Bone Wars: The Rivalry That Rewrote Dinosaur History

[00:00:01] Kyle Risi: overnight the whole country go mad for dinosaur fossils. This is the age that gave us the Stegosaurus, the triceratops.

[00:00:10] Adam Cox: And of course the tyrannosaurus rex

[00:00:13] Kyle Risi: Creatures that are up there amongst lunchbox royalty.

[00:00:16] And at the heart of mania, were two paleontologists who began their careers as friends, but ends up collapsing into paleontologist's pettiest rivalries in scientific history.

[00:00:28] They rush , half [00:00:30] finished skeletons into display causing a flurry of strange made up creatures popping up in museums all over the country.

[00:00:37] Edward, he feels betrayed

[00:00:39] The few spiraled into bribery, spying, and sabotaging dig sites. Even poaching each other's men with higher wages.

[00:00:47] Adam Cox: Get Steve. He's hot

[00:00:50] Kyle Risi: In some cases they literally blow up entire dig sites

[00:00:54] Adam Cox: that could mean that there's dinosaurs out there that we have never discovered.

[00:00:58] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[00:00:59] Adam Cox: [00:01:00] wow, that's so petty.

[00:01:27] Kyle Risi: ​ Welcome to the Compendium and Assembly of Fascinating [00:01:30] Things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

[00:01:35] Adam Cox: We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history, and the jaw dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

[00:01:43] Kyle Risi: I'm Kyle Reese, your Ring Master for this week's episode,

[00:01:45] Adam Cox: and I am Adam Cox, your human dart knife thrower this for this week.

[00:01:50] But I'm looking for an assistant to throw knives at.

[00:01:54] Kyle Risi: How many have you been through?

[00:01:55] Adam Cox: We basically have to, hire an internal recruiter because we're just hiring too many [00:02:00] people. And some reason, Kyle, they just keep getting hurt.

[00:02:02] Kyle Risi: You mean you keep murdering them Guys, if you are new to the show and you want to support us, then the absolute best way to support the show and enjoy exclusive perks is to join us over at Patreon because signing up is completely free and you get access to next week's episode a whole seven days before anyone else.

[00:02:21] Adam Cox: And did you know Kyle, for as little as $3 a month, you'll become a fellow freak of the show unlocking our entire back catalog. There's about 20 [00:02:30] episodes in there. Mm-hmm. So yeah, become a certified freak and you can explore them all.

[00:02:34] Kyle Risi: And as a special thank you as always, our certified freak tier members now receive an exclusive compendium key chain.

[00:02:40] All you have to do is just DM us your dress, and of course we'll send one straight to your door so we can always be dangling.

[00:02:48] Adam Cox: Near your crotch.

[00:02:49] Mm.

[00:02:49] Kyle Risi: Right there.

[00:02:50] Adam Cox: Yeah. Just over Christmas. Will we there at Easter?

[00:02:53] Kyle Risi: You round with your family, your kids a bar. Bar mitzvah.

[00:02:55] Adam Cox: We can be there.

[00:02:56] Kyle Risi: Crotch, dangling.

[00:02:58] Adam Cox: And lastly, guys, please follow us [00:03:00] on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. Your support helps others and keeps these amazing stories coming

[00:03:06] Kyle Risi: even better. Tell a friend,

[00:03:08] Adam Cox: Tell the crazy lady down the street.

[00:03:09] Kyle Risi: Tell the damn dog, Adam. Today's episode is actually suggested by a few of our listeners via the freaky register on Patreon this one we have to thank Laura Siri, Lily Mae, Joe Waynes Worth, Allison Johnson and Jordan Richardson.

[00:03:26] Adam Cox: Wow. A popular topic.

[00:03:28] Kyle Risi: It is, a lot of people [00:03:30] suggested this one.

[00:03:30] Adam Cox: What is it about then,

[00:03:31] Kyle Risi: Adam, today on the Compendium, we are diving into an assembly of dinosaurs boys, and they're very, very. Fragile egos.

[00:03:42] Adam Cox: Well, dinosaurs, obviously, I'm guessing we're covering wrong.

[00:03:46] Kyle Risi: No, I'm joking.

[00:03:47] Adam Cox: Uh, Are we dealing with kids?

[00:03:49] What's going on?

[00:03:49] Kyle Risi: Adam? Imagine a moment in history where Americans first discovered dinosaurs and instantly a whole world of imagination is unleashed.

[00:03:59] [00:04:00] Today's story has taken us on a journey through the mid to late 18 hundreds a time at the height of the Gilded Age in America where railroads were roaring West. Gold rush towns were sprouting up everywhere and in the middle of all of that, people start stumbling upon ancient, mysterious creatures all over the west.

[00:04:20] Adam Cox: So that's when dinosaurs were first discovered back?

[00:04:23] Kyle Risi: No. dinosaurs were discovered just a little bit before that in around about the 17 hundreds. But in America, this is where they [00:04:30] first discovered that actually, america also had dinosaurs and they were bigger, better, and bolder.

[00:04:36] Adam Cox: Ah, so that's when they were invented.

[00:04:38] Kyle Risi: overnight the whole country just seems to go mad for dinosaur fossils.

[00:04:43] Museums wanted them newspapers hyped them up. The wealthy elites started writing massive checks just to be the proud owner of these pre-historic beasts.

[00:04:53] And so across America, a brand new frenzy began something that will be known [00:05:00] as the bone rush. It was a race to find name and claim as many prehistoric creatures as possible.

[00:05:08] This is the age that gave us dinosaurs we know and love today. And I'm talking, of course, the Stegosaurus, the triceratops. Diplodocus,

[00:05:19] Adam Cox: and of course the tyrannosaurus rex

[00:05:21] Kyle Risi: Mr. T Rex himself. Yeah. The lovable ferocious beast with tiny little arms.

[00:05:26] Adam Cox: What about the Velociraptor? And a pterodactyl.

[00:05:28] Kyle Risi: Yeah. What

[00:05:29] Adam Cox: about [00:05:30] save two tigers?

[00:05:30] Kyle Risi: Hey, that's a mammal, isn't it?

[00:05:32] Adam Cox: I know, but I'm just gonna go to like power ranger resorts.

[00:05:35] Kyle Risi: I see what you're doing. What's your relationship with dinosaurs?

[00:05:38] Adam Cox: That feels, uh, like a personal question.

[00:05:40] Kyle Risi: Well, I mean, every single kid on this planet who was born in the eighties and the nineties. Must have some kind of relationship or some fascination with dinosaurs.

[00:05:48] Adam Cox: I dunno. Maybe I'm a bit abnormal then because I've, I can appreciate a good dinosaur. But I, I was never like, obsessed with dinosaurs.

[00:05:56] Kyle Risi: I was absolutely dinosaur mad. Do you remember back in the day you can [00:06:00] get these little magazines that,

[00:06:01] Adam Cox: is it the one that you build and it's closed in the dark?

[00:06:03] Kyle Risi: Yes.

[00:06:03] It would be those magazines where you would get like a little part of a bigger model each week. Mm-hmm. And then you'd read about all the different dinosaurs. But then as you collected each edition, you would then be able to construct your dinosaur model and it would be all bones on the inside that would glow in the dark.

[00:06:19] Adam Cox: Yes. I remember this. It was cool. I did enjoy doing that.

[00:06:21] Kyle Risi: It was fun. I think I ended up stopping 'cause it gets really expensive.

[00:06:26] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:06:26] Kyle Risi: I ended up stopping at the point where I was just about to get the [00:06:30] skin that you would clip over it.

[00:06:31] Adam Cox: Really?

[00:06:32] Those magazines. That was a thing as a kid. You'd go to the news agents every week and you'd get a new magazine or every month. Mm-hmm. I think I have all like 250, magazines of the animals of F Wood.

[00:06:42] Kyle Risi: You are such a fucking loser.

[00:06:44] Adam Cox: Well, the thing is, I think my parents just kept buying it for me, even though I lost interest after maybe the first hundred issues.

[00:06:50] Kyle Risi: It's like when you say, mom, I really love rainbows, and then all of a sudden that becomes your personality. Every year you just get rainbows

[00:06:56] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:06:56] Kyle Risi: But Adam, this is the era of giants that [00:07:00] essentially shaped our childhood imaginations. This is pretty much where they get solidified into our collective consciousness.

[00:07:07] And at the heart of mania were two paleontologists who began their careers as friends, but ended up as lifelong enemies.

[00:07:17] Their names were Edward Drinker, cope, and Orhan, Charles Marsh.

[00:07:22] Adam Cox: Wow. These are very posh names. I'm guessing they have some money.

[00:07:25] Kyle Risi: Very Victorian, I would say. Mm-hmm. Both of them were brilliant. Both of them were [00:07:30] ambitious, utterly convinced that they were both destined to become the greatest fossil hunters America has ever seen.

[00:07:36] But Adam, instead of working together, their partnership ends up collapsing into one of paleontologist's pettiest most chaotic rivalries in scientific history.

[00:07:47] This wasn't polite academic disagreements. The few spiraled into bribery, spying, poaching each other's workers and sabotaging dig sites.

[00:07:57] It devolved into literal trench [00:08:00] warfare where each side were literally throwing rocks at each other from neighboring quarries.

[00:08:05] They end up rushing, half finished skeletons into prints and on display causing a flurry of strange made up. Franken saw creatures popping up in museums all over the country.

[00:08:16] These are specimens that even today scientists are still trying to untangle.

[00:08:21] Adam Cox: Oh. So people thought that these were real dinosaurs, but actually it wasn't a dinosaur at all. It is mishmash of dinosaurs.

[00:08:28] Kyle Risi: They were a mishmash of dinosaurs. Yeah. [00:08:30] Because at the same time they didn't know how these dinosaurs went together. So all they could do was just guess.

[00:08:35] Adam Cox: Yeah. They didn't even have it like an IKEA manual or anything.

[00:08:37] Kyle Risi: Nothing. But most shockingly Adam was that it wasn't beneath these men to outright destroy fossils just to stop the other from landing a discovery and in the process wiping out that dinosaur's imprints on this planet or at a spite. So they would just destroy these fossils.

