“Of these rocks?” Johnson asked, astonished.
“Rocks? You think these are rocks? They are nothing of the sort.”
“Then what are they?”
“They are teeth!” Cope exclaimed.
Cope touched one, and traced with his finger the gentle hills and indentations of the cusp pattern. He placed the two he held next to each other, then found a third at Johnson’s feet and set it in a row with the other two; it was clear from their similarity in size and form that they went together.
“Teeth,” he repeated. “Dinosaur teeth.”
“But they are enormous! This dinosaur must be of fantastic size.”
For a moment the two men silently contemplated just how large such a dinosaur must have been—the jaw needed to hold rows of such large teeth, the thick skull needed to match such a massive jaw, the enormous neck the width of a stout oak to lift and move such a skull and jaw, the gigantic backbone commensurate to the neck, with each vertebra as big around as a wagon wheel, with four staggeringly huge and thick legs to support such a beast. Each tooth implied an enormity of every bone and every joint. An animal that large might even need a long tail to counterweight its neck, in fact.
Cope stared across the rocky expanse and beyond, into his own imagination and knowledge. For a moment his usual ferocious confidence gave way to quiet wonder. “The full creature must be at least twice the dimensions of any previously known,” he said, almost to himself.
They had already made several discoveries of large dinosaurs, including three examples of the genus Monoclonius, a horned dinosaur that resembled a gigantic rhinoceros. Monoclonius sphenocerus, one of the specimens, was estimated by Cope to stand seven feet tall at the hip joint, and to be twenty-five feet long, including the tail.
Yet this new dinosaur was far larger than that. Cope measured the teeth with his steel calipers, scratched some calculations on his sketch pad, and shook his head. “It doesn’t seem possible,” he said, and measured again. And then he stood looking across the expanses of rock, as if expecting to see the giant dinosaur appear before him, shaking the ground with each step. “If we are making discoveries such as this one,” he said to Johnson, “it means that we have barely scratched what is possible to learn. You and I are the first men in recorded history to glimpse these teeth. They will change everything we think we know about these animals, and much as I hesitate to say such a thing, man becomes smaller when we realize what remarkable beasts went before us.”
Johnson saw then that all that was done in Cope’s mission—all that even he, Johnson, did now—would have meaning to scientists in the future.
“Now, your camera,” Cope reminded him. “We must record this moment and place.”
Johnson went off to collect his equipment, from the flat plains above. When he returned, careful not to fall, Cope was still shaking his head. “Of course you can’t be sure from teeth alone,” he said. “Allometric factors may be misleading.”
“How big do you make it?” Johnson asked. He glanced at the sketch pad, now covered with calculations, some scratched out and done again.
“Seventy-five, possibly one hundred feet long, with a head perhaps thirty feet above the ground.”
And right there he gave it the name, Brontosaurus, “thundering lizard,” because it must have thundered when it walked. “But perhaps,” he said, “I should call it Apatosaurus, or ‘unreal lizard.’ Because it is hard to believe such a thing ever existed . . .”
Johnson took several plates, up close and from farther away, with Cope in all of them. They hurried back to camp, told the others of their discovery, and then in the fading twilight paced out the dimensions of Brontosaurus—a creature as long as three horse-drawn wagons, and as tall as a four-story building. It made the imagination run wild. It was altogether astonishing, and Cope announced that “this discovery alone justifies our entire time in the West,” and that they had made “a momentous discovery, in these teeth. These are,” Cope said, “the teeth of dragons.”
The trouble the teeth would soon cause them, they could not have imagined.
Around the Campfire
Any discovery led Cope to wax philosophical around the campfire at night. Each man had examined the teeth, felt their ridges and knobs, weighed their heft in one hand. The discovery of the gigantic Brontosaurus provoked an unusual degree of speculation.
“There are so many things in nature we would never imagine,” Cope said. “At the time of this Brontosaurus, the glacial ice had receded and our entire planet was tropical. There were fig trees in Greenland, palm trees in Alaska. The vast plains of America were then vast lakes, and where we are sitting now was at the bottom of a lake. The animals we find were preserved because they died and sank to the bottom of the lake, where muddy sediment silted over them, and that sediment in turn compressed into rock. But who would have conceived such things until the evidence for them was found?”
No one spoke. They stared at the crackling fire.
“I am thirty-six years old, but at the time I was born,” Cope said, “dinosaurs were unknown. All the generations of mankind had been born and died, lived and inhabited the earth, and none ever suspected that long, long before them, life on our planet was dominated by a race of gigantic reptilian creatures who held sway for millions upon millions of years.”
George Morton coughed. “If this is so, then what about man?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Most discussions of evolution sidestepped the question of man. Darwin himself had not dealt with man for more than a decade after his book was published.
“You know of the German finds in the Neander Valley?” Cope asked. “No? Well, back in ’56 they discovered a complete skull in Germany—heavy-boned, with brutish brow ridges. The strata is disputed, but it seems to be very old. I myself saw the find in Europe in ’63.”
“I heard the Neander skull was an ape, or a degenerate,” Sternberg said.
“That is unlikely,” Cope said. “Professor Venn in Düsseldorf has devised a new method of measuring the brain size of skulls. It’s quite simple: he fills the brain case with mustard seeds, then pours the seeds out into a measuring vessel. His researches show that the Neander skull held a larger brain than we possess today.”
“You are saying this Neander skull is human?” Morton said.
“I don’t know,” Cope said. “But I do not see how one can believe that dinosaurs evolved, and reptiles evolved, and mammals such as the horse evolved, but that man sprang fully developed without antecedents.”
“Aren’t you a Quaker, Professor Cope?”