The Big Dinosaur Podcast

Episode 250 is all about the Bone wars. Including our dinosaur of the day, Hesperornis, the penguin-like dinosaur with teeth and strange lobed feet.

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Resources for Sabrina Ricci’s Hardcore Bonewars:

• The Bonehunter’s Revenge by David Rains Wallace source
• The Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury source
• The Gilded Dinosaur by Mark Jaffe source
• The Life of a Fossil Hunter by Charles Sternberg source
• The Bone Hunters by Url Lanham source
• Bone Sharps, Cowboys & Thunder Lizards by Jim Ottaviani source
• The Bone Wars are infamous. Between the 1870s to the 1890s, two paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, had a rivalry that eventually ruined them but also made dinosaurs mainstream. source
• These two hunted for fossils in the Wild West of the United States, with the help of the new railroads and the burgeoning scientific community in America. They also had to deal with politics, tensions between the Sioux and other tribes, and of course each other. source
• Before the Bone Wars, dinosaurs were not that popular. Only 9 species of dinosaurs had been named, and mostly isolated teeth and skeletal fragments had been found. But after Marsh and Cope, and their rush to name new species, even going so far as to bribe, steal, and destroy bones to prevent each other from “winning,” (there are rumors they spied on each other and one rumor that Marsh stole a railway car of bones, though there’s no evidence for that one), they named 144 species (only 32 are still considered valid). source
• Marsh and Cope are often depicted in different ways. Marsh was a loner, very suspicious of people, and worked slowly and methodically. He was bald with a large beard. Cope was passionate and eccentric, quick to describe fossils, and liked women but was also devoted to his family. Cope had a full head of hair and a mustache. But both of them had money and were very driven. Marsh got money from his Uncle George Peabody, who owned a large mercantile company, and was a philanthropist and bachelor, with an interest in education. Cope got money from his father, though he had an allowance for most of his life, so is sometimes depicted as the “poor one” in the Bone Wars. source
• There was one more paleontologist who was part of the Bone Wars, and he’s often not mentioned: Joseph Leidy. Leidy was the first vertebrate paleontologist in the U.S., and older than both Marsh and Cope. He’d found evidence of horses, lions, rhinos, and other large mammals in the West, and in 1856 he discovered dinosaurs in America. He formally described Hadrosaurus foulkii in 1858. source
• However, unlike Marsh and Cope, Leidy didn’t have money to pursue fossil hunting, and he didn’t like getting entangled in the rivalry. Eventually he quit paleontology and people kind of forgot about him. (Cope learned a lot from Leidy, but still called him “Poor Old Leidy.”) source
• Marsh and Cope’s rivalry ruined them both, but was also great for paleontology source
• Before the Bone Wars, there were only 9 named species of dinosaurs source
• Cope and Marsh found more than 25,000 new fossils and named 144 new dinosaurs (Cope named 64, Marsh named 80), 9 of Cope’s are still valid, 23 of Marsh’s are valid source
• Not all of them are still valid, but they still made valuable contributions (and Marsh also argued that birds descended from dinosaurs) source
• Cope published fast and described 1,115 of the 3,200 species of vertebrate fossils known in North America in 1900 source

