Part 42

But by far the most illuminating of the mid-century writers on Paleozoic vertebrates was Sir William Dawson, a very large proportion of whose numerous papers relate to the Coal Measures of Nova Scotia and their contained plant and animal remains. In 1853 appeared Dawson’s first announcement, written in collaboration with Sir Charles Lyell, of the finding of the bones of vertebrates within the base of an upright fossil tree trunk at South Joggins. These bones were identified by Owen and Wyman as pertaining to a reptilian or amphibian to which the name Dendrerpeton acadianum was given. Following this were several papers published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, London, describing more vertebrates and associated terrestrial molluscs. In 1863 Dawson summarized his discoveries in the Journal (=36=, 430–432) under the title of “Air-breathers of the Coal Period,” a paper which was expanded and published under the same title in the Canadian Naturalist and Geologist for the same year. Dawson also printed in the same volume the first account of reptilian(?) footprints from the coal. Thus from time to time there emanated from his prolific pen the account of further discoveries, both in bones and footprints, his final synopsis of the air-breathing animals of the Paleozoic of Canada appearing in 1895. The only other group of vertebrates which claimed his attention were certain whales, on which he occasionally wrote.

Fishes.—The fossil fishes from the Devonian of Ohio found their first exponent in J. S. Newberry, appointed chief geologist of the second geological survey of Ohio, which was established in 1869. These fishes from the Devonian shales belonged for the greater part to the curious group of armored placoderms, the remains of which consist very largely of armor plates with little or no traces of internal skeleton. There was also found in association a shark, Cladoselache, of such marvelous preservation that from some of the Newberry specimens now in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, Bashford Dean has demonstrated the histology of muscle and visceral organs, in addition to the very complete skeletal remains.

Newberry’s work on these forms, begun in 1868, has been carried to further completion by Bashford Dean and his pupil L. Hussakof, as well as by C. R. Eastman. Newberry’s other paleontological work was with the Carboniferous fishes of Ohio, the Carboniferous and Triassic fishes of the region from Sante Fé to the Grand and Green rivers, Colorado, and on the fishes and plants of the Newark system of the Connecticut valley and New Jersey. He also discussed certain mastodon and mammoth remains, and those of the peccary of Ohio, Dicotyles.

Joseph Leidy (1823–1891).

We now come to a consideration of the work of Joseph Leidy, one of the three great pioneers in American vertebrate paleontology, for if we disregard the work of Hitchcock and others on the fossil footprints, few of the results thus far obtained were based upon the fruits of organized research. Leidy began his publication in 1847 and continued to issue papers and books from time to time until the year 1892, having published no fewer than 219 paleontological titles, and 553 all told. His earlier paleontological researches were exclusively on the Mammalia, which were then coming in from the newly discovered fossil localities of the West. The discovery of these forms, one of the most notable events in the history of our science, will bear re-telling.

The first announcement was made in 1847, when Hiram A. Prout of St. Louis published in the Journal (3, 248–250) the description of the maxillary bone of “Palæotherium” (= Titanotherium proutii)from near White River, Nebraska. This at once drew the attention of geologists and paleontologists to the Bad Lands, or Mauvaises Terres, which were to prove so highly productive of fossil forms. About the same time S. D. Culbertson of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, submitted to the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia some fossils sent to him from Nebraska by Alexander Culbertson. These were afterward described by Leidy in the Proceedings of the Academy, together with the paleotheroid jaw, in addition to which three other collections which had been made were also placed at his disposal for study.

This aroused the interest of Doctor Spencer F. Baird of the Smithsonian Institution, who sent T. A. Culbertson to the Bad Lands to make further collections. The latter was successful in securing a valuable series of mammalian and chelonian remains. These, together with other specimens from the same locality, were sent to Leidy, for, as Baird remarked, Leidy, although only thirty years of age, was the only anatomist in the United States qualified to determine their nature. The outcome of Leidy’s study of this material was “The Ancient Fauna of Nebraska,” published in 1853, and constituting the most brilliant work which up to that time American paleontology had produced. Leidy’s determinations, which are in the main correct, are the more remarkable when it is realized that he had little recent osteological material for comparative study. The forms thus described by him were new to science, of a more generalized character than those now living, and yet their distinguished describer recognized, either at that time or a little later, their true relationship to the modern types. The extent of Leidy’s anatomical knowledge was almost Cuvierian, and Cuvier-like he established the fact of the presence of the rhinoceroses, then unheard of in the American fauna, from a few small fragments of molar teeth, an opinion shortly to be fully sustained through the finding of complete molars and the entire skull of the same individual animal.

Leidy next turned his attention to the huge edentates, which he studied exhaustively, publishing his results in the form of a memoir in 1855, two years after the appearance of the “Ancient Fauna.”

Extinct fishes of the Devonian of Illinois and Missouri and the Devonian and Carboniferous of Pennsylvania were made the subjects of his next researches, after which he described the peccaries of Ohio, and later, in a much larger and most important work, the Cretaceous reptiles of the United States (1865). Most of the fossils discussed in this last work are from the New Jersey Cretaceous marls and of them the most notable was the herbivorous dinosaur Hadrosaurus, the structure and habits of which, together with its affinities with the Old World iguanodons, Leidy described in detail. From Leidy’s descriptions and with his aid, Waterhouse Hawkins was enabled to restore a replica of the skeleton in a remarkably efficient way. This restoration for a long time graced the museum of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and there was a plaster replica of it in the United States National Museum. These, together with plaster replicas of Iguanodon from the Royal College of Surgeons in London, gave to Americans their first real conceptions of members of this most remarkable group. The associated fossils from the New Jersey marls were chiefly crocodiles and turtles.

From 1853 to 1866 F. V. Hayden was carrying on a series of most energetic explorations in the West, especially in Nebraska and Dakota as then delimited, returning from each trip laden with fossils which were given to Leidy for determination. The results appeared in 1869 in Leidy’s Extinct Mammalian Fauna of Dakota and Nebraska, published as volume =7= of the Journal of the Philadelphia Academy. In this large volume no fewer than seventy genera and numerous species of forms, many of them new to science, were described, representing many of the principal mammalian orders; horses were, however, especially conspicuous. This last group led Leidy to the conclusion, afterward emphasized by Huxley, that North America was the home of the horse in geologic time, there being here a greater representation of different species than in any recent fauna of the world. Leidy’s interest in the horses, for the forwarding of which he made a large collection of recent material, extended over many years, as his first paper on the subject bears the date of 1847, the last that of 1890.

Next came the discovery of Eocene material from the vicinity of Fort Bridger, Wyoming, geologically older than the Nebraska and Dakota formations. This, together with specimens from the Green River and Sweetwater River deposits of Wyoming and the John Day River (Oligocene) of Oregon, was also referred to Leidy, and added yet more to the list of newly discovered species with which he had already become familiar in his earlier researches. The results of this study were published by the Hayden Survey in 1873, under the title “Contributions to the Extinct Vertebrate Fauna of the Western Territories.” This was the last of Leidy’s major works, but he continued up to the time of his death to report to the Academy concerning the various fossil forms that were submitted to him for identification. Of such reports the most important was one on the fossils of the phosphate beds of South Carolina, published in the Journal of the Academy in 1887.

As a paleontologist, Leidy ranks with Cope and Marsh high among those who enriched the American literature of the subject, but it must be remembered that this was but a single aspect of his many-sided scientific career, for he made many contributions of high order to botany, zoology, and general and comparative anatomy as well, nor did his knowledge and usefulness as an instructor of his fellow men keep within the limitations of these subjects.

Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–1899).

The sixth decade of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the labors of several paleontologists who, like Leidy, were destined to raise the science of fossil vertebrates in America to the level of attainment of the Old World. They were, among others, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. Of these the names of Marsh and Cope are linked together by the brilliance of their attainments, their contemporaneity, and the rivalry which the similarity of their pursuits unfortunately engendered. Marsh produced his first paleontological paper in 1862 (=33=, 278), Cope in 1864, but the latter died first, so that his life of research was shorter.