[00:08:56] Adam Cox: That could mean that there's fossils or there's dinosaurs out there that [00:09:00] we have never discovered.

[00:09:01] Kyle Risi: Possibly. Maybe they were like the loss of their kind and they destroyed them. But this few, Adam stopped being about good science and became a decades long contest of anything you can do, I can ruin faster.

[00:09:13] Adam Cox: I see.

[00:09:14] Kyle Risi: And yet, out of their chaos came the foundations of modern paleontology as we know today. Without these guys, there is no Ross Geller from friends. Can you imagine a world without Ross Geller?

[00:09:28] Adam Cox: Are these like the first [00:09:30] paleontologists?

[00:09:30] Kyle Risi: Yeah. They basically instilled themselves as the first paleontologists, especially in America.

[00:09:35] Adam Cox: I guess they're like the Victorian equivalent of Indiana Jones.

[00:09:38] Kyle Risi: Oh, I'd be careful with using the word Victorian because they don't go by our eras. They call this the Gilded Age.

[00:09:46] Adam Cox: Okay. The Gilded Indiana Jones. It doesn't have the same dream as Victorian.

[00:09:50] Kyle Risi: It doesn't, but also Indiana Jones wasn't the paleontologist. He was an archeologist.

[00:09:55] Adam Cox: I don't know. It's like he could have had a whip.

[00:09:58] Kyle Risi: And so Adam, today on the compendium, I'm [00:10:00] gonna tell you about the bone walls, how two men turn dinosaur hunting Into our high stakes, high drama grudge match.

[00:10:06] We'll explore their friendship, their betrayal, their sabotage, and the wild mistakes they made and the staggering impact their feud had on science even today.

[00:10:16] And since this is a war, by the end we'll decide which of these actually won the so-called war, or whether or not it was the dinosaurs that were the true winners in the story.

[00:10:27] Adam Cox: I bet neither of them won, but that's just a [00:10:30] hunch. Okay. Interested,

[00:10:32] Kyle Risi: so before we zoom in to these two gentlemen, paleontologists and the feud of the Gilded Age, not Victorian. Let's look at what the world was like during this time.

[00:10:42] Just like other rushes that came and went. America caught bone fever in the middle of the Great American gold rush. Do you know much about that?

[00:10:52] Adam Cox: Yes. It's when the Americans were rushing for gold.

[00:10:55] Kyle Risi: Exactly. So picture it, it's the 1870s. America is in the [00:11:00] thick of the Gilded Age. People are rushing to find gold.

[00:11:02] Railways are racing across the country. Towns are popping up like weeds and everyone is either mining something, claiming something or shooting at someone for claiming the same thing.

[00:11:14] Adam Cox: things haven't really changed that much though, has they?

[00:11:17] Kyle Risi: No, it's exactly the same. And right alongside, this is this bizarre parallel universe where people start stumbling upon these enormous, mysterious bones, jutting out of the dirt.

[00:11:28] But while the gold rush [00:11:30] really accelerated the discovery of these beasts, especially since every motherfucker already had a shovel, so they were already digging something.

[00:11:37] The first dinosaur was actually discovered 30 years prior in 1838 when a farmer named John Hopkins was digging in a mile pit on his property when he uncovers a handful of enormous bones.

[00:11:51] For 20 years, John displays these bones in his house, just inviting locals to come and poke at them and speculate wildly on [00:12:00] what these creatures might actually be.

[00:12:02] Adam Cox: I wonder what people thought when he was like, do you want to check out my big bone? Like John, John? No, not that one.

[00:12:10] Kyle Risi: and so after 20 years of this, in 1858, a lawyer and amateur geologist named William Falk hears about these bones and decides to investigate for himself.

[00:12:19] He conducts a full excavation of the sites and discovers for the very first time and nearly completes dinosaur skeleton.

[00:12:27] Adam Cox: And did they know it was a dinosaur at this [00:12:30] point, or just like a dead animal? But

[00:12:32] Kyle Risi: they're very much aware of what was being found over in Europe.

[00:12:35] Mm-hmm. So it was like this. America has its own dinosaurs now. I see. But also they were way bigger. So folk sends his fossils to a Dr. Joseph Ledy, a very important figure in the story at the time, he was one of the leading anatomists at the time.

[00:12:50] Leady basically pieces the bones together. He names the creature Hydro sous, folky in honor of the man who found it. And instantly, Adam [00:13:00] America is introduced to this idea that dinosaurs were not only real, but they were also huge and buried all over America

[00:13:09] and so the American bone Rush begins from here whenever someone was out digging for gold or blowing up a ravine in order to redirect a water supply, they would stumble upon a find triggering literal armies of fossil hunters to descend on the site.

[00:13:23] Landowners would then get hundreds of dollars in exchange, and fossil hunters would then load up crates and crates of bones into trains [00:13:30] like they were shipping treasure chests back east. These bones landed in the collection of museums, universities, and of course rich people.

[00:13:39] And at the center of all of this are our two main characters who are basically treating the American West like their own personal fossil hunger games. And although for them this was about science and discovery, it also became about power.

[00:13:54] At the time, paleontology in America was fairly new, and so for them, this was a literal land [00:14:00] grab.

[00:14:00] It was thought that whoever controlled the fossils and could name the most dinosaurs would control the future of American paleontology. Both these men were absolutely convinced that they were the chosen ones.

[00:14:13] Adam Cox: That's so strange to go. It's almost like Pokemon. If you can catch them all and you win.

[00:14:18] And I guess they were discovering like brand new dinosaurs and species that would've been discovered elsewhere in the world, I assume.

[00:14:24] Kyle Risi: I think largely there is of course overlap because you've gotta remember mm-hmm. We've got tectonic plate shift. So [00:14:30] some of these dinosaurs would be also found elsewhere.

[00:14:32] But at this moment in time, most of the excavations that were happening were kind in Europe and America. So the dinosaurs were largely different.

[00:14:40] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:40] Kyle Risi: The first guy we should know about is Edward Drinker Cope. He was born to a wealthy Quaker family in July, 1840 in Philadelphia.

[00:14:48] And growing up, Edward is diplomatically described as relentless, but mischievous, but when you read between the lines, he's basically a spoiled brat. But [00:15:00] despite this, he has this energy and curiosity that sparks a lifelong fascination with animals.

[00:15:04] At 12, he attends the friend's boarding school near Westchester in Pennsylvania, where he doesn't really apply himself.

[00:15:12] fails most of his subjects. He's of course, disobedient, or as historians put it, a qualler with poor conduct.

[00:15:20] Adam Cox: What does that mean?

[00:15:21] Kyle Risi: Basically, he's a cunt with a bad temper.

[00:15:25] Adam Cox: Wow. Language. Kyle that needs bleeping.

[00:15:28] Kyle Risi: He regularly writes letters, home , asking [00:15:30] for larger and larger allowances. He's basically bankrupting his family, and they're also more and more frustrated with the fact that he's just not applying himself at school.

[00:15:38] His poor performance at school means that his father makes the decision that Edward is not going to go back to school after summer break in 1855. Instead, he's gonna stay home where his father can Percy, steer him towards what he considers a more respectable path.

[00:15:54] Adam Cox: And what's that?

[00:15:55] Kyle Risi: The plan was by Edward, a farm and groom him into becoming a [00:16:00] gentleman farmer.

[00:16:01] Adam Cox: A gentleman farmer. So what's the difference between a regular farmer and a gentleman farmer?

[00:16:05] Kyle Risi: Is he farming more politely? Is he not elbow deep in cows or is there a separate entrance for the gentry? I honestly, I don't know.

[00:16:14] Adam Cox: Maybe he just wears like a nice top hat and a bow tie. I,

[00:16:18] Kyle Risi: while you are out in the farm?

[00:16:19] Yeah. I don't, I don't get it.

[00:16:21] Adam Cox: Oh, look at that gentleman farmer over there. He's so polite.

[00:16:25] Kyle Risi: Uh, either way, his father is convinced that this will give Edward the skills and the [00:16:30] discipline that he needs for a stable, respectable future.

[00:16:33] Edward, however, doesn't see it that way. No. Mostly because to him, farming is literally the most boring, imaginable thing that he could be doing with his time.

[00:16:41] Adam Cox: Yeah. No one wants to do what their parents tell them to do.

[00:16:44] Kyle Risi: Absolutely. Emphasize he wanted to have a career in the sciences, right?

[00:16:47] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:48] Kyle Risi: So instead of working the farm that his father literally buys him, he decides to instead rent out the land and use the income to fund his scientific pursuits on the side. He takes up a part-time job at the [00:17:00] Academy of Natural Sciences, where he's basically reclassifying and cataloging specimens.

[00:17:05] Adam Cox: It's a bit weird that he's considered a rebel, but he's also a scientist. Like I could never consider a scientist as a rebel these days.

[00:17:12] Kyle Risi: Yeah. They're just dorks.

[00:17:13] Adam Cox: Hang on. They're trying to save the world, Kyle.

[00:17:15] Kyle Risi: That's true. Dorks are trying to save the world.

[00:17:18] Adam Cox: But just the thought right back then. Doing this, it was like, no. You're being a rebel. You're a tearaway.

[00:17:23] Kyle Risi: Possibly. And I guess because it's a new thing. It's if we were YouTubers today, right? My parents would be like, oh, it might not be a [00:17:30] stable career. But actually people have made really great careers that'd have been YouTubers

[00:17:33] Adam Cox: more money than their parents.

[00:17:35] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[00:17:36] Adam Cox: God. He just wasn't appreciated in his own time, Kyle,

[00:17:38] Kyle Risi: And I couldn't find out if his dad knew they rented out the land. i'm not sure if he's doing this on the sly, but it is funny to imagine him every morning pulling on his overalls, jumping on his tracks and saying, dad off to work, only to drive to the academy on his tractor.

[00:17:51] Adam Cox: And then he comes home and he's has to, I dunno, put some mud on his face.

