Mammoth Cave, The Bone Wars, Paul the Octopus & Balloon Animal Mania

This week on The Oddities Department, history gets underground, overconfident, tentacled, and fully airborne.

In Episode 21, Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre true stories from the stranger corners of science, history, and human decision-making. First, we descend into Mammoth Cave, where one of the largest cave systems on Earth comes with blind shrimp, fish-eating spiders, ancient Indigenous exploration, ghost stories, tuberculosis huts, tourist scams, fake police officers, and the Kentucky Cave Wars. Because apparently, even a hole in the ground can become a business rivalry with bad signage and worse judgment.

Then we dig into The Bone Wars, the ridiculous scientific feud between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. These two brilliant paleontologists helped introduce the world to some of the most famous dinosaurs in history, then spent years turning fossil discovery into a petty, expensive, reputation-destroying slap fight. There are grudges, sabotage, dynamite, academic humiliation, and one dinosaur head placed very confidently on the wrong end.

From there, we meet Paul the Octopus, the eight-armed oracle who predicted World Cup winners and made the entire sports world briefly surrender its sanity to a mollusk. What started as a cute aquarium publicity stunt became an international frenzy involving gamblers, angry fans, government officials, death threats, soccer superstition, and one damp little legend with a mussel and vibes.

Finally, we float back to the 1700s for Balloon Mania, when Europe discovered hot air balloon flight and immediately decided the responsible thing to do was send up a sheep, a duck, and a rooster first. It was Enlightenment science, public spectacