Science journalist David B. Williams, who writes for Earth magazine, covered the research of SMU vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs and the infamous Bone Wars of the late 1800s.
The Bone Wars was a flurry of fossil speculation across the American West that escalated into a high-profile national feud. Drawn into the spectacle were two scientists from the Lone Star State, geologist Robert T. Hill, now acclaimed as the Father of Texas Geology, and naturalist Jacob Boll, who made many of the state’s earliest fossil discoveries.
The article, “Long-Lost Letters Shed New Light on 19th-Century Bone Wars,” was published in the January 2013 issue of Earth.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu. (Photo: Octavio Mateus)
Hill and Boll had supporting roles in the Bone Wars through their work for one of the feud’s antagonists, Edward Drinker Cope, according to Jacobs’ new study.
Currently his field projects include work in Mongolia and Angola. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He consulted on the new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which opened in 2009.
By David B. Williams
Earth
In the decades following the Civil War, America became the center of the fossil world through discoveries by paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, one-time friends turned bitter enemies. Out of their nasty, well-financed battle to dominate the world of paleontology came legendary dinosaur finds such as skeletons of Brontosaurus (now known as Apatosaurus), Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Allosaurus. The finds weren’t just a bone or two of each dinosaur, as had been the case in the early years of dinosaur discoveries in England; rather, these were nearly complete skeletons that for the first time shed light on the incredible diversity of dinosaurs.
The so-called Bone Wars entailed this lifelong race between Marsh and Cope to discover the most new fossils, during which both paleontologists risked their scientific integrity as well as their financial well-being. The field skirmishes between Cope and Marsh mostly occurred in Colorado and Wyoming (and mostly among their hired help), but one of the lesser-known side squabbles took place in Texas. New evidence from recently discovered letters from Cope to field collector Robert T. Hill reveals more about the nature of the conflict and its contributors.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information, www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The science magazine Discover has covered the research of SMU vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs and the infamous Bone Wars of the late 1800s.
In a post on Discover’s “80 beats” blog, the magazine reprinted the translation of a poem written by frontier naturalist and fossil hunter Jacob Boll.
Jacobs came across the poem at the American Museum of Natural History on a label on the back of Eryops specimen No. AMNH 4183.
SMU biology professor Pia Vogel translated the poem. Vogel and Jacobs worked with SMU English professor John M. Lewis to retain the essence of the poem in English.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Louis Jacobs in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu. (Photo: Octavio Mateus)
The Bone Wars was a flurry of fossil speculation across the American West that escalated into a high-profile national feud. Drawn into the spectacle were two scientists from the Lone Star State, geologist Robert T. Hill, now acclaimed as the Father of Texas Geology, and Boll, who made many of the state’s earliest fossil discoveries.
Hill and Boll had supporting roles in the Bone Wars through their work for one of the feud’s antagonists, Edward Drinker Cope, according to Jacobs’ new study.
Currently his field projects include work in Mongolia and Angola. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He consulted on the new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which opened in 2009.
Discover
This poem in praise of the Permian amphibian Eryops was scrawled on the back of a label now in the American Museum of Natural History by Jacob Boll, a Swiss-German fossil hunter involved in a tumultuous 19th-century paleontology feud.
Graduate students and post-docs do a lot of important work in science these days, in the names of their more eminent supervisors, and there was a similar set-up in the early days of American paleontology. Many of the fossils named by and attributed to E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh, archenemies and the era’s most prominent paleontologists, were collected in the field by hired hunters like Boll and his contemporary Robert T. Hill, who both worked for Cope.
Paleontologists sifting through papers in the library of Southern Methodist University recently came across letters between Hill and Cope and, while examining specimens at AMNH, happened on Boll’s little poem.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information, www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Science journalist Brian Switek, who blogs for Wired magazine, covered the research of SMU vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs and the infamous Bone Wars of the late 1800s.
The Bone Wars was a flurry of fossil speculation across the American West that escalated into a high-profile national feud. Drawn into the spectacle were two scientists from the Lone Star State, geologist Robert T. Hill, now acclaimed as the Father of Texas Geology, and naturalist Jacob Boll, who made many of the state’s earliest fossil discoveries.
Hill and Boll had supporting roles in the Bone Wars through their work for one of the feud’s antagonists, Edward Drinker Cope, according to Jacobs’ new study.
Currently his field projects include work in Mongolia and Angola. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He consulted on the new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which opened in 2009.
By Brian Switek
Wired
No episode in the history of American paleontology has been as discussed, and celebrated, as the Bone Wars of the late 19th century. This contentious scientific showdown, played out during the days of the Wild West, set the foundation for fossil studies in North America, and introduced naturalists and the public alike to magnificent creatures such as Diplodocus, Uintatherium, and Dimetrodon (to pick just three of dozens).