[00:17:54] Maybe like rolls in some poo and is like, what a day.

[00:17:58] Kyle Risi: You'll never believe the day that I've [00:18:00] had with the chickens.

[00:18:01] Adam Cox: But to be fair, six months later the dad's gonna be like, uh, where am my potatoes?

[00:18:05] Kyle Risi: Yeah, here they are. Those are regs. Anyway, he does apply himself at the academy and after four years he manages to publish his first paper.

[00:18:15] Adam Cox: Do you mean four years? He was lying to his dad about a farm.

[00:18:17] Kyle Risi: I dunno if he was lying. I think it's just speculation. But at this moment it really looks like he's getting his shit together. And even though his dad really wants him to be a gentleman farmer, his dad eventually gives in and he agrees to pay for Edward to attend [00:18:30] university. And so in 1861, Edward enrolls at the University of Pennsylvania to study comparative autonomy under Joseph Leady. The same guy who first brings America, its first dinosaur.

[00:18:42] Adam Cox: And so comparative anatomy, is that comparing anatomy

[00:18:46] Kyle Risi: Exactly, yes. Essentially the study of how different animal bodies compare the similarities, the differences, and what those clues reveal essentially about how species evolved .Because at this time, Darwin's origin of species had only [00:19:00] been out just a few years. So the whole field was exploring these new ideas, new arguments about evolution.

[00:19:05] And so Edward, those himself, right in the middle of all of this. Over the next few years, he works on re cataloging the Herpetological collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences. And he keeps publishing papers mostly on reptiles and amphibians. That's exactly what herpetology, means. It's the study of reptiles and amphibians.

[00:19:24] Adam Cox: Easy, easy for you to say

[00:19:25] Kyle Risi: Then in 1863, when Edward is 23, he meets a girl that [00:19:30] his father hates and the reason is she isn't related to the family.

[00:19:35] Adam Cox: She's not related.

[00:19:36] Kyle Risi: Yeah. That's it.

[00:19:37] Adam Cox: She, so he wants Edward to keep it in the family. And have some incest.

[00:19:40] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:19:41] Adam Cox: How like are we talking sisters, cousins, second cousins? What's deemed accept acceptable?

[00:19:45] Kyle Risi: Oh, cousins be cousins. They Quakers

[00:19:46] Adam Cox: what? First cousins?

[00:19:47] Kyle Risi: I don't know.

[00:19:48] Adam Cox: I still feel like you'll come up with a web fur.

[00:19:49] Kyle Risi: That's it. His father basically looks at him and he is like, absolutely not. Your children will be normal and I will not have that.

[00:19:56] Adam Cox: They'll be 10 toes. That's, that's not acceptable.

[00:19:59] Kyle Risi: We're Quakers, [00:20:00] boy, we're aiming for 12. And so he does the reasonable Victorian patriarchal thing and he ships Edward off to travel around Europe,

[00:20:08] Adam Cox: Victorian, or

[00:20:09] Kyle Risi: I know at the Gild age is spelling mistake.

[00:20:11] Adam Cox: why is the version of that the Gilded Age? Sure. But what's the, if you are from, you're a Victorian. So you're from the Victorian age.

[00:20:18] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:20:18] Adam Cox: So you are a Gildan an American,

[00:20:21] Kyle Risi: an industrialist.

[00:20:22] Adam Cox: I'm gonna call 'em American Victorians.

[00:20:25] Kyle Risi: You can't do that. You're basically forcing our American brethren to [00:20:30] accept that they were under the crown again when they kinda ripped themselves away from that in 1777.

[00:20:35] Adam Cox: Someone correct me with what the right term is and then I'll call them that.

[00:20:38] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Until then, you're Victorians

[00:20:40] Adam Cox: American Victorians.

[00:20:41] Kyle Risi: So the thinking is that he has sent him to Europe to keep him away from this girl. But that's the unofficial reason. The official reason is because he's trying to keep him from being conscripted into the Civil War, which they were currently in the middle of at the time.

[00:20:54] So while in Europe, Edward visits loads of museums, he meets respected scientists across different [00:21:00] fields. Eventually he wanders into Berlin and he meets the second guy in our story. And that is Orth Neil Charles Marsh, a 33-year-old American studying at the University of Berlin.

[00:21:12] Orhan Neil is from Lockport in New York. His mother was Mary Gaines Peabody. And basically he comes from the infamous Peabody family, which makes his Uncle George Peabody, the wealthy banker and philanthropists of the age.

[00:21:26] Listeners from especially Georgia, might recognize his name from the [00:21:30] Peabody Awards that are handed out by the University of Georgia, I think every year.

[00:21:34] And Georgia's widely considered the founder of what we would now call like charitable giving. Today.

[00:21:39] but when Orphan Hill is three years old, his mother actually dies from cholera and it's his Uncle George who takes financial responsibility for him.

[00:21:46] This means that Orhan Hill ends up getting an excellent education. He ends up studying geology, chemistry, anatomy, vertebrate paleontology. So he's a bloody smart kid. He eventually graduates with [00:22:00] a couple degrees from a couple really good schools, including Yale,

[00:22:03] Adam Cox: a couple.

[00:22:04] Kyle Risi: Oh yeah. He doesn't stop there, Adam.

[00:22:06] ' cause after this he decides that he's gonna stick with the world of academia and he lands a Berkeley scholarship and his plan is to build a full academic career. So he just keeps racking up more and more degrees across different fields.

[00:22:20] Adam Cox: Fine. So he is smart, but I bet he can't put up a shelf.

[00:22:23] Kyle Risi: Well, that's, that's the criticism that he gets here. Like he's academic and he's smart, and he's intelligent, but he's not worldly. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. [00:22:30]

[00:22:30] Adam Cox: He hasn't got street smarts.

[00:22:31] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Not like Edward, who grew up on a farm,

[00:22:34] and it's a scholarship that he gets that actually brings him to Berlin, where he studies paleontology and anatomy, which is where he meets Edward Cope.

[00:22:43] They actually, Adam, they become really good friends. They write to each other regularly. They swap discoveries, they debate ideas. They're nerding out about paleontology and things that are going on at the time.

[00:22:54] Adam Cox: That's how the best of frenemies start out, because they start off like they get along and everything [00:23:00] and something like changes, and then they just set on this path where they're constantly fighting each other. It's like Professor Xavier and Magneto from X-Men.

[00:23:07] Kyle Risi: God, why do you have to bring an X-Men reference into this? No one gets it. No one understands.

[00:23:12] Adam Cox: Yes, they will. The 10 other people will get it.

[00:23:15] Kyle Risi: There's not X-Men. It's Power Ages with you.

[00:23:17] So they've got this bit of a friendship going on. And because both of them are busy classifying new species, their friendship reaches a point where they literally start naming fossils after each other. Orhan Neil a 66 million year old mosso Cop Anus, [00:23:30] which is basically after Edward Cope. I know it sounds unfortunate, but it's the Latin four cope.

[00:23:36]

[00:23:36] Adam Cox: sounds like Copus.

[00:23:37] Kyle Risi: I know. It doesn't it? Edward then returns a favor with a 307 million year old amphibian that he calls Colos. Marshy. So it's sweet. It's a full scientific bromance that they've got going on between them.

[00:23:49] Adam Cox: I see.

[00:23:50] Kyle Risi: It's like people naming stars after people today. Do you know what I mean?

[00:23:53] Adam Cox: Uhhuh,

[00:23:53] Kyle Risi: I'd name an animal. I'd name an animal after you.

[00:23:54] Some sort of slug, a deadly one. Maybe

[00:23:57] Adam Cox: At least it's deadly.

[00:23:58] Kyle Risi: Would you return the favor?

[00:23:59] Adam Cox: [00:24:00] Yeah. If I could find something that fits. It has to be quite scrappy. And Jack

[00:24:03] Kyle Risi: and you Bri a Jack Russell.

[00:24:04] Adam Cox: Yeah. And quite small and annoying yappy. That'd be a, Kyle,

[00:24:09] Kyle Risi: do you know when people have those discussions in the office and they always go, what kind of animal would I be? And I'm really good at telling people what kind of dog breed they would be. Mm-hmm. But I don't understand why I'm always a really small animal.

[00:24:19] Adam Cox: You're always a Jack Russell.

[00:24:21] Kyle Risi: I dunno why though.

[00:24:21] Adam Cox: Because Kyle,

[00:24:23] Kyle Risi: I would say like a, a lovable trusty golden retriever.

[00:24:27] Adam Cox: No, you're definitely not that.

[00:24:29] Kyle Risi: I see [00:24:30] myself as a golden retriever.

[00:24:31] Adam Cox: Yeah, you're friendly, but I'm gonna keep you outside most of the day.

[00:24:34] Kyle Risi: You can't be trusted on the carpet. these two guys, they found each other. But the thing is though, their personalities are very different. Remember, Orhan Hill grows up in a wealthy upper CROs world, thanks to his uncle

[00:24:44] so he's polished academically. Meanwhile, Edward. he's a Quaker. He's more of a farm boy turned scientist. He's passionate and brilliant, but far less formally trained than Orphan Neil. And because they're both proud men, they both quietly look down on each other for different [00:25:00] reasons.

[00:25:00] You definitely see this similar in a way, in their early letters to each other. Like Edward miss maybe some detail in a fossil that they're discussing.

[00:25:06] And Orhan Neil will be like, don't be so hard on yourself. It's easy to overlook this if you haven't studied the work of like so and so or whatever. Right? Then Edward in turn will then drop hits that orhan. Neil isn't nearly as worldly or feel tested as he is.

[00:25:20] Do you know what I mean? So it's friendly on the surface, but the intent behind the jabs isn't always that clear.

[00:25:25] And so it's often brushed over, but it's definitely there

[00:25:29] Adam Cox: like very passive [00:25:30] aggressive little comments and snide remarks.

[00:25:32] Kyle Risi: Yeah, you can't quite place it. We all know those types of people. Do you know what I mean? And so eventually in 1866, orphan Hill returns to the United States, and he's appointed the professor of vertebrae paleontology at Yale officially.