To Professor Marsh should be given credit for the first organized expedition designed exclusively for the collection of vertebrate remains, the results of which contain so much material that it has not yet entirely seen the light of scientific exposition. Marsh’s first trip to the West was in 1868, the first formal expedition being organized two years later. These expeditions, of which there were four, were privately financed except for the material and military escort furnished by the United States Government, and consisted of a personnel drawn entirely from the graduate or undergraduate body of Yale University. These parties explored Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Oregon, and returned laden with material from the Cretaceous and Tertiary formations of the West. Some of this is of necessity somewhat fragmentary, but type after type was secured which, with his exhaustive knowledge of comparative anatomy, enabled Marsh to announce discovery after discovery of species, genera, families, and even orders of mammals, birds, and reptiles which were unknown to science. The year 1873 saw the last of the student expeditions, and thereafter until the close of his life the work of collecting was done under Marsh’s supervision, but by paid explorers, many of whom had been his scouts and guides in the formal expeditions or had been especially trained by him in the East. In 1882, after fourteen years of the experience thus gained, Marsh was appointed vertebrate paleontologist to the United States Geological Survey, which relieved him in part of the personal expense connected with the collecting, although up to within a short time of his death his own fortune was very largely spent in enlarging his collections. After his connection with the Survey was established, Marsh had two main purposes in view in making the collections: (1) to determine the geological horizon of each locality where a large series of vertebrate fossils was found, and (2) to secure from these localities large collections of the more important forms sufficiently extensive to reveal, if possible, the life histories of each. Marsh believed that the material thus secured would serve as key or diagnostic fossils to all horizons of our western geology above the Paleozoic, a belief in which he was in advance of his time, for few of his contemporaries appreciated the value of vertebrates as horizon markers. The result of the fulfilment of his second purpose saw the accumulation of huge collections from all horizons above the Triassic and some Paleozoic and Triassic as well. These contained some very remarkable series, each of which Marsh hoped to make the basis of an elaborate monograph to be published under the auspices of the Survey. One can visualize the scope of his ambitions by the fact that no fewer than twenty-seven projected quarto volumes, to contain at least 850 lithographic plates, were listed by him in 1877. These covered, among other groups, the toothed birds (Odontornithes), Dinocerata, horses, brontotheres, pterodactyls, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, monkeys, carnivores, perissodactyls and artiodactyls, crocodiles, lizards, dinosaurs, various birds, proboscideans, edentates and marsupials, brain evolution, and the Connecticut Valley footprints. Much was done towards the preparation of these memoirs, as evidenced by the long list of preliminary papers, admirably illustrated by woodcuts which were to form the text figures of the memoirs, which appeared with great regularity in the pages of the Journal for a period of thirty years. Of the actual memoirs, however, but two had been published at the time of Marsh’s death in 1899—the Odontornithes in 1880 and the Dinocerata in 1884. One must not overlook, however, the epoch-making Dinosaurs of North America, which was published by the Survey in 1896, although it was not in the form nor had it the scope of the proposed monographs. This was not due to lack of application, for Professor Marsh was an indefatigable worker, but rather to the fact that the program was of such magnitude as to necessitate a patriarchal life span for its consummation. As it is, Professor Marsh’s fame rests first upon his ability and intrepidity as a collector, ready himself to brave the very certain hardships and dangers which beset the field paleontologist in the pioneer days, and also by his judgment and command of men to secure the very adequate services of others and so to direct their endeavors that the results were of the highest value. The material witness to Marsh’s skill as a collector lies in the collections of the Peabody Museum at Yale and in the Marsh collection at the United States National Museum, the latter secured through the funds of the United States Geological Survey. Together they constitute what is possibly the greatest collection of fossil vertebrates in America, if not in the world; individually, they are second only to that of the American Museum in New York City, the result of the combined labors of Osborn and Cope and their very able corps of assistants.

As a scientist Marsh possessed in large measure that wide knowledge of comparative anatomy so necessary to the vertebrate paleontologist, and as a consequence was not only able to recognize affinities and classify unerringly, but also to recognize the salient diagnostic features of the form before him and in few words so to describe them as to render the recognition of the species by another worker relatively easy. The publication of hundreds of these specific diagnoses in the Journal constitutes a very large and valuable part of that periodical’s contribution to the advancement of our science. Marsh’s method of indicating forms by so brief a statement leaves much to be done, however, in the way of further description of his types, which in many instances were but partially prepared.

Yet another important service which Marsh rendered to science was the restoration of the creatures as a whole, made with the most painstaking care and precision through assembling the drawings of the individual bones. These restorations have become classic, embracing as they did a score or more of forms, of beast, bird, and reptile. They also were published first in the Journal, although they have subsequently been reproduced in text-books and other works the world over. Part of Marsh’s popular reputation, at least, which was second to that of no other American in his line, was due to his skill in attaining publicity, for his papers, of whatever extent, were carefully and methodically sent to correspondents in the uttermost parts of the earth, and thus the Marsh collection has reflected the fame of its maker.

Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897).

The third great name in American vertebrate paleontology, that of Edward Drinker Cope, stands out in sharp contrast with the other two, although in the range of his interests he was probably more nearly comparable with Leidy than with Marsh. The beginning of Cope’s scientific labors dates from 1859, the year made famous in the annals of science by the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species. It is not surprising, therefore, that matters evolutional should have interested him to the very end of his career. Cope was not merely a paleontologist, but was interested in recent forms, especially the three lower classes of vertebrates, to such an extent that his work therewith is highly authoritative and in some respects epoch-making. Thirty-eight years of almost continual toil were his, and the mere mass of his literary productions is prodigious, especially when one realizes that, unlike those of a writer of fiction, they were based on painstaking research and philosophical thought. The greater part of Cope’s life was spent in or near Philadelphia except for his western explorations, and he is best known as professor of geology and paleontology in the University of Pennsylvania, although he served other institutions as well.

