The Bone Wars and a Stegosaurus In London: The London History Show

We've seen a lot of people and places so far- I thought it was time we met an animal. This is Sophie the Stegosaurus!
In each episode of The London History Show, we'll be looking at a different statue, plaque, building or feature of London's landscape that you can find for yourself, and we'll tell its story. Watch the whole series here: tinyurl.com/ybzud2wm
If you want to find the location of any London History Show episode for yourself, you can do that here: tinyurl.com/yc3ry3ku
Join my patrons here: www.patreon.com/jdraperlondon
Find my TikTok here: / jdraperlondon
Book tours with me here: www.eventbrite.com/o/j-draper...
Photographs licensed under Creative Commons: tinyurl.com/odbps7g
Sources and further reading:
Academy Of Natural Sciences. Bone Wars: The Cope-Marsh Rivalry. web.archive.org/web/200801191...
Black, R. 2011. Watch Out For That Thagomizer! www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...
DePolo, P. et al. 2020. Novel track morphotypes from new track sites indicate increased Middle Jurassic dinosaur diversity on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone....
Paterson, V. 2009. Treasures Of The Natural History Museum.
Press Associaton, 2014. Sophie The Stegosaurus Debuts At London’s Natural History Museum. www.theguardian.com/science/2...
Rajewski, G. 2008. Where Dinosaurs Roamed. m.arquivo.pt/wayback/20091015...
Strauss, B. 2019. 10 Facts About Stegosaurus, the Spiked, Plated Dinosaur. www.thoughtco.com/things-to-k...

[@joanhelenak]

I LOVE the idea of these impressively mustachioed men hurling rocks and insults at each other like boys in a schoolyard

[@morganw2492]

I'm glad you mentioned the thagomizer, I love that story

[@AndrewBlacker-wr2ve]

I'm old enough to remember when Gary Larson (The Far Side) published the "Thagomizer." I roared with laughter then. I know very little about dinosaurs so I had no clue which one featured the Thagomizer but when Ms. Draper began talking about the dangerous tail plates, I instantly recalled the Thagomizer! Decades later, I'm roaring about Gary Larson's creation!

[@sparky22700]

I love the little scene in Dinotopia where one of the characters grafitti's a school desk with picture of a triceratops and a stegasaurus in a classic doggy-style pose. When the teacher sees this she says "that's not how stegosaurus mate".

[@maxximumb]

How did Stegosaurus mate? Very, very carefully.

[@MichaelAndersxq28guy]

Maybe missionary. Or 69ing.

[@catherinefilcher236]

Stegosaurus is my favourite dinosaur. When I was a little girl in primary school we were all given a dinosaur to research, I was given the stegosaurus and the research project I did sparked a life long obsession with dinosaurs. I have a sliver Stegosaurus ring which I where everyday. It is one of my dreams to visit Sophie while wearing my dinosaur dungarees. This video was delightful. I have only just discussed this channel and I adore your content. It's informative and entertaining.

[@NamelessBody]

That's the best origin story I've ever read. But: Is it a heroine's background, or a villain's origin story?

[@samiam619]

@@NamelessBody WHAT are you on about? Villain? Heroine?

[@hannahbrown2728]

The Thagomizer is one of my favorite paleotonology factoids

[@nanuqo2006]

Even if it wasn't the main purpose, Stegosaur plates definitely helped somewhat in defense. There have been recorded bite marks from predators on stegosaur plates.

[@CorwinFound]

May have been bite bait. Have something big and easy to bite that is also non-vital. While Allosaur is biting, you can get in a few a few whacks, dealing more damage than you take. Just a thought.

[@ChrisCaramia]

Growing up near the Morrison Formation, Stegosaurs are EVERYWHERE. Glad to see at least one made it across the pond in good shape.

[@lilykatmoon4508]

Gary Larson was a genius. The Far Side is one of my favorite comics! So hilarious. The Thagomiser is my new fun fact !

[@adrianmillard6598]

I enjoyed your presentation / narrative style. Clear spoken and just plain enthusiastic and fun. Great video, thank you.