[00:25:45] He's the first paleontologist professor in the entire country. He is literally the first,

[00:25:51] which sounds impressive. But he gets this because he basically convinces his uncle, to donate $150,000 to [00:26:00] build the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale.

[00:26:03] And so of course, once the university accepts the money, he then installs himself as head of the museum.

[00:26:09] Adam Cox: I see.

[00:26:10] Kyle Risi: So it's not like Yel can exactly turn around and say No. But regardless of the method, this moment marks the very beginning of paleontology as an official academic discipline in America.

[00:26:19] And Little Does Orphan will know that a century and a half later will have Ross Geller proudly following unique footsteps. I can't imagine a world without Ross.

[00:26:28] Adam Cox: Ross Geller.

[00:26:29] Kyle Risi: [00:26:30] He's my hero. So to actually fill the museum with specimens or Neil uses some of his inheritance to recruit an army of fossil hunters, which he sends across the American West with one mission. Dig up anything and everything that looks even slightly prehistoric.

[00:26:46] If it pokes out of the geological record. They are prying it out because he's eager for specimens and at this point he'll just accept pretty much anything.

[00:26:55] Adam Cox: Will he go as far as making up an dinosaur?

[00:26:59] Kyle Risi: He's gonna make them all [00:27:00] up, right? 'Cause they're all unclassified. None of them are discovered. So he's making all of them up.

[00:27:04] Adam Cox: Yeah, but is he getting like a cat and a dog and go, Hey, it's like this prehistoric animal.

[00:27:08] Kyle Risi: We'll see. So whatever these fossil hunters find, they basically pack 'em into crates. They load them onto trains and send them off to Orhan Hill, who then pays them handsomely. Other people start seeing how lucrative the fossil hunting game is, and they set up their own teams and whatever they find, they start sending them to various paleontologists around the country. who are now kind of like starting to crop up. But This becomes [00:27:30] Adam a massive free for all that ends up causing real damage to the field.

[00:27:34] Remember, many of these paleontologists are spread across the country. They don't exactly have an online database or a central kind of system to submit their findings to.

[00:27:42] So very often the very same species get dug up, let's say Sega saws for example, except one specimen might be a baby stegasaurus and another one might be an adult. But then paleontologists end up classifying them as two separate dinosaurs.

[00:27:56] Adam Cox: Yeah. It feels like it could be quite hard to keep track. 'cause if you've got a lot of people [00:28:00] within the country doing all this excavation at the same time. Like how do you keep a central database when they're all over doing this?

[00:28:06] Kyle Risi: Exactly. All they've got to rely on are the different papers that get written and then distributed across the country, which is a slow process in kind of Victorian America.

[00:28:15] Mm-hmm. So it'll be months and months and months, sometimes even years before you then open up a paper and then you kind say, oh, this one was discovered. It's the same one. They named it first, so they get it, right?

[00:28:25] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:25] Kyle Risi: But the reality is some people knew that they were looking at the same [00:28:30] species, but admitting that meant that they would lose the credit for that discovery.

[00:28:34] Adam Cox: So they just say that it is a new species.

[00:28:36] Kyle Risi: Exactly. So instead they just declare this, Nope, this is definitely a new species. And they with that.

[00:28:41] Adam Cox: So someone's already discovered a Stegasaurus, which is the adult, and then someone finds a baby stegosaurus and calls it

[00:28:47] Kyle Risi: a pygmy Sega sour or whatever.

[00:28:49] Adam Cox: Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Okay. Do you have to, at this point in time, have had a qualification in paleontology, or could you just be like, I've got a shovel?

[00:28:57] Kyle Risi: I think if you want a job like in a museum then [00:29:00] probably you need to be, but you've got a situation where Edwards isn't formally trained. He doesn't have the fancy qualifications that Orhan Neil has. So his ability to land a decent job in a very fancy museum is a lot more restricted. So you can go off and you can do these things. You just can't land prestigious jobs, essentially.

[00:29:18] Adam Cox: I see.

[00:29:19] Kyle Risi: And so because of this, the scientific record starts filling up with loads of duplicates under different names, but hilariously it gets even messier.

[00:29:28] When these things get dug [00:29:30] up, there are of course no photographs of how they were found. They're literally dug up chucks into a bunch of crates, and then when these bones reach a museum, these paleontologists have to work out how they all fit together. So it becomes very easy to mistake a neck vertebra for a tail vertebrae.

[00:29:45] So suddenly you've got a dinosaur classified as a brand new species when actually it's one that's already known.

[00:29:50] Adam Cox: Yeah. They put it together back to front.

[00:29:53] Kyle Risi: Exactly. And those are just the unintentional mistakes. There's also very much an incentive to assemble a [00:30:00] skeleton, realize it matches an existing species, and then quietly rearrange the bone. So it looks like something completely new. Exactly. Purely just so they can claim a brand new discovery.

[00:30:08] Adam Cox: And how are people gonna know about this? They could just black it.

[00:30:12] Kyle Risi: And there's also no rush to correct these mistakes because again, doing so means admitting that you didn't discover a new species, or that you're a complete idiot for getting it wrong. Like you're supposed to be a scientist, you're not supposed to make these mistakes.

[00:30:23] Adam Cox: Yeah. But then, I dunno, this feels like a whole new. Kind of world to discover. You're gonna make mistakes.

[00:30:29] Kyle Risi: It comes down to like [00:30:30] scientific, integrity in these matters, right?

[00:30:32] Adam Cox: Or snobbery.

[00:30:33] Kyle Risi: But there's so much pride and so much arrogance and ego in this field at this time because these are distinguished people going into these fields that they don't want to lose face. And so even after all these years, modern paleontologists are still cleaning up some of these messes that were created all these years ago.

[00:30:48] They're discovering these different fossils and they're going, actually this is wrong. That's a vertebrae not a tailbone.

[00:30:54] Adam Cox: Are you're telling me that theran source wrecks might not actually exist?

[00:30:57] Kyle Risi: Well, I mean, we know that Tyrannosaurus Rex [00:31:00] exists, but think of the most recent discovery that made, especially with its tyrannosaurus Rex, is that he isn't this felt ferocious animal that we grew up with. They're actually, really chubby and fat.

[00:31:10] Adam Cox: What?

[00:31:11] Kyle Risi: Yeah. When we were at the, Dinosaur park, they updated their T-Rex to be this big massive fat T-Rex. They did look like Barney the dinosaur.

[00:31:19] Adam Cox: Are you serious?

[00:31:20] Kyle Risi: I'm 100% serious.

[00:31:22] Adam Cox: But that goes against everything we've learned.

[00:31:24] Kyle Risi: Exactly. And so we hold onto these beliefs for so many years that sometimes it does become difficult to undo [00:31:30] these tangled messes.

[00:31:30] Adam Cox: So how do they know that, the transverse regs is a bit fat?

[00:31:34] Kyle Risi: I think it's because when they look at the bone structure and the density and they work out how much muscle mass it would have on it based on other things, I think they just put two and two together and they can work it out.

[00:31:44] Adam Cox: I see that might explain why they've got small arms as well. Just like they, they've just been sitting on the sofa the whole time. Yeah. Not working out.

[00:31:51] Kyle Risi: There's even a theory that they just had even smaller hands because it was just like enveloped by fat.

[00:31:56] Adam Cox: That doesn't sound ferocious,

[00:31:58] Kyle Risi: does it? Does it?

[00:31:59] And here's the [00:32:00] thing, Edward and Arthur Neil, they're the absolute worst offenders at this. They are so prolific and end up with so many fossils that they just don't have time to process them all properly. So between them, they end up discovering 142 dinosaur species, They fuck up so much that modern day paleontologists estimate that maybe about 30 of those that they discovered is. Actually valid.

[00:32:23] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:32:24] Kyle Risi: I know. So it is just mostly guesswork. Overreach and just pure nonsense a lot of the time because they don't know what they're doing. [00:32:30] They've got nothing to kind of go by.

[00:32:31] Adam Cox: Yeah. Fair enough. They were the first people to do this and they probably discovered new animals or whatever. So I don't know. They didn't have the technology back then. They didn't have all this knowledge that's, shared around the world.

[00:32:42] Kyle Risi: People from the Victorian times are stupid

[00:32:44] so it's just really funny to me to imagine these two, basically working with a glue gun in one hand and a dream in another, just sticking random bones together and then proudly declaring a brand new dinosaur tick next. And next quake comes in that unpack them all like, right, how, what am I feeling today?

[00:32:59] Adam Cox: [00:33:00] Hmm.

[00:33:00] Kyle Risi: I'm feeling, I'm feeling ferocious. And they're like, put this one here and stick that one there. And then voila, it's a T-Rex next.

[00:33:08] Adam Cox: Feels like an art project.

[00:33:09] Kyle Risi: So while Orphan Neil is busy building his fossil empire at Yale.

[00:33:14] Edward becomes the professor of Zoology at Haverford College, which is impressive, but technically he doesn't have the qualifications for the physical job. He is brilliant, but remember he didn't put the work in when it mattered.

[00:33:26] So he doesn't really have any formal qualifications to [00:33:30] fix that. Of course, daddy quietly pulled some strings. The college responds by awarding Edward an honorary master's degree. Essentially, that's his golden ticket to getting the job. So a bit of nepotism there.

[00:33:41] Adam Cox: It's just a shortcut to the role. So it's not necessarily qualified.

[00:33:44] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:33:45] Adam Cox: But Daddy had a word with someone,

[00:33:47] Kyle Risi: daddy, I What? The job at the college.

[00:33:49] Adam Cox: Yeah, that's, I hate that kind of thing.

[00:33:52] Kyle Risi: So a few years later, he finally marries a woman that his father does approve of his cousin.

[00:33:58] Adam Cox: Oh.

[00:33:59] Kyle Risi: They have a [00:34:00] daughter who to his father's disappointment is fairly normal. Looking alongside his job, he settles into a comfortable life with a good house, a few servants, everything is running smoothly.