The main figures during this controversial episode were friends-turned-rivals E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh. Both were experienced in the field, but, especially as they cemented their credentials as America’s leading paleontologists, both men increasingly relied on field assistants and a network of scientific connections to keep fossils flowing to their east coast labs.
Jason Heid, an editor with D Magazine’s popular Frontburner blog, covered the research of SMU vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs and the infamous Bone Wars of the late 1800s.
The Bone Wars refers to a flurry of fossil speculation across the American West that escalated into a high-profile national feud. Drawn into the spectacle were two scientists from the Lone Star State, geologist Robert T. Hill, now acclaimed as the Father of Texas Geology, and naturalist Jacob Boll, who made many of the state’s earliest fossil discoveries.
Hill and Boll had supporting roles in the Bone Wars through their work for one of the feud’s antagonists, Edward Drinker Cope, according to Jacobs’ new study.
Currently his field projects include work in Mongolia and Angola. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He consulted on the new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which opened in 2009.
Jacobs co-leads Projecto PaleoAngola, a collaborative international scientific research program focused on the ancient life of Angola.
Besides the discovery of the first dinosaur of Angola, the team has uncovered mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, turtles and other Cretaceous marine animals, but the aim is also to create a strong and lasting institutional and scientific collaboration that has a multiplier effect in Angolan academia.
In the laboratory, Jacobs’ research utilizes advanced imaging and stable isotope techniques to investigate paleoenvironmental, biogeographic and phylogenetic issues of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras.
Jacobs is featured by National Geographic on its Explorers web site, which acknowledges the work of the world’s scientists whose research is made possible in part through funding from National Geographic.
By Jason Heid
Frontburner
SMU paleontologist Louis Jacobs has been studying the role of two Texas fossil collectors in the 19th century Bone Wars, which played out across the American frontier as rivals competed fiercely to uncover new fossils (and thus discover new extinct species.) In doing so he found a poem written by one of the men, Dallas naturalist Jacob Boll, whose Swiss family was among those that founded the utopian La Reunion colony here.
During a break in his field labors, Boll’s fascination with ancient bones prompted him to write in his native German an ode to fossils. Jacobs found the poem in the American Museum of Natural History on a label on the back of Eryops specimen No. AMNH 4183.
SMU biology professor Pia Vogel translated the poem. Vogel and Jacobs worked with SMU English professor John M. Lewis to retain the essence of the poem in English.
Treasure trove of archived letters discovered at SMU; Permian hunter’s German ode to a fossil is translated into English
In the late 1800s, a flurry of fossil speculation across the American West escalated into a high-profile national feud called the Bone Wars.
Drawn into the spectacle were two scientists from the Lone Star State, geologist Robert T. Hill, now acclaimed as the Father of Texas Geology, and naturalist Jacob Boll, who made many of the state’s earliest fossil discoveries.
Hill and Boll had supporting roles in the Bone Wars through their work for one of the feud’s antagonists, Edward Drinker Cope, according to a new study by vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
The study by Jacobs expands knowledge about Cope’s work with Hill and Boll.
It also unveils new details about the Bone Wars in Texas that Jacobs deciphered from 13 letters written by Cope to Hill. Jacobs discovered the letters in an archive of Hill’s papers at SMU’s DeGolyer Library. The letters span seven years, from 1887 to 1894.
Hill, who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, not only provided Cope with fossils of interest but also shared geological information about fossil locales.
Boll, who was a paid collector for Cope — as was the practice at the time — supplied the well-known paleontologist with many fossils from Texas. More than 30 of the taxa ultimately named by Cope were fossils collected by Boll.
“Fossils collected by Boll and studied by Cope have become some of the most significant icons in paleontology,” said Jacobs, an SMU professor of earth sciences and president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.
The survey party of USGS geologist Robert T. Hill explored Texas during the 1800s to report on the geology and resources to open the West to agriculture. (Credit: USGS)
Rush to find fossils explodes during opening of the American West
Jacobs describes the late 1800s as a period of intense fossil collecting. The Bone Wars were financed and driven by Cope and his archenemy, Othniel Charles Marsh. The two were giants of paleontology whose public feud brought the discovery of dinosaur fossils to the forefront of the American psyche.
Cope, from Philadelphia, and Marsh, from Yale University, began their scientific quests as a friendly endeavor to discover fossils. They each prospected the American frontier and also hired collectors to supply them with specimens. Cope and Marsh identified and named hundreds of discoveries, publishing their results in scientific journals.