[@charlesunderwood6334]

If you look at the skeleton closely, you will see that the vertebrae at the base of the tail are far narrower than elsewhere on the vertebral column showing the tail was extremely mobile. Also the centre of gravity is over the back legs and the muscles on the front legs show they could push sideways. It could easily rotate on its back legs to keep the tail towards an enemy.

[@louisthehuman6077]

Thanks for pointing that out. I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise and its interesting now I do 👍

[@VenusianKalliope]

Heck yeah The Bone Wars!!

[@Ornitholestes1]

We still consider the back plates to be bones, namely dermal bones (osteoderms to be precise, so the comparison to crocodiles is accurate, they also have osteoderms, albeit differently shaped ones). Those are bones that ossify from within the skin, rather than from an initially cartilaginous endoskeleton (those would be endochondral bones). Many of our bones are also originally dermal elements rather than endochondral. For example our clavicles and the jaw bones. There were endochondral elements forming the jaws in our distant ancestors, but in mammals those are reduced to form the inner ear ossicles, and dermal elements have taken over the role as jaw bones.

[@gobblinal]

How were the plates attached? What sort of muscles were needed? Otherwise I'm seeing them as just flapping about, which surely would tear them off the skin? Or were the muscles strong enough to control them so that flapping them would help cool things down? I'm thinking of something that might be similar to animals with a "sail", except these are multiple smaller "sails"?

[@Ornitholestes1]

@@gobblinal likely they were simply deeply embedded in very thick skin at their base. Likely not being very heavy, that would have sufficed to keep them stable. Thermoregulation has been proposed as an adaptive function for stegosaur plates, and might have played a minor role. In stegosaurs with large plates, they might have functioned for giving off excess heat, similar to the ears of an elephant (the bones forming the plates are highly vadcularized and would have been full of blood). However this likely wasn't their main function actoss the board, as the plates vary a lot between different stegosaur genera.

[@gobblinal]

@@Ornitholestes1 Thank you. I have no idea what the skin on one of these would've looked like and I don't know what to compare it to. Maybe dorsal fins on cetaceans? If these were just for display, would there be any need for vascularization? Or was that just an adaptation that helped some genera but maybe not all? Maybe what it was for was only good for the environment at the time but now there is no environment that would force an animal to grow something similar.

[@Ornitholestes1]

@@gobblinal As for the skin, nobody really knows that exactly, but probably some sort of cross between thick horny skin like you know it from your feet (presumably) and scaly reptile or bird skin. And really thick in the part where it anchored the plates, so that it would be strong enough to keep them upright. But I think we don’t really have any knowledge on how firm or flexible that anchoring would have actually been exactly. Vascularization may have actually aided the display purpose as well, as it would allow the animal to flush the plates with blood to generate vibrant colours. With most dinosaurs presumably having excellent colour vision (because that’s what extant dinosaurs as well as the closest extant relatives to dinosaurs have), that would make a lot of sense for display. But with stegosaur back plates I think it really isn’t as simple as a single explanation explaining all of it. Likely all hold true to some extend. Part intraspecific display (maybe for intimidation of rivals or impressing mates) Part interspecific display (again rivalry display, but also aiding in species recognition, i.e. telling apart conspecifics from members of another coexisting species of stegosaur, which explains why the patterns and shapes of spines and plates vary so much between species) Part maybe thermoregulation, especially in the large, big-plated forms, like _Stegosaurus_ Part maybe defense (while not perfectly adapted, they obviously would make it more difficult to bite a stegosaur from a dorsal direction, so they would provide some limited protection. Sort of demonstrating that, there is a neck plate of a stegosaur with bite marks, probably from an _Allosaurus_. It doesn’t make sense that it would have bitten the plate during feeding, because there would have been no meat on there, so it likely bit it while trying to get at the neck below the plate while attacking the stegosaur, likely successfully, as IIRC there was no sign of healing in that specimen). As for modern animals, most large land animals today simply don’t have the prerequisite osteoderms to evolve into such back plates. It’s possibly that if there was an analogous group of mammals with large, keeled osteoderms, they could have also brought forth a similar morphology. Or maybe not. The prerequisites (e.g. the good colour vision; most mammals are colour blind, with monkeys such as us being the rare exception, and even our colour vision is bad compared to the tetrachromacy of archosaurs) for the evolution of various structures vary depending on the group of animals.Mammals generally are less visual animals than dinosaurs, so maybe that’s why we have less spectacular visual display structures today. But even so, there are some weird structures in mammals as well. Among reptiles, the osteoderms and scutes on the backs of crocodiles actually go in a similar direction, even if they are way less extreme.