[00:34:10] But unlike Arthur Neil, whose world is funded by Uncle Peabody, Edward's constant concern is finding more money to fuel his research. He has no idea when that money will run out. So he has to be as prolific as humanly possible.

[00:34:24] So throughout the 1870s, just like Orphan Hill, Edward sends out a team of fossil hunters all over the [00:34:30] USA to dig up specimens for him.

[00:34:32] He works so fast, Adam and is so prolific that in a single year he publishes 76 papers on various discoveries and his travels.

[00:34:42] Adam Cox: Wow, that's pretty good going

[00:34:43] Kyle Risi: by today's standards. It is literally astonishing.

[00:34:47] But 76 papers in one year does mean. It's rid errors.

[00:34:52] Adam Cox: I was gonna say it's a whole load of bullshitting.

[00:34:54] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Misclassification spelling mistakes, wild assumptions. He's basically rushing. it's because [00:35:00] he wakes up every day not knowing if tomorrow the money will run out. You know what I mean? So he's forced into quantity over quality, essentially.

[00:35:06] Meanwhile, Orhan Hill is way more relaxed. He doesn't have to worry about money, but also his research reaches a wider audience due to his connections. Thanks to Uncle Mr. Peabody. This means for less work, his reputation grows faster than Edwards.

[00:35:20] So while the two are building their careers, both Edwards and Ortho Neil still correspond regularly updating each other on their latest fines.

[00:35:27] At one point, Edward invites Ortho Neil [00:35:30] to his fossil pit in the West. It's very much like, come down, we'll dig together. Be cute. We can continue our bromance.

[00:35:37] I'll tell you about my cousin, and it all goes really, really well. But the end of the visit, Orhan Hill secretly bribes Edwards pit operator to send all future fossils to him instead of Edward.

[00:35:50] Adam Cox: Ah, that's a bit of a,

[00:35:52] Kyle Risi: I know it's appalling fossil digging etiquette, isn't it?

[00:35:55] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:35:56] Kyle Risi: That's not how you behave when a man invites you to his [00:36:00] pit.

[00:36:01] Adam Cox: How do you behave, Carl? It's very sneaky. It's not very gentleman like.

[00:36:06] Kyle Risi: No, it's not.

[00:36:07] Adam Cox: I guess once he receives the bones, he's gonna be like, I'm gonna steal your ideas. So why is he doing that? Is it because he can't do it, or he is not very good at it?

[00:36:15] Kyle Risi: No, he has the funds. He's got the resources.

[00:36:18] But often he'll does this because he sees how prolific Edwards is becoming, despite the errors in his work, and he starts to see him as a real potential threat, not just to his reputation, but to the possibility that Edward might stumble upon a career [00:36:30] defining discovery before he does.

[00:36:32] Adam Cox: I'm guessing, like Edward is doing it really like fast and furious in a way. And so throwing as much shit outta the wall. Exactly. See what sticks. Mm-hmm. And then something's gonna like land

[00:36:40] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So when Edward finds out about this, of course he's furious. He stops it immediately and this puts a major strain on their relationship.

[00:36:48] But Orphan Neil's fears do start to come true when in 1867, Edward discovers a brand new specimen in Kansas, which he names ELAs, or Platy uterus. Basically it's a [00:37:00] giant ocean dwelling marine reptile with enormous flippers and a very, very, like extraordinarily long tail, far longer than its actual body itself.

[00:37:11] Adam Cox: This is one of the biggest dinosaurs found, is

[00:37:14] Kyle Risi: Exactly. This is the first major fossil discovery to come out of a state that is famously nowhere near the ocean.

[00:37:20] So that like, people are like, what the fuck? How did that even happen? This kind of starts to make people realize that actually the world is constantly shifting on these tectonic plates.

[00:37:28] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:37:29] Kyle Risi: And this thing, Adam, [00:37:30] it's massive. It's 34 feet long, is by far the biggest specimen anyone has found so far.

[00:37:35] And so overnight the bone rush intensifies hoards of fossil hunters descending to the region and so edward De Space, his brand new dinosaur, proudly in a museum. Thousands and thousands of people come to see it.

[00:37:49] Everyone is talking about it. And for the very first time, his name is finally getting up there along with the likes of Orville because he just gets the success because of his connections, right?

[00:37:59] Edward [00:38:00] has to literally, like you said, throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what sticks. And now finally, he's made a big discovery.

[00:38:05] Adam Cox: Yeah, a really big one. So it's worked out for him. So I'm guessing Orhan Neil is gonna be really mad at this.

[00:38:12] Kyle Risi: Yes.

[00:38:12] One day, Orhan Neil comes to see this amazing new discovery. He takes one look at it and says, you've put the head on the wrong end.

[00:38:20] Adam Cox: Really? Did he?

[00:38:22] Kyle Risi: Which to be fair. It is easy to make this mistake. Like looking at this thing you wouldn't expect its neck to be longer than its tail

[00:38:29] Adam Cox: Uhhuh.

[00:38:29] Kyle Risi: [00:38:30] Naturally, Edward doesn't believe him. They have this full blown public arguments and in the end, Edward calls his mentor, Joseph Leady, to come in and settle the disputes.

[00:38:38] Leady arrives, he picks up the skull, takes one look at it and it confirms that Orhan Hill is right.

[00:38:44] Adam Cox: Oh no.

[00:38:45] Kyle Risi: Yeah, you put the head on the wrong end. So it's a dinosaur with a super long neck and a short tail, not the other way around.

[00:38:53] Adam Cox: I see. That does make more sense in terms of trying to find food. Why would you need a really long tail in [00:39:00] the ocean?

[00:39:00] Kyle Risi: Why would you need a really long neck

[00:39:02] Adam Cox: but to put your neck or head into crevices and eat?

[00:39:06] Kyle Risi: I guess so.

[00:39:06] Yeah. I dunno. I looked at it and thought actually that's quite an easy mistake to make. But yeah,

[00:39:10] Adam Cox: in terms of what I'm picturing, I don't know what it is, but I feel like. Obviously this fossil is in the ground and it's probably laid with its head and its tail in the right place. Did they not make a note?

[00:39:20] Kyle Risi: Well, remember They're not digging up a lot of these fossils, right? They're sending out these fossil hunters to dig these things up. When they discover a fossil, they don't photograph it 'cause they don't have the [00:39:30] cameras, right? So they just literally dig out all the bones, pop them into a crate and send them off, and he has to work out how they go together.

[00:39:34] Adam Cox: Shouldn't there be like a deputy that's like taking notes to go, it's here and just like a little sketch maybe, or something like that?

[00:39:40] Kyle Risi: Absolutely. That's probably something that they implemented in the future, but up until this point, it leaves it open for these big mistakes to be made just like this.

[00:39:48] Adam Cox: I would just blame Steve, my deputy bone collector.

[00:39:50] Kyle Risi: Yeah, why not? But not only this lead also says that ELAs au. Is not actually new discovery. It's actually a disco [00:40:00] sous that he discovered back in 1851.

[00:40:03] Adam Cox: Oh no.

[00:40:03] Kyle Risi: Of course. Watching all of this orphan Neil is gleeful as hell. Meanwhile, Edward is left completely mortified and humiliated. Not only has Orphan Neil gotten one up on him, but now his own mentor, the man he respects most in this world, has publicly backed Orphan Hill.

[00:40:21] Adam Cox: was his ELAs or whatever, bigger

[00:40:24] Kyle Risi: It just was another melasma, or it could be the biggest one. Maybe Ca saw get credit for that, but it doesn't matter.

[00:40:28] He's not [00:40:30] made a massive discovery. Right. Oh,

[00:40:31] Adam Cox: but they discovered that Kansas may have been near an ocean at one point.

[00:40:36] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Yeah. So there's, so that's kind of cool. There's still some the merit in his discovery.

[00:40:39] But because Edward has already presented the specimen at the American Physiological Society with the head on the wrong end, and also under the wrong name.

[00:40:48] He now has to face a prospect of having to issue a correction and essentially become a complete laughing stock in the scientific community, which is not something he wants to do.

[00:40:58] So instead [00:41:00] what he does is he goes off and buys back every single copy of that paper that he sent out.

[00:41:05] Adam Cox: Oh,

[00:41:06] Kyle Risi: but he doesn't get them all, especially the precious copy that Orphan Neil has.

[00:41:10] Lead eventually finds out what Edward has done, and he comes down on him hard.

[00:41:15] He goes ahead and publishes the correction himself, making Edward look even worse. Not only was he now wrong, but he is now sloppy and also unethical, so it's not a good look.

[00:41:25] Adam Cox: Wow. He's even, taken to the papers to do this

[00:41:27] Kyle Risi: and this is his mentor, the guy who's supposed to be [00:41:30] nurturing him.

[00:41:30] Adam Cox: Yeah. It feels, feels like very much like high school.

[00:41:33] Kyle Risi: It feels vindictive to me. But from lead's perspective, this is a lesson that he thinks Edward needs in order to be the best paleontologist that he can be.

[00:41:40] But for Edward, he feels betrayed and it was all Orhan Hill's doing. And so for Edward, this ruins any friendship that they ever had between them,

[00:41:49] Adam Cox: it's over.

[00:41:50] Kyle Risi: It is over bitch.

[00:41:52] but meanwhile, Orhan Neil thinks that Edward will eventually come around He'll look at this and go, this was funny. He'll laugh it off and they'll [00:42:00] be friends again.

[00:42:00] That isn't until 1877 when Orphan Neil gets a letter from an Arthur Lakes in Colorado. Arthur has basically been out looking for fossilized leaves when he stumbles across something far more interest. Bones,

[00:42:15] Adam Cox: fossilized leaves sounds really dull.

[00:42:17] Kyle Risi: Yeah, maybe.

[00:42:18] I think they normally find them like in slate or like sediment that kind of forms and they split them open. They see these lovely impressions of leaves and stuff.