Cope’s early work was among the amphibia and reptiles, his first paleontological paper, the description of Amphibamus grandiceps, appearing in 1865. This year he also began his studies of the mammals, especially the Cetacea, both living and extinct, from the Atlantic seaboard. The next year saw the beginning of his work on the material from the Cretaceous marls of New Jersey, describing therefrom one of the first carnivorous dinosaurs, Lælaps, to be discovered in America. In 1868 Cope began to describe the vertebrates from the Kansas chalk and three years later made his first exploration of these beds. This led to his connection with the United States Geological Survey of the Territories under Hayden, and to continued exploration of Wyoming and Colorado in 1872 and 1873. The material thus gained, consisting of fishes, mosasaurs, dinosaurs, and other reptiles, was described in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society as well as in the Survey Bulletins. In 1875 these results were summarized in a large quarto volume entitled “Vertebrata of the Cretaceous formations of the West.” Subsequent summers were spent in further exploration of the Bridger, Washakie, and Wasatch formations of Wyoming, the Puerco and Torrejon of New Mexico, and the Judith River of Montana. The material gathered in New Mexico proved particularly valuable, and led to the publication in 1877 of another notable volume entitled “Report upon the Extinct Vertebrata obtained in New Mexico by Parties of the Expedition of 1874.”

Material was now accumulating so fast as to necessitate the concentration of Cope’s own time on research, so that, while he continued to make brief journeys to the West, the real work of exploration was delegated to Charles H. Sternberg and J. L. Wortman, both of whom became subsequently very well known, the former as a collector whose active service has not yet ceased, the latter as an explorer and later an investigator of extremely high promise.

As early as 1865, Cope began no fewer than five separate lines of research which he pursued concurrently for the remainder of his career. On the fishes, he became a high authority in the larger classification, owing to his researches into their phylogeny, for which a knowledge of extinct forms is imperative. On amphibia, he wrote more voluminously than any other naturalist, discussing not only the morphology but the paleontology and taxonomy as well. In this connection must be mentioned not only Cope’s exploration and collections in the Permian of Ohio and Illinois, but especially the remains from the Texas Permian, first received in 1877, upon which some of his most brilliant results were based; these of course included reptilian as well as amphibian material. His third line of research, the Reptilia, is in part included in the foregoing, but also embraced the reptiles of the Bridger and other Tertiary deposits, those of the Kansas Cretaceous, and the Cretaceous dinosaurs.

Up to 1868 Leidy alone was engaged in research in the West, but that year saw the simultaneous entrance of Marsh and Cope into this new field of research, and their exploration and descriptions of similar regions and forms soon led to a rivalry which in turn developed into a most unfortunate series of controversies, mainly over the subject of priority. This resulted in a permanent rupture of friendship and the division of American workers into two opposing camps to the detriment of the progress of our science. This breach has now been happily healed, and for a number of years the degree of mutual good will and aid on the part of our workers has been of the highest sort.

The extent of the western fossil area, and particularly the explorations of three of Cope’s aids, Wortman in the Big Horn and Wasatch basins, Baldwin in the Puerco of New Mexico, and Cummins in the Permian of Texas, gave him so fruitful a field of endeavor that the occasion for jealous rivalry was largely removed. The most manifest result of Cope’s western work was the publication in 1883 of his Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West, which formed volume =3= of the quarto publications of the Hayden Survey. This huge book contains more than 1000 pages and 80 plates and has been facetiously called “Cope’s Bible.”

Cope’s philosophical contributions, which covered the domains of evolution, psychology, ethics, and metaphysics, began in 1868 with his paper on The Origin of Genera. In evolution he was a follower of Lamarck, and as such, with Hyatt, Ryder, and Packard, was one of the founders of the so-called Neo-Lamarckian School in America. Cope’s principal contribution, set forth in his Factors of Organic Evolution, is the idea of kinetogenesis or mechanical genesis, the principle that all structures are the direct outcome of the stresses and strains to which the organism is subjected. Weismann’s forcible attack on the transmission theory did not shake Cope’s faith in these doctrines, for he claimed that the paleontological evidence for the inheritance of such characters as are apparently the result of individual modification was too strong to be refuted. Cope was more like Lamarck than any other naturalist in his mental make-up as well as his ideas. He was also, like Haeckel, given to working out the phylogeny of whatever type lay before him, and in many instances arrived marvellously near the truth as we now see it.

Associated for a while with A. S. Packard, Cope soon became chief editor and proprietor of the American Naturalist, which was for many years his main means of publication and thus served our science in a way comparable to the Journal. As Osborn says by way of summation:

“Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist in Paleontology. After Huxley he was the last representative of the old broad-gauge school of anatomists and is only to be compared with members of that school. His life work bears marks of great genius, of solid and accurate observation, and at times of inaccuracy due to bad logic or haste and overpressure of work.... As a comparative anatomist he ranks both in the range and effectiveness of his knowledge and his ideas with Cuvier and Owen.... As a natural philosopher, while far less logical than Huxley, he was more creative and constructive, his metaphysics ending in theism rather than agnosticism.”

1870–1880.