[@CorwinFound]

I learned today what a beakless turtle skull looks like and it is maybe the cutest skull ever!

[@lancejackson3524]

Depiction of stegosaurus mating was hilarious.

[@janellevans878]

Thanks for clearing up the butt brain theory. And coming from Nebraska and South Dakota in the US. Made this esp fun. Dinosaur rustling is still going on in the area. Supposedly, there is poaching and blackmailing going on.

[@bertbaker7067]

@~5:45 LOL, I had been thinking maybe the plates on their backs' facilitated mating somehow and your comment about science not knowing how they did killed me😂. Great channel!

[@emmabrownhorn]

I read a children's story once aimed at kids living in the area and time period the bone wars occurred in... the moral of the story was that if there's fossils found where you live, don't show them to anyone but your parents. It read like a slightly twisted version of a stranger-danger type story

[@AzraelThanatos]

Considering the idiocy of Cope and Marsh that wouldn't really surprise me because of their lack of concern and outright paranoia there. If you want a good book that helps understand those two crazies, look for Dragon Bones by Michael Crichton (yes, the guy who wrote Jurassic Park), it's historical fiction but is really good at portraying it from the view of someone of the era. And it's technically, the same world as the Jurassic Park novel due to a few fictional characters referenced in Jurassic Park and The Lost World as historical for that universe.

[@HidaAtarasi]

Fun fact: Stegosaurus is one of the few stegosaurs to not have a massive shoulder spike that lines up with the thagomizer, so that spiky tail wasn’t just a spiked mace, but a bear trap iron maiden to impale assailants.

[@calvingrondahl1011]

Salute to Sophie from the Dinosaur Park in Utah where I volunteer as a cartoonist, retired from the newspaper.

[@TruthTalkTarot]

OMG, I'm not even that interested in dinosaurs and I found this video fascinating!

[@robertmcgovern8850]

Greetings from Wyoming. Hi, Sophie! You're well out of here.🥶🦕🤠

[@AnnBearForFreedom]

Thank you for the steggie mating animation. I soooooo needed that giggle. Hee!

[@mbm8404]

An amazing video! Thank you so much!🙏

[@aidensidk3273]

I love you content. Helped dramatically by your lovely accent I've been binging since finding your channel recently. Thank you from the base of mt. Rainier WA USA. -Stefan and his boys Skyler and Aiden-

[@HighTensionWire]

Great video, love your style

[@brunonjezic6208]

Drinker-Cope is one of the more interesting last names i heard of

[@anniel6479]

I think I remember my various dino picture books including the brain in the butt theory as a kid, lol.

[@walterl322]

His surname is Drinker-Cope... let that sink in...

[@amandahertel4015]

It's good to remember that people were just as bonkers in the past as they are today. lol

[@JamieAlice92]

I once saw a stegosaurus in my back garden. It wasn’t very impressive tho. It was only about the size of a cat. And it wasn’t scaly or anything, but covered in fur. And it didn’t do anything dinosaur-like either. It just said “meow” and licked its paws for a bit, and then wandered off. True story.

[@InfiniteNarwhal]

Fun video!

[@jdranetz]

I wonder if it could sprint bipedally for a few seconds or longer, to maneuver in fight mod?

[@gobblinal]

I can't think of any other animal this disproportionate in the legs, but I can only imagine that longer, stronger back legs are to support bipedalism, maybe like a pangolin waddling about with it's hands full? Or it had a weird gallop for short bursts of speed? Or moved very slowly, which is why it needed the plates to look bigger and deflect attacks to the spine and the ever-so-important thagomizer.

[@HotDogRock]

Love This!

[@amandabirenbach463]

I wonder if stegosaurus plates could be lowered and lifted kinda like dog ears (like how the short floppy ones can lift their ears up) with increased or decreased blood flow. The idea is more close to a certain human body part, but I'll keep this idea PG.