[00:42:26] Adam Cox: Yeah. But to choose to go find that and not go and find [00:42:30] bones. Like what a choice. And then he does find bones, which I think that

[00:42:33] Kyle Risi: must have been a good day. A way cooler. Exactly. He does think it's cool. He thinks that someone's gonna be interested in this and so he sends a few of the bones to Ortho Neil knowing that he has this big reputation, but he also sends a few to Edward, who is this rising star in the field at the time.

[00:42:48] Arthur's thinking is he'll send a few samples to any paleontology nerd who has a postal address, and he'll see who basically pays him the best rate. It's the fossil hunting version of shopping around for the best [00:43:00] quote

[00:43:00] Adam Cox: I see.

[00:43:00] Kyle Risi: Before Ortho Neil can respond. Edward sends Arthur $100 for the full set of bones and immediately publishes his findings. Arthur then sends a polite follow-up letter to Orhan Neil letting him know that the bones he sent him earlier should probably go to Edward since Edward has now paid for them and he would probably appreciate the full set.

[00:43:19] Adam Cox: Well, that's presumptive that he would just send them back.

[00:43:24] Kyle Risi: I think maybe he's expecting there to be a degree of scientific integrity here. Do you know what I mean? He sent him a [00:43:30] sample. What do you make of this? I've also sent them to a few other people. Oh, that person's got back to me. Could you please forward those on, maybe put a couple quid in there to pay for the postage. I don't know.

[00:43:38] Adam Cox: Yeah, but I guess he doesn't know how petty they've been.

[00:43:41] Kyle Risi: No, he has no idea.

[00:43:42] Orphan Hill is outraged by this. He thinks that Edward has deliberately robbed him of a fossil and a potential big discovery.

[00:43:49] And now he feels exactly the same sting that Edward felt with a whole kind of dinosaur head on the wrong end incidence a few months back.

[00:43:57] And so from this moment on, it's sparks [00:44:00] decades of pettiness and sabotage, and it all erupts from here.

[00:44:03] Adam Cox: so what did they do? How bad did it get between them?

[00:44:06] Kyle Risi: So, orphan nail retaliates, he hears Edward is digging into a huge bone bed in komo bluff in Wyoming and immediately sends his own team to stake a claim of the land.

[00:44:17] Edwards finds out that Orhan Neil is in the area and he basically doubles his crew in order to overshadow anything that Orhan Neil's team might produce in any way.

[00:44:27] But soon enough, the numbers even out [00:44:30] and they start relentlessly spying on each other. Whenever one side strikes a big find, the other sets up a dick close by. They keep trying to poach each other's men with higher wages.

[00:44:40] Adam Cox: Oh, I thought you were gonna say something else. What? I just poach each other as men. ' cause they're, I don't know,

[00:44:44] Kyle Risi: watch, just shoot them. That kind of poaching.

[00:44:47] Adam Cox: No, I, it sounded more sexual initially.

[00:44:50] Kyle Risi: Not sexual. Adam.

[00:44:51] Adam Cox: Get Steve. He's hot.

[00:44:55] Kyle Risi: Which basically means that for these fossil hunters, digging in this area becomes very [00:45:00] lucrative. The average wage ends up cranking higher and higher just so the other team can keep their own teams.

[00:45:06] When the high wages starts causing them to hemorrhage money, both sides try a new approach by trying to keep the dig location secret.

[00:45:13] But the diggers, remember Adam, these are freelancers. They have no loyalty to either side, and so because they all end up in the same saloon at the end of the working day, they just tell each other everything.

[00:45:24] Adam Cox: What? What dig are you at? And they just like, exactly,

[00:45:26] Kyle Risi: what do you find today?

[00:45:27] Adam Cox: What are you getting paid?

[00:45:28] Fine, I'm gonna come down there tomorrow.

[00:45:29] Kyle Risi: [00:45:30] Exactly. So it just ends up being so pointless in some cases, when each side POEs the other side's diggers, they later discover, they willingly let them be poached so they could act as spies for them inside the team.

[00:45:43] Adam Cox: Oh wow. Send an inside man.

[00:45:45] Kyle Risi: It gets surprisingly sophisticated.

[00:45:48] There are moments where a team excavates a specimen, they crate up, they label it for shipment, and then the spy will quietly swap the delivery address and send the whole thing off to orphan Mills [00:46:00] museum.

[00:46:00] Adam Cox: I didn't think that there'd be spies in paleontology. Wow.

[00:46:04] Kyle Risi: It's ruthless. They all have one thing to gain and that is legacy. And the credit of discovering a big thing. Do you know what I mean? They don't wanna take any risks.

[00:46:13] Adam Cox: Yeah. I can see why they went to such links, even though I don't know any of these people until today.

[00:46:17] Kyle Risi: But probably the worst thing they do is both Orel and Edwards become so protective of their dig sites that they will routinely destroy fossils, just so if they end up in the other one's hands, it'll just be completely worthless.

[00:46:29] So [00:46:30] they'll chip things off, they'll remove parts. So it's like they don't have a complete skeleton. It's awful.

[00:46:34] Adam. In some cases when they were done, they would literally blow up the entire dig site with dynamite just so the others wouldn't be able to gain access to that plot.

[00:46:44] Adam Cox: So they would've collected as many bones as they could and then blow it up just to make sure there's nothing else left.

[00:46:48] Kyle Risi: Not always. Sometimes they would just be like, we're done here.

[00:46:51] Adam Cox: Don't need these bones.

[00:46:52] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[00:46:52] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:46:53] Kyle Risi: Blow it up.

[00:46:54] Adam Cox: That doesn't feel like they're being the most ethical or whatever the word is.

[00:46:57] No,

[00:46:57] Kyle Risi: these are pieces of natural history that literally take [00:47:00] millions of years to form. And they're blowing them up all outta spite.

[00:47:02] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:47:03] Kyle Risi: They're like, they behaving like kids. Also, this sounds exaggerated, but one time when they had set up two sites brazenly close to each other, the tensions get so heated that they end up in a full blown rock throwing wall. Actual trench warfare, but with rocks

[00:47:16] Adam Cox: were, some of 'em are fossils, like throwing bones.

[00:47:18] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Ooh, I'll send this. I'll send this one to the museum.

[00:47:22] Adam Cox: Yeah. I've been missing this.

[00:47:23] Kyle Risi: Just what I needed, Adam. They let this go on. For 15 years, 15 years, 15 [00:47:30] years. Instead of just moving to another region or getting out of each other's way, they deliberately keep themselves in this constant state of paranoia just to make sure that the other one doesn't ever get an upper hand.

[00:47:39] Adam Cox: That is a long time just to hold a grudge.

[00:47:41] Kyle Risi: It is so long, and this isn't just contained within the dick sites. It spills out into their personal lives as well.

[00:47:46] When they start classifying the dinosaurs coming out these pits, they begin naming them after each other again, but not like before when it was like moss coppi, or co marshy.

[00:47:58] Like those days are gone. [00:48:00] Those are flattering names.

[00:48:01] Orhan Hill classifies a specimen as any Ches cop, which literally translates into copter, which is Edward's name.

[00:48:11] Adam Cox: Wow, that's so petty.

[00:48:13] How I just, yeah. Although, to be fair, I dunno if the other names are that like complimentary.

[00:48:17] Kyle Risi: No, I guess not. But the thing is though, this is now in the scientific record. The, for you just spilled over into, and it's there forever now because they're not gonna exactly change its name, are they?

[00:48:26] Adam Cox: Yeah, I guess so. And that's going to set the world. Everyone's gonna know [00:48:30] that. Someone's having a dig at them essentially.

[00:48:32] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:48:32] So basically now they're coming after each other's credibility. As we know, Edward has this habit of rushing out papers into print and they're offering riddled with inaccuracies.

[00:48:40] Ortho Neil ends up spending more time than he spends on his own papers. publicly critiquing all of Edward's work.

[00:48:48] And so for a while, issue after issue of the American Nationalist Journal is just Orhan Neil listing out everything Edward has ever gotten wrong.

[00:48:56] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:48:57] Kyle Risi: In the end, just to put a stop to this, Edward [00:49:00] literally buys a controlling sake of the journal just so he can block whatever Orhan Neil writes about him, but also in doing this, he turns the tables and attacks him right back.

[00:49:09] Mostly just ensuring that he's always the one who gets the last word. So like he'll post something, he'll be like, oh yeah, Edward's got X, Y, and Z wrong. And then Edwards will just be like, come back with a retort. He'll be like, no, you are wrong. These are the reason why. And that's it. And then if he sends a response back in, he'll just block it from being printed.

[00:49:26] Adam Cox: This is like the equivalent of someone doing a Facebook [00:49:30] status update. Yeah. And like having a go at someone like their neighbor or something.

[00:49:33] Kyle Risi: Exactly. And they'll post the post and then they'll be like, okay, great. I've got the last word. I'm now gonna block you. Yeah. So you can see it, but you can't respond.

[00:49:40] Yeah. Or turn comments off. I used to do that all the time.

[00:49:42] Adam Cox: I like the fact that this kind of behavior, it's been going on for centuries.

[00:49:46] Kyle Risi: Yeah. It's not beneath anyone.

[00:49:48] by the late 18 hundreds Orphan Neil uses his connections to George Peabody's legacy to become the chief paleontologist of the US Geological Survey, as well as the head of the National Academy of Sciences. [00:50:00] So these are fucking big roles.

[00:50:03] This basically, Adam gives him access to federal funding, which means he can now cut Edward off from receiving any government support entirely. every application that has Edward's name on it, or even associated with him in any way is just denied. Denied, denied.

[00:50:19] And as a result, Edward's influence in the field starts to dwindle.

[00:50:23] This is a man who relies heavily on government funding, so when that support dries up, he is forced into riskier and riskier [00:50:30] ways of just keeping himself afloat and also getting more funding to fund his work.

[00:50:34] And so he's desperate at this point.

[00:50:37] Adam Cox: What does he do in order to get the money then?

[00:50:39] Kyle Risi: Well, to stay afloat, he starts investing in a bunch of civil minds, which works for a while until the bottom falls out of the industry and the stock is essentially worthless.

