of the ladder looking down on the rest of creation.
Evolution is messy and never proceeds in a straight line, as typical museum displays imply. Most of the fossils we unearth are not direct ancestors of modern species and are, instead, likely to be part of an extinct lineage. The highly-branched evolutionary tree is a better model of the biological past.
Marsh was one of the earlier converts to Darwin’s theory of evolution by variation and natural selection and should have known about the tree model of speciation, which Darwin explained in his On the Origin of Species:
“…one species first giving rise to two or three varieties, these being slowly converted into species, which in their turn produce by equally slow steps other varieties and species, and so on, like the branching of a great tree from a single stem, till the group becomes large.”
“…so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.”
Marsh did have some important and enduring successes. Perhaps the most important one is his idea that birds descended from dinosaurs:
“In some of these [dinosaurs], the separate bones of the skeleton cannot be distinguished with certainty from those of Jurassic birds. . . Some of these diminutive Dinosaurs were perhaps arboreal in habit, and the differences between them and the birds that lived with them may have been at first mainly one of feathers…”
Poor beginnings
Marsh was born in Lockport, New York, near the Erie Canal, to Caleb Marsh, a farmer, and his wife Mary Gaines Peabody. Marsh’s mother was the younger sister of George Peabody. The Peabody’s were born poor, along with five other siblings, but George became a wealthy banker and philanthropist. Marsh’s wealthy uncle George would become an essential part of his later career.
Both the Marsh and the Peabody families proudly traced their ancestry to the early beginnings of America and to the Old World. On his father’s side, Marsh traced his heritage to a John Marsh of Salem, who had come from England and had arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. On his mother’s side, he could trace his ancestry to a Lieutenant Francis Peabody, who came from Hertfordshire, England, in 1635, and who’s ancestry reportedly traced even further back into the mists of English history.
Both families were established in the village of South Danvers, known today as Peabody, Massachusetts. Caleb Marsh and Mary Peabody met at Bradford Academy, and the couple soon got married, in 1827, and moved east to Lockport. George Peabody’s business career was already well established at this stage. Funds from Peabody to his sister, as well as from Caleb Marsh’s father, enabled the newlyweds to buy a 114-acre farm a mile away from the Erie Canal for $2,000. Soon after, they bought another 100 acres.
Despite such auspicious beginnings, the young family lost their first-born son soon after his birth in 1828. But they recovered quickly and, in 1829, they had a daughter, Mary, and then on October 29, 1831, a son, Othniel Charles. Suddenly, tragedy struck again. In August of 1834, Mary Marsh was recovering from the birth of her fourth child, when she died of cholera. Othniel Marsh was not yet three years old.
Caleb Marsh was grief-stricken and sold the farm, moving the family back to South Danvers. He remarried around 1836, to the daughter of a wealthy Lockport neighbor. After that, the depression of 1837 hit and destroyed his shoe business. A few years later Caleb Marsh moved back to Lockport. Financial difficulties seemed to hound him for years afterward.
As Marsh grew up, he got along well with his stepmother and her children, but often quarreled with his father. Whether this was a cause or a consequence is not clear, but Marsh avoided working in the family farm and preferred to wander the New York countryside, observing nature, and hunting. He became an expert shot with the rifle.
In 1843, the Erie Canal was being widened and Lockport became famous around the world for its rich Silurian fossils. Retired Army Colonel Ezekiel Jewett was a top field paleontologist and was attracted to the region. Col. Jewett taught a summer geology class in Lockport from 1843 to 1847, where Marsh learned how to collect fossils.
Marsh’s schooling was intermittent, but he learned enough to attend the Wilson Collegiate Institute in Wilson, New York, from 1848 to 1850. Marsh then attended the Lockport Union School, where he also tried, and then shunned, the teaching profession.
In 1851, Marsh came into some money from George Peabody through his mother’s dowry, from a settlement of a property after her death. He used the proceeds to go to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He was older than the other boys, and after a quiet warm-up year, he took off and swept most of the academic honors.
The rich uncle
George Peabody was born in 1795 in South Danvers, Massachusetts. He was one of seven children in a poor family, and his father died when he was just a teenager. He had amassed very little education by that time and went to work in his older brother’s store in order to support the family.
Peabody volunteered in the War of 1812, where be met Elisha Riggs. In 1814, Riggs provided the funding to start Riggs, Peabody & Co., a wholesale dry goods firm that imported goods from Britain.
In 1816, Peabody moved to Baltimore, where he would stay for two decades, and transformed himself into a businessman and financier. He visited England for the first time in 1827 to sell American state bonds in order to raise capital for railroads and other transportation infrastructures. This sparked a decade of trans-Atlantic trips, branch offices, and a new firm, the George Peabody & Company banking firm. Peabody’s bank later became J. S. Morgan & Co. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Peabody had taken on Junius Spencer Morgan (father of J. P. Morgan) as a partner. Peabody’s bank ultimately gave rise to the British merchant bank Morgan Grenfell, part of Deutsche Bank, as well as JP Morgan Chase, and also to Morgan Stanley.
