Megalonyx jeffersonii
Fossils rarely do scientists the courtesy of showing up intact, so putting them together is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. A tough one. Without a picture on the box to go by. It's no wonder a few old bones have made some of the world's smartest scientists look so stupid.1. All the President's SlothsIn decades past, American presidents apparently had hobbies other than playing golf and eating at McDonald’s. Thomas Jefferson, for one, was an avid paleontologist. As early as the 1790s (before it was cool), he kept an impressive fossil collection at his home in Monticello. So when a group of confused miners came upon some unidentifiable bones in a West Virginia cave, they sent them to Jefferson. Judging from the long limbs and large claws, the president suspected they belonged to a giant cat “as preeminent over the lion in size as the mammoth is over the elephant” and that the animal might still exist somewhere in the unexplored West.
Jefferson got the size right. The description? Not so much. The animal he named
Megalonyx (giant claw) was actually one of the giant ground sloths that very slowly roamed America during the last ice age. And while Jefferson later agreed with this alternative diagnosis, his error wasn’t a complete waste. The
Megalonyx marked one of the first important fossil finds in the United States, and it prompted the first and second scientific papers on fossils published in North America. In honor of the president’s contribution, the sloth’s name was later formalized to
Megalonyx jeffersonii.
2. A Bone-headed ApproachTo this day, the
Brontosaurus remains one of the most popular and recognizable dinosaurs in history – an impressive feat for an animal that never existed. The confusion started in 1879, when collectors working in Wyoming for paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh found two nearly complete – yet headless – sauropod dinosaur skeletons. Wanting to display them, Marsh fitted one specimen with a skull found nearby, and the other with a skull he found in Colorado. Voila! – the Brontosaurus was born.
(Image credit: Flickr user yuan2003)
Unfortunately for Marsh, the skeletons were later exposed as adult specimens of a dinosaur already discovered, the
Apatosaurus. The error was formally corrected in 1903 by Elmer Riggs of Chicago’s Field Museum, and scientific papers haven’t called the animal
Brontosaurus since. Seventy more years passed before researchers determined that the skulls Marsh borrowed really belonged to the
Camarasaurus, a discovery of his archrival, Edward Drinker Cope. Pop culture, however, missed the memo altogether.
3. Getting Your Head Screwed on RightPaleontology’s version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, Marsh and Cope had a nasty and long-running professional rivalry. Although they’d actually started out as friends (with each even naming a discovery after the other), by 1870 their relationship had taken a turn for the worse. A year earlier, Cope had assembled a skeleton of the sea reptile called
Elasmosaurus. However, in his rush to publish his discovery, he placed the head on the wrong end, giving everyone the impression that the animal had a very long tail instead of a very long neck. Marsh poured ample salt in that wound by making fun of Cope’s error in print (suggesting he rename the animal “twisted lizard”) and constantly ridiculing it at parties and exhibitions. Given the stakes, he might as well have slapped Cope across the face with a glove and insulted his mother. As it was, all Cope could do was try and buy up all the published examples of his posterior-backwards construction.
Incorrect image of Elasmosaurus published by Cope.
The feud only grew from there. The two men fought over allegations that, on a tour of Cope’s digging operations in New Jersey, Marsh bribed collectors to send key fossils to him. And in 1877, a part-time collector in Utah incited a whole new string of cutthroat arguing by trying to sell bones from his site to both of them. Other feud highlights included a series of snippy “he said, he said” pieces in the New York Herald and the time the Smithsonian confiscated much of Marsh’s fossil collection after Cope accused him of misusing tax dollars to hoard fossils for himself.