[00:50:47] And by 1886, Edward, essentially Adam loses everything.

[00:50:53] His family are forced to move out of their home just so they can rent it out so they can use the money to survive. But Adam. It [00:51:00] gets worse because of Orhan, Neil's influencing government, he manages to push through a new law that states that any fossils that have ever been collected using federal funding now belong to the Smithsonian Museum, So anything that Edwards has ever dug up now belongs to the government.

[00:51:17] Adam Cox: How can he do that? That like

[00:51:18] Kyle Risi: he did it.

[00:51:19] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:51:20] Kyle Risi: Isn't that awful?

[00:51:20] Adam Cox: He's clearly got a lot of power and sway.

[00:51:23] Kyle Risi: That's it. So now Edward's life's work is now under threat and his entire fossil collection is going to be seized [00:51:30] by the government.

[00:51:30] And so Edward has very little that he can retaliate with, right? He is completely ruined. He's got no reputation. What else can he do? He does have one thing. All these years, Edward has been keeping a journal, documenting every single mistake and misdeed that Orhan Hill has committed. I'm talking dishonest, scientific errors, publishing, blunders, literally everything.

[00:51:52] Adam Cox: And so he hasn't published any of these at this point in time. He's just been keeping a quiet note.

[00:51:56] Kyle Risi: A little journal. Yeah. Basically he writes it all down in this little black [00:52:00] book, a shit list. Basically, he takes the journal to the New York Herald and on the 12th of January, 1890, they run the first article accusing orphan of a bunch of things, including. Plagiarism.

[00:52:13] He accuses him of employing others to do the scientific work on his behalf and then signing his own name to it.

[00:52:18] He accuses him of misusing government funds only to enrich himself and others. He describes one of Orhan Hill's works as the most remarkable collection of errors and ignorance of [00:52:30] anatomy and literature on the subject ever displayed So Victorian.

[00:52:34] Adam Cox: Wow. What a dig

[00:52:35] Kyle Risi: For a time. It was quite a scandal actually.

[00:52:38] Adam Cox: So actually in some ways Edward is really taken the higher ground a lot of this time. Like he's made errors. I know he is like pushing out a lot of stuff. But he is never really discredited or Neil before

[00:52:49] Kyle Risi: Reportedly though the article is riddled riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. So it does raise questions about the credibility of the piece, but only just a little bit, the most important part was [00:53:00] that information was now out there in the wild, but also for the very first time. This is when the world discovers that these two are in the middle of this really vicious rivalry.

[00:53:09] Adam Cox: Oh, so this is the first time I thought it was quite public up until this point.

[00:53:12] Kyle Risi: It wasn't really public. No. It's now a bitchy feud.

[00:53:15] Adam Cox: Oh. So does this start a bit of a war within the papers and stuff?

[00:53:20] Kyle Risi: Pretty much, yeah. It ends up setting off this series of vicious debates across the scientific community, specifically though about Orhan Hill's power and influence in the field.

[00:53:29] [00:53:30] In the end, there's no formal investigation into the more serious allegations, especially about misappropriating government funding.

[00:53:36] But that is only because before the pressure fully hits, the US Geological Survey are forced to remove Orphan Hill from his position, just to escape the scrutiny.

[00:53:47] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:47] Kyle Risi: Which, as you can imagine. Now puts the ball firmly back in Edwards court.

[00:53:52] Adam Cox: Yeah. So Arthur Neil got his comeuppance.

[00:53:54] So with both of their reputations now ruined, essentially, what do they do? Have they got anything else to lose? [00:54:00] They keep going at it, or do they make amends?

[00:54:01] Kyle Risi: They try to kinda recover. However, it's Edward who slowly starts to recover first. After Joseph Leady, remember he's his mentor. After he dies, Edward takes over as Professor of Zoology at the University of Pennsylvania.

[00:54:14] The salary bump basically means that he can move his family back into their home, and for the first time in years, he starts to get his life back on track. But he's still dealing with that law that says that any specimens collected with government funding now belong to the Smithsonian [00:54:30] Museum.

[00:54:30] For a while he does resist handing anything over. But eventually, in 1895, he decides that he's gonna sell four of his collections. So around 13,000 specimens to the American Museum of Natural History and a few other institutions.

[00:54:43] So he's got a lot of stuff, man.

[00:54:45] Adam Cox: How much does that go for?

[00:54:46] Kyle Risi: He gets about $59,000 in total. So far less than what he wanted, but at least he gets something before the government come knocking and trying to take all of his stuff away.

[00:54:57] Adam Cox: Ah, yeah. That's smart.

[00:54:58] Kyle Risi: So he still keeps his private [00:55:00] collection, which obviously they can't touch, so he isn't completely stripped off his entire life's work.

[00:55:04] But the rivalry ends up spanning their entire lives through their rise into scientific success, to their then financial ruin. And what is wild that they didn't need to do any of this.

[00:55:14] Do you know what I mean? It was just so pointless if they just stayed out of each other's way, they could have at least achieved great things, probably even greater things if they were just left to their own devices.

[00:55:22] Adam Cox: That's what I mean. They seem to spend the time discrediting the other person, whereas they could have, fair enough, they might put out some papers that were wrong or whatever, [00:55:30] spelling mistakes, but they could have been focusing on new discoveries and things like that.

[00:55:33] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Like we said earlier on, Orhan Neil was just so preoccupied with spending most of his time discrediting Edward's work rather than writing his own papers. And advancing his own sciences. All they gained was just years of stress and misery, but then also mutual destruction.

[00:55:47] It was just pointless. They suffered immensely just by being in each other's orbits

[00:55:52] Adam Cox: and in a way, if they did make a great discovery, they could have gone down in like history, but they've gone down on history for the wrong reasons.

[00:55:58] Kyle Risi: People called the story [00:56:00] the bone walls, right? And so naturally there must be a winner. Right? So after all of this, we have to ask who actually won the bone wars. And when we go purely on numbers and tally the new species, it's actually oral. Who comes out on top, he ends up with around 80 brand new species.

[00:56:16] Whereas Edward ends up with 56.

[00:56:19] Adam Cox: I mean, that's still pretty good going.

[00:56:21] Kyle Risi: It is. There's a small margin between them. Some of orphan hill's, dinosaurs, you'll know instantly. They include, Thete, Asosa,

[00:56:29] Adam Cox: ah,

[00:56:29] Kyle Risi: The [00:56:30] triceratops.

[00:56:30] Adam Cox: Oh, he discovered that one. Mm-hmm. That's my favorite

[00:56:32] Kyle Risi: one. It is, it's my favorite.

[00:56:33] And also the diplodocus.

[00:56:35] Adam Cox: Okay, so it some pretty iconic dinosaurs

[00:56:37] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Creatures that are up there amongst lunchbox royalty.

[00:56:42] Adam Cox: Yes.

[00:56:42] Kyle Risi: But here's the thing, the reason orphan's, dinosaurs are iconic and Edwards aren't, and I've looked at Edwards list,

[00:56:50] I wouldn't recognize a single one of them. And it's because it all comes down to resources. Orhan Hill had government funding, right? He had museum backing the full weight of the Peabody Fortune [00:57:00] pushing all of his work into the spotlight, and we never had any of that.

[00:57:03] But also comparing them isn't really that fair. Edward had a far broader interest than Orhan Hill. Edward literally chased everything in anything. Mammals, reptiles, amphibians, you name it. Whereas Orhan Hill, he focused mostly on reptiles and mammals, so they weren't always looking for the same thing.

[00:57:19] So of course, when you compare dinosaurs, the guy physically specializing in dinosaurs is always gonna be the clear winner.

[00:57:24] Adam Cox: Yeah. But then is it because Ortho Neil's dinosaurs are those that have gone in, [00:57:30] they've gone on like lunchboxes in Jurassic Park and whatever it is. Is it just no one's picked up Eds with dinosaurs because they're just, no one's done that yet.

[00:57:38] Kyle Risi: Exactly. They haven't. Author Neil because of his name, they get pushed up. They get made more prominent.

[00:57:43] Adam Cox: Sure.

[00:57:44] Kyle Risi: And also he was the head of the museum at Yale. Probably one of the most notable museums in the country at the time.

[00:57:49] Adam Cox: So it's not that Edwards discoveries were any less then.

[00:57:52] No. It just didn't get the notoriety.

[00:57:54] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Yeah. So I wouldn't really recognize any of the dinosaurs that he discovered out of the 56. Really? Maybe [00:58:00] like a dinosaur B would, but you know what a stick in the basics. Triceratops. Stegosaurus, T-Rex. That's it.

[00:58:06] Pterodactyl.

[00:58:07] Adam Cox: What about a diplodocus? Huh?

[00:58:08] Kyle Risi: Diplodocus. Sorry. Yes, exactly. Mm.

[00:58:11] But in 1897, edward dies at the age of 56, so he's not old. in his will, he insists on having no grave at all. Instead, he donates his body to science, and even today, his bones are kept in a locked drawer for Be students to study, which is noble as a scientist, giving [00:58:30] back to science in a scientific way.

[00:58:31] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:32] Kyle Risi: But actually, the real reason he does this is because he wants his remains to be placed alongside his mentor, Joseph Ledy at the University of Pennsylvania. So a totally normal, healthy student professor relationship going on there.

[00:58:45] Adam Cox: Oh. Because the other professor's bones are even though that he had also discredited Edward in the past. Yeah. So he wanted his dead bones to be next to this guy.

[00:58:53] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:58:53] Adam Cox: That's weird.

[00:58:54] Kyle Risi: I guess he probably ended up seeing this as like a, a lesson that Leady wanted to teach him for [00:59:00] like not doing science properly.

[00:59:01] Adam Cox: Sure. But what about his cousin wife?

[00:59:03] Kyle Risi: Exactly. What about his family? No. He wants to be buried in the university with a creepy bloody Joseph Leady. Professor,

[00:59:10] Adam Cox: this is what happens when you obsess over fossils.