Amid this meteoric rise in the financial and political worlds, Peabody found time to support his nephew, O.C. Marsh.
In May 1856, Marsh wrote a letter to Peabody asking permission to enter Yale College. Peabody gave him both encouragement and financial support. After graduating from Yale, Marsh continued another couple years studying science under Yale’s top faculty, including chemistry professors Benjamin Silliman and his son Benjamin Silliman, Jr., George Brush, and James Dana.
In June 1862, Marsh wrote to Peabody again, informing him of his plans to study in Germany. Peabody, once more, readily gave his approval and support. Marsh traveled and studied at several leading institutions throughout the continent. He worked with Gustavus and Heinrich Rose at Berlin University, and with Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff in Heidelberg, spent time in Switzerland, and then back in Berlin.
During his academic tour of Europe, Marsh met with Peabody for a long conversation about his career and ended up with Peabody promising to donate $150,000 to Yale for a museum. The museum later became the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the bequest also funded a lifetime appointment of Marsh as Chair of Paleontology at Yale.
The bone wars
Edward Drinker Cope (Wikimedia Commons)O.C. Marsh’s biggest and career-defining rival was Edward Drinker Cope. Cope was born on July 28, 1840, to a wealthy Quaker family, the oldest son of Alfred and Hanna Cope. Ironically, just like his mortal enemy Marsh, Cope also lost his mother when he was three years old. Also, like Marsh, the young Cope got along well with his stepmother and her son. With such similar childhood experiences and a shared love of paleontology, you’d imagine these would be best friends for life. Of course, there is more to a good friendship than shared experiences and interests. The personalities and ambitions of these men almost guaranteed, in hindsight, that their collision would be epic.
Cope’s father, Alfred, was a philanthropist and ran a successful shipping business which his father had started. They lived in a large stone house in Philadelphia, surrounded by eight acres of gardens, giving Cope plenty of space to explore as a child. Cope was given plenty of opportunities for education, from trips to museums to attendance at elite boarding schools, where his temperamental spoiled brat personality emerged and became well known. He became interested in biology, reading up on the subject on his own, and visiting the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University. After a couple of years at the school, Alfred decided Cope should be a gentleman farmer and even bought him a farm.
Cope resisted his father’s efforts to turn him into a farmer, again echoing Marsh’s experiences growing up. However, Cope’s father was wealthy and indulging, exactly the opposite of Marsh’s father. Cope eventually convinced his father to pay for classes at the University of Pennsylvania from 1861 to 1862.
Like Marsh, Cope traveled to Europe and also met notable scientists as he toured through France, Germany, England, Ireland, and other countries on the continent. It was during the winter of 1863 that Cope met Marsh, who was then attending the University of Berlin. A good friendship appeared to be in the making. Marsh took Cope on a personal guided tour of Berlin, hosted him for several days, and maintained a working correspondence with him, sharing fossils and manuscripts. They even named fossils for each other. If that is not a bromance, I don’t know what is.
That all started to unravel in 1868 when Marsh visited Cope at his home in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Cope had been discovering fossils in the local quarries for the past couple of years. Marsh undermined Cope by bribing the owners of the quarries to forward any new fossils to him instead of to Cope.
Then in 1870, Marsh humiliated Cope by gleefully pointing out that Cope’s published description of a giant plesiosaur called an Elasmosaurus had the head at the wrong end.
Cope then began collecting in areas that Marsh considered his turf in Kansas and Wyoming. And thus, the Bone Warsbegan — a decades-long feud that only ended with Cope’s death in 1897.
The competition would have been pointless and stupid even if it was limited to who could collect the most fossils. Except that, as hinted by Marsh’s bribing of New Jersey quarry owners, the endless vendettas included hiring away each other’s work crews, sabotaging digs, theft, bribing landowners, and undermining the other’s reputations in academic journals and in the newspapers.
If the idiocy of keeping score was a valid way of measuring such a feud, Marsh could be said to have won, with him discovering eighty new dinosaur species and Cope fifty-six. But both men’s reputations were destroyed during this childishness, as were both of their considerable fortunes. The destruction went beyond the two combatants. Fossil sites were dynamited out of spite, and among the collateral damage were other people’s careers and the reputation of American paleontology. In their competitive haste to assemble and describe new fossil species, their inevitable sloppiness and errors caused confusion in the field for decades after their deaths. If either side claimed to have won, it was the very definition of a pyrrhic victory.
Among all the fossils these two paleontologists uncovered in their undisciplined haste to outdo the other, are some of the most iconic and recognized dinosaurs in the world: Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Allosaurus, and more. Collectively, their fossils have filled museums, magazines, and minds, to paraphrase contemporary paleontologist Robert Bakker. Furthermore, as a child, my mind was one of many filled with the wonder of those bones.
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