The dinosaur of the day: Hesperornis

• Mesozoic avialan that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now Kansas, US as well as Canada and Russia
• Penguin-like
• Basically a large bird
• About 5.9 ft (1.8 m) long
• Did not have wings
• Had strong hind limbs, used to swim
• Toes were lobed, not webbed (kind of flattened, good for swimming)
• Did not fly, but great at diving and swimming
• Feet probably came out to its sides near the tail, which means their legs couldn’t go under the body to stand, and they probably pushed themselves on their bellies on land, like seals
• Probably were good at foot-propelling to dive, but not great walking on land
• Probably only on land for breeding and laying eggs
• Hesperornis is similar to Gavia immer (the common loon, an extant animal) and probably moved similarly on land and in water
• Had a flattened tail, which may have helped it change direction and go deeper or back towards the surface when under water
• Had a long neck
• Had teeth and a beak
• Beak was good for catching fish
• Probably used the beak to hold on to prey
• Teeth were in the entire lower jaw and the back of the upper jaw
• Their palate (roof of the mouth) had small pits that could lock the lower teeth into place when the jaws were closed
• In 1952, Joseph Gregory found that Hesperornis teeth were not in sockets like dinosaurs, but had a longitudinal groove that ran down the beak, similar to mosasaurs
• Similarities in mosasaur lower jaws may show Hesperornis could swallow large, slippery prey
• Probably ate fish
• Lived in subtropical to tropical waters, in a marine habitat. However, some of the younger species may have lived in freshwater deposits, so they may have moved, at least to some extent, away from salt water
• In 2016, David Burnham, Bruce Rothschild, and others studied a leg bone that was found in South Dakota the 1960s and found that the Hesperornis bone had bite marks from a plesiosaur (they compared tooth marks of a juvenile plesiosaur and it matched the bite marks to within a mm). There were signs of infection (based on the roughness of the bone), so Hesperornis probably survived the attack
• Burnham and Rothschild found that the plesiosaur came from the side of Hesperornis, based on the orientation of the bite, and also found it probably fit the whole leg in its mouth
• Shows plesiosaurs may have been opportunistic predators, instead of always going after small prey
• Hesperornis fossils have been found from Arkansas to the Arctic, which is around where the Western Interior Seaway was. That means Hesperornis may have lived in cool and warm temperatures in the Arctic, or it may have migrated
• In 2014, Laura Wilson and Karen Chin looked at the internal bone structure of Hesperornis fossils and of modern day penguins (including gentoo penguins, which do not migrate for winter, and Adélie and chinstrap penguins which do migrate)
• They looked for lines of arrested growth (LAGs) that would have slowed or stopped to respond to stressful events such as Arctic winters or migrations
• They didn’t find any LAGs in Hesperornis, but saw that Hesperornis grew to adult sized quickly
• Modern penguins didn’t have any signs of Arctic winters or migration stress either
• The penguins grow in about a year, so that’s why there are no LAGs (they grow too fast)
• With Hesperornis, there are several possible reasons for no LAGs: they were adult sized quickly so the stresses associated with migrating or overwintering did not appear in ther bone microstructure, their bones may not be easily molded and therefore these patterns were not recorded, or the Arctic climate were not that bad (though it could get below freezing, it was warmer than it is today)
• The gentoo penguins grow even faster than the other penguins and Hesperornis, possibly because they need to get to adult-sized before the winter comes (since they don’t migrate)
• Wilson and Chin said penguins need to be studied more, which may help answer more questions about Hesperornis
• Type species is Hesperornis regalis
• Name means “regal western bird”
• Discovered by O.C. Marsh in 1871, during his second expedition out west in Kansas with 10 students. He thought it was a diving species (didn’t find a head)
• In 1872 Marsh went back to Kansas with 4 students. One of them, Thomas Russell found a nearly complete skeleton, with part of the head (with teeth)
• This and Benjamin Mudge’s discovery of Ichthyornis led to Marsh writing in an 1873 paper, “the fortunate discovery of these interesting fossils does much to break down the old distinction between birds and reptiles”
• Hesperornis was part of the pre-Bone Wars. Some Hesperornis fossils were accidentally sent to Cope, and Marsh accused Cope of stealing them
• Dozens of Hesperornis regalis specimens have been found
• Marsh published an illustrated monograph of Hesperornis in 1897, based on many specimens
• Nine species
• Some of the species are only known from a single bone or a few bones, but they’re considered different species because they were found in different strate or different locations
• Marsh named Hesperornis crassipes in 1876 (originally named it Lestornis crassipes, based on an incomplete skelton with teeth and parts of the skull). Hesperornis crassipes was larger than Hesperornis regalis, had five ribs (Hesperornis regalis had four), and had slightly different looking bones in the breastbone and lower leg
• Marsh named another species Hesperornis gracilis
• Another species, Hesperornis altus, was found in Montana in the Judith River Formation (found a partial lower leg). Marsh originally classified it as Coniornis because he thought Hesperornis only lived in Kansas. But others disagreed, and now refer to it as Hesperornis altus
• In 1915 Shufeldt named another species, based on one dorsal vertebra and it being smaller than Hesperornis altus
• Nessov and Yarkov found another Hesperornis in Russia near Volgograd in 1993 (more specimens have been referred to it). It’s named Hersperornis rossicus and it’s a different size
• Martin and Lim named four more new species in 2002 based on fossils that had not yet been studied. Includes Hesperornis mengeli and Hesperornis macdonaldi (small ones), Hesperornis bairdi and Hesperornis chowi. These are from South Dakota and Alberta, Canada
• Can see Hesperornis in an exhibition dedicated to Marsh coming to the Yale Science Building, to honor him as an early, important Yale scientist
• Can see Hesperornis in ARK: Survival Evolved

Fun Fact: Cope also named Dimetrodon, though Dimetrodon is not a dinosaur.