[@pdemkovich]

Thanks!

[@JDraper]

You're very kind, thank you!

[@NamelessBody]

X: Why do they call you Mr. Smith? S: Because my father was a blacksmith, as was my father's father. His father, my great-grandfather, was even the armorer of the king at the time! X: Ah I see. And you, why are you called Ms. Miller? M: Well, the village mill has been run by my family for at least a hundred years! The peasants may not like us much, but we've been doing pretty well for ourselves. X: Fascinating. Then, Mr. Butcher, I think I know where your family name comes from? B: Obviously, yes. Although they used to call my father's family Fisher, but ever since the new fishing laws were put in place, we haven't been allowed to fish at the local river anymore, so my mother was married into the Butcher family and I learnt that trade. X: Interesting. Well, Mr. Drinker-Cope, what is the story of--- D-C: Just shut up. I'm not gonna talk about it.

[@colinmathura-jeffree9829]

Favourite dinosaur!

[@PhoebeFayRuthLouise]

Same!

[@rynoceras]

I enjoyed this very much. One minor technical error: Cope died in 1897.

[@paleobolt8069]

Just a few small corrections dinosaurs are not a type of lizard they aren't even that closely related also they were probably warm blooded also the fact that they have a small brain compared to their body size doesn't necessarily mean that they were dumb (Sorry I'm very tired and couldn't think of a better way of saying that).

[@wyvern723]

Man! I remember the brain butt theory. Always seemed weird.

[@vannasilver]

I’ve seen her, she’s magnificent

[@AthyDuGard]

I wonder, if during the Bone Wars, Edward became a Drinker to Cope. #dadjokes

[@lasandrenstormewalker5432]

Those broke bones growing out of skin are called Osteo derms

[@bforman1300]

Actually, to determine whether 'Sophie' is male or female, look at the protruding spines on the underside of the tail. If they are all the same length, it's a male. If it's female, the spine nearest the pelvic bones, on the underside of the tail, will be missing, and the one next to it will be half the size of the 3rd. The resultant gap allows for eggs to pass down a birth canal in a living dinosaur. The angle of the photo doesn't show clearly, so the first 2 tail vertebrae may be hidden by the pelvis, but from this perspective, 'Sophie' appears to be male.

[@safe-keeper1042]

Wait, so they didn't know what this dinosaur looked like but they knew her name?

[@bob_the_bomb4508]

Sounds like an unfortunate example of online dating…

[@eastvandb]

Well, they found her wallet close to the dig site.

[@TeethToothman]

⚡👽⚡

[@seansmagee]

At 5:52 I thought she said “Edward drink a Coke”

[@zeusathena26]

Irony his name was Drinker-Cope, since his religion didn't allow people to drink. 😅

[@thefisherking78]

It's wild how those two let their egos become so destructive to themselves , others, and even the science they loved, when it seems like they should have both been able to be rich and famous and respected as the two biggest stars in a basically uncrowded filled with a wealth of undiscovered material.

[@salty4496]

:)

[@Rebar77_real]

Frigging human pettiness... When are we going to learn!

[@edgeeffect]

I was always very fond of the brain in the butt theory... I'm now rather disappointed at your revelation that it's not true. At least I've now got the thagomiser to make up for it.

[@benimalachinestor8961]

It's a male because females have like a square shape plates male have triangle shape plates

[@paleobolt8069]

As she literally mentioned in the video it has been suggested that male and females had different shaped plates but not which shape for which sex and also that hypothesis isn't even particularly likely.

[@dannylance5212]

Was there any dinosaurs dug up in England? I thought every continent had dinosaur fossils. I stand corrected.

[@fermintenava5911]

The very first named dinosaurs, marine reptiles and pterosaurs were all uncovered and named either in England. Megalosaurus, Baryonyx, Eustreptospondylus, several dinosaurs from Isle of Wight... all uncovered in England 🤨 (Plus - England is not a continent)

[@dannylance5212]

@@fermintenava5911 True, it's a island.

[@Jezus42]

Ostoderms(spelling)

[@Jezus42]

Bone skin