Big dinosaur leaves faint tracks

January 11, 2016 3:29 PM

A few months ago, I went searching for the truth about that missing bone. I was not the first — plenty of others have sought the largest dinosaur that has ever lived. What I found was a quest that has driven some people toward maniacal competition, some to conspiracy theories and others to disregard scientific consensus. It drove me to a little rocky outcropping on a hill in rural Colorado known as Cope’s Nipple.

—The Biggest Dinosaur In History May Never Have Existed by David Goldenberg is about Amphicoelias fragillimus, a species of sauropod dinosaurs described by famed paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope from a single, enormous bone, which later went missing. It may have been the biggest of the big, as explained by Prof. Ken Carpenter [pdf] or a fiction created by a typo [pdf], as argued by Cary Woodruff and John R. Foster.
posted by Kattullus (17 comments total)

150-million-year-old green-and-red dirt layer in the hills known to geologists as the Morrison Formation.

That would make a great name for a...wait for it...rock band.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:19 PM on January 11, 2016 [19 favorites]

"Either way, the men went from sniping at each other to actively working against each other. At sites across the West, their workers were directed to sabotage one another, destroying rival camps, quarries and even bones."


Sheesh. Scientific Progress on the March.
posted by lkc at 4:48 PM on January 11, 2016

Au contraire, this was clearly a paradigmatic case of scientific progress going boink.
posted by Kattullus at 4:50 PM on January 11, 2016 [6 favorites]

Why would someone give their child the middle name "Drinker?"
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 5:00 PM on January 11, 2016

From the article: calls the argument over the largest dinosaur a paleontological “dick-measuring contest” that he’s not interested in participating in.

hahahaha A good friend of mine has a play on Cope's Rule that she calls Cope's Ruler; without going into its vulgarities it basically boils down to that in paleontology there's an inverse relationship between egomaniacal pursuit and probability of truth.
posted by barchan at 5:00 PM on January 11, 2016 [9 favorites]

Why would someone give their child the middle name "Drinker?"


In my experience for the first nine months or so it's either "Drinker," "Sleeper," or "Shitter."
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:24 PM on January 11, 2016 [6 favorites]

a great name for a...
dibs on Deccan Traps
posted by j_curiouser at 6:05 PM on January 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

Othniel Marsh? With a name like that, I wonder what the Esoteric Order of Dagon was doing, looking for dinosaur bones. What did they want found... or not found?
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:28 PM on January 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

Paleontology has spent the last hundred years cleaning up the taxonomic mess created by Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh in their mad competition to find and name new dinosaur species. I'm not surprised by yet another phony species created by Cope; it joins a veritable herd of creatures that never existed.

Paleontologists probably would have done well to rip up everything those two did and start from scratch, but by the time it became clear how awful the situation was, much of it had already been straightened out.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:34 PM on January 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

There's a Cope vs Marsh comic for those who want more paleontology rasslin.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:26 PM on January 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

Deccan Traps

Those are what the drummer plays, right?
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:06 PM on January 11, 2016

The Deccan Traps are one of the few things that really terrify me. Literally hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of lava pouring out in continent-sized sheets. At least there's some hope of deflecting an asteroid; what can you do when the danger is coming from below?
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:55 AM on January 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

There was going to be a Bone Wars film on HBO about Cope and Marsh, starring Steve Carell and James Gandolfini. But sadly Gandolfini died soon after it was announced.

I've always been a bit of a dinosaur nerd, if not quite as obsessed as I was when I was eight, and I always thought the story would make a great film / mini series from when I first heard about it.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:13 AM on January 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

Why would someone give their child the middle name "Drinker?"

The Drinkers were a prominent Quaker family in Philadelphia. So were the Copes. Edward's mother's maiden name was Edge, but I assume he somehow was related to them, or the families were friends. (See also: the noted author Catherine Drinker Bowen.)
posted by LeLiLo at 3:23 AM on January 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

There's a good American Experience on the war, called Dinosaur Wars.
posted by persona au gratin at 6:08 AM on January 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

There was going to be a Bone Wars film on HBO about Cope and Marsh, starring Steve Carell and James Gandolfini. But sadly Gandolfini died soon after it was announced.

Guess you have to settle for Tony Hale and Chris Meloni.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:59 AM on January 12, 2016

Nobody tell Duane Gish or Jack Chick!
posted by symbioid at 8:24 AM on January 12, 2016