[00:59:12] Kyle Risi: But also in his will, he leaves Orhan Hill. One final challenge, Edward has his skull preserved so that his brain could be measured after Orhan Neil dies hoping that it would prove that his is bigger.

[00:59:24] Adam Cox: Oh God.

[00:59:25] Kyle Risi: Orhan.

[00:59:25] Adam Cox: And

[00:59:26] Kyle Risi: apparently at the time people believed that brain size correlated with [00:59:30] intelligence. So this ends up being the most ridiculous pissing contest imaginable, classic male behavior, but also completely pointless because of course, it doesn't correlate to intelligence in any way.

[00:59:40] Adam Cox: If anything, It correlates to a lack of intelligence.

[00:59:43] Kyle Risi: Or just that they're men. This is how we like our feuds. Of course, for the winner to be established, orphan Neil, has to die first. Which is stupid, because neither of them will actually get to see the results anyway.

[00:59:54] Adam Cox: Yeah. But who does have the biggest brain?

[00:59:56] Kyle Risi: He never accepts the challenge, Eventually [01:00:00] in 1899, so just a couple years after Edward Orhan Hill dies at the age of 67. and it's not because he's matured or he's understood the era of his ways or how pointless this all was. It's because this was his final chance to snub Edward one last time by refusing outright.

[01:00:18] Adam Cox: Oh really? Yeah. Not 'cause he feared that maybe that he would lose.

[01:00:22] Kyle Risi: No. He was just like, yeah, I'm not rising up to it. But really he's using it as a way of getting back at him.

[01:00:28] Adam Cox: It seems like he's afraid of the [01:00:30] size of his brain.

[01:00:30] Kyle Risi: possibly. And so Adam, with oral's death, the feud is finally ended.

[01:00:35] Apparently Edwards skull is still preserved at the University of Pennsylvania today, but the risk speculation might not even be his, because at some point during the 20th century they lose track of it and when it finally turns up again, some argue that the written descriptions of the skull don't actually match the actual skull.

[01:00:52] That itself. Oh really?

[01:00:53] Some experts, obviously they sist that is his, but others say absolutely not. No way.

[01:00:58] Adam Cox: Do you reckon it just got mixed up [01:01:00] with a load of other skeletons

[01:01:01] Kyle Risi: or? Probably I would say so. Like it's a, it's hard job keeping track of one skull over 150 years.

[01:01:06] Adam Cox: And equally like a lot of skeletons, they look the same.

[01:01:09] Kyle Risi: They do, yeah. So what they're relying on are these like written descriptions of the skull, like, oh, inside here on the left hand side of the cranium and there's this little bump here,

[01:01:17] Adam Cox: it looks like Edward,

[01:01:18] Kyle Risi: he's got the same smile.

[01:01:20] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:01:20] Kyle Risi: But despite the chaos, there is some positivity that came out of the bone wars. I remember we got Stegastaurus Triceratops, objectively the best [01:01:30] dinosaurs, and at the height of the bone Rush Edward and Orphan Nail, they were literally celebrities, newspapers followed Brown from Dick site to Dick site. Like Victorian Papa, sorry, gilded Age, paparazzi.

[01:01:41] Adam Cox: American Victorians.

[01:01:43] Kyle Risi: Yeah. They pioneered that public fascination that ended up lasting like 150 years later. It's crazy.

[01:01:49] Adam Cox: Mm.

[01:01:50] Kyle Risi: And honestly, it's thanks to them that dinosaurs are still part of our cultural bloodstream today. Right. Like, can you imagine growing up in the nineties without dinosaurs, what would we doing?

[01:01:59] Like no dinosaur [01:02:00] toys. No dinosaur books. No. No. Jurassic Park, Adam,

[01:02:03] Adam Cox: God. Yeah.

[01:02:04] Kyle Risi: Like Steven Spielberg might not even be the household name. He's today.

[01:02:08] Adam Cox: Uh, no, but he made sharks. Not sharks.

[01:02:10] Kyle Risi: George.

[01:02:10] Adam Cox: George. Yeah.

[01:02:11] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I was gonna say like he's made et

[01:02:13] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:02:13] Kyle Risi: but that's just a me story against the epic that is Jurassic Park, in my opinion.

[01:02:18] Adam Cox: But what was, if it was Edward discovered the triceratops and stuff like that, what would the Power Rangers look like then?

[01:02:24] Kyle Risi: That's true actually.

[01:02:25] Adam Cox: And just, Jurassic Park might be about a whole bunch of other different dinosaurs

[01:02:29] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:02:29] Adam Cox: [01:02:30] That we don't even know about.

[01:02:30] Kyle Risi: It could be, yeah. Like the landscape could be very different.

[01:02:33] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:34] Kyle Risi: The damage they did was also enormous too. Like paleontologists today, they're still correcting some of the, mistakes that they made.

[01:02:40] Many of their papers are still being reanalyzed and they are definitely skeleton city museums right now containing foreign bones or bones in the wrong order, or from different species altogether.

[01:02:51] Adam Cox: To be honest. How sure can we be about dinosaurs in terms of, not that they didn't exist mm-hmm.

[01:02:56] But more in terms of what they looked like. We can assume the cut of their skin, [01:03:00] but like you said at the beginning, like with Yeah. If the tyrannosaurs rex is now potentially different or slightly different body shape. Yeah, we could still be wrong.

[01:03:07] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I mean, a lot of dinosaurs are now discovering that they didn't just have skin. They actually had feathers. A lot of them would've been really feathery. There's even speculation that T-Rex himself had a bunch of feathers.

[01:03:18] Adam Cox: Exactly. We've been lied to this whole time.

[01:03:20] Kyle Risi: I don't think we've necessarily been lied to. We've been lied to. We're piecing the puzzle pieces together. But you've got these instances where these scientists or these paleontologists, they're so proud.

[01:03:29] They don't want to admit that [01:03:30] they were wrong with certain things. That they either keep these things from being corrective for a long, long time, or they just don't surface it.

[01:03:37] Adam Cox: It's like Phoebe and friends when she's saying gravity could exist, but it's not so much like she's being pulled down, but more like forced down,

[01:03:44] Kyle Risi: pushed down,

[01:03:44] Adam Cox: pushed down.

[01:03:45] So this is the thing until someone discovers something else, this is just what we've gotta believe in.

[01:03:49] Kyle Risi: That's true. Yeah. And as Phoebe said, again, in friends like, Ross, are you so narrow-minded that you can even be open-minded enough for [01:04:00] even for a second to consider the possibility that blah blah, blah, blah, blah.

[01:04:03] And Ross is I guess she's wow, Ross. Before, like I disagreed with you, Lisa respected you, you just let go of all of your beliefs. What will you tell the other scientists? And Ross just storms out. I love Ross.

[01:04:18] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:04:19] Kyle Risi: But to be fair, then of course you've got everything that they did destroy as well. In my opinion, unforgivable because there could have been something really valuable in that.

[01:04:26] Adam Cox: That's true. That's the crime, I guess in terms of, yeah. [01:04:30] Have we missed out on something?

[01:04:31] Kyle Risi: There is a silver lining after they died, they left behind dozens and dozens of unopened crates that have never been cataloged, like just stacked with bones from these dick sites.

[01:04:42] So there is the strange silver lining, like I said, that out of all that destruction, they might be something really unique waiting to be discovered inside those crates. I'm sure they've all opened them up now, but that's crazy that they died leaving all this stuff behind and it's for no other reason than they just did not have [01:05:00] time to go through it all because they were just.

[01:05:02] So prolific and it was all driven by this view to one up each other.

[01:05:06] Adam Cox: Yeah. Just look at your bones. You might have found something new.

[01:05:09] Kyle Risi: Yeah, exactly. And Adam, that is a story of the bone wars.

[01:05:13] Adam Cox: I didn't even know that was a thing.

[01:05:16] Kyle Risi: You didn't even know it existed. But hey, you have the bone walls to thank for triceratops, your favorite dinosaur.

[01:05:21] Adam Cox: Yeah. And the fact that people did fight over this during the time, but I guess it was such a new, big thing. You wanted your name out there, you wanted to be the next Albert Einstein, right? Or something.

[01:05:29] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I think [01:05:30] the Victorian times, or sorry, the, the Gilded Age of America, Victorian Americans, um, it was all about new frontiers, right?

[01:05:37] Mm-hmm. And discovering new things. They had the gold rush. They were heading out west, they were doing all these really crazy things, and everyone wanted a legacy and to be associated with something really great.

[01:05:46] We don't really have that anymore because pretty much everything has been discovered. The last frontiers people say are space, but space is pretty boring.

[01:05:53] Adam Cox: What about the sea? They say that we haven't

[01:05:55] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[01:05:55] Adam Cox: There's a lot more in the sea that we haven't discovered. Could be some more dinosaurs down there.

[01:05:59] Kyle Risi: Oh yeah. But [01:06:00] also a lot of these dinosaurs that discover on land, they came from the sea. It's just with the tectonic plates moving mm-hmm.

[01:06:04] They end up on land.

[01:06:05] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:06:06] That was a good little trip into history there, Kyle. Thank you for that.

[01:06:10] Kyle Risi: You are welcome. Should we run the outro for this week?

[01:06:12] Adam Cox: Let's do it.

[01:06:13] Kyle Risi: And so that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium, an assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did.

[01:06:22] Adam Cox: If today's episode sparked your curiosity, then please do us a favor and follow us on your favorite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and [01:06:30] helps more people like you discover the show

[01:06:32] Kyle Risi: for our dedicated freaks out there. Don't forget, the next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon, and as always, it is completely free to access.

[01:06:40] Adam Cox: And if you want even more, then join our certified freak steer to unlock the entire archive for delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next. We'd love for you to be part of our growing community.

[01:06:52] Kyle Risi: We always drop new episodes every Tuesday. And until then, remember even dinosaurs, when extinct, with more dignity than cope [01:07:00] and marsh managed.

[01:07:01] We'll see you next time.

[01:07:02] Adam Cox: See ya. [01:07:30]