Over the course of nearly three decades, however, their competition evolved into a costly, self-destructive, vicious all-out war to see who could outdo the other. Despite their aggressive and sometimes unethical tactics to outwit one another and steal each other’s hired collectors, Cope and Marsh made major contributions to the field of paleontology, Jacobs said.
Hill first to identify and map the Cretaceous geology in North Texas
Born in 1858, Hill was a teenager when he left Tennessee as an orphan and arrived on the Texas frontier in 1874, says Jacobs’ study. Hill settled in Comanche, southwest of Fort Worth, where he went to work for his brother’s newspaper, the Chief. After earning a Bachelor of Science in geology from Cornell, Hill was hired as a field geologist for the USGS.
Hill is noted for being the first to identify and map the distinct rock formations in North Texas that correspond to the Earth’s Cretaceous geologic period from 146 million years ago to 65 million years ago, Jacobs said. For much of the Cretaceous, a shallow sea cut North America in half from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. Dinosaurs roamed the coastal shoreline and huge reptiles swam the waters, an environment that preserved plants and animals as fossils for posterity millions of years later.
Through his reading of the letters, Jacobs found that Cope disagreed with the way Hill named the Cretaceous rock units, and told him so. Cope counseled Hill: “You mustn’t mind criticism. We all get it and get used to it; but it isn’t comfortable at first.”
In subsequent letters, said Jacobs, it’s apparent Hill had changed his approach, for which Cope offered him high praise: “I wish to say definitely that your discovery of the lower Cretaceous series in this country is the most important addition to our geology that has been heard for a long time.”
Hill contributed one of 1,000 species of backboned animals named by Cope
Jacobs’ research found that numerous letters reveal that Cope was persistent in trying to buy a Cretaceous fish fossil that Hill had collected. In various letters, Cope expresses a desire to view the fossil, each time stating his request in a different way. Hill ultimately sold Cope the fossil for $15. Cope named the specimen Macrepistius arenatus. It is housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Hill’s fish specimen was one of 1,000 species of backboned animals, from fish to dinosaurs, that Cope described and named in his lifetime.
Also evident in the correspondence is a glimpse into the battle intrigue between Cope and Marsh, Jacobs said. In one letter, Cope angles to learn from Hill details about a new director of the USGS, to judge whether “our ? friend O.C.M.” would have an advantage.
Cope wrote to Hill, “Possibly you can find out how the land lies?”
Cope’s other Texas connection was through Jacob Boll
Boll was a much larger supplier to Cope and ultimately made significant contributions to the field of paleontology. Boll “is mentioned, usually in passing, in virtually every history of the subject,” according to Jacobs.
Born in 1828 in Switzerland, Boll was the first to discover vertebrate fossils in the Permian red beds along the drainages of the Wichita and Red rivers and their tributaries.
“The discoveries opened up an entirely new chapter in vertebrate evolution some 280 million years old,” Jacobs said. “Boll’s finds include some of the oldest close relatives of mammals whose evolution eventually led to humans.”
Boll belonged to one of the Swiss families that founded the mid-19th century utopian society La Reunion in Dallas, Jacobs said. Boll made Dallas his home sometime after 1874. He died in the field in the Permian red beds in 1880 from a snake bite.
At least one scholar has asserted that Cope — to keep the identity of his collectors secret from Marsh — never credited Boll for the Texan’s many fossil discoveries. Jacobs, however, found evidence that in 1878 Cope, in fact, did acknowledge Boll’s contribution, at least for the big-headed, semi-acquatic amphibian Eryops. Cope wrote that the fossil was “found … by my friend Jacob Boll.”
Boll’s fossil fascination erupted into a poem for Eryops
During a break in his field labors, Boll’s fascination with ancient bones prompted him to write in his native German an ode to fossils. Jacobs came across the poem in the American Museum of Natural History on a label on the back of Eryops specimen No. AMNH 4183.
SMU biology professor Pia Vogel translated the poem. Vogel and Jacobs worked with SMU English professor John M. Lewis to retain the essence of the poem in English.
“Now you will with some few others
Trek to the professor’s seat.
Awakened through his careful thought,
Be reassembled from your fragments,
To tell to others yet to come
From the sculpting of your teeth
How you lived and disappeared,
Name you he will, and what he found.”
While Hill and Boll were linked by their relationship to Cope, it isn’t known whether the two of them ever met, according to Jacobs.
”Hill and Boll both made major contributions to frontier science at an important time in American history,” Jacobs said. “They may have been nearly forgotten, but their lives have influenced much that came later.” — Margaret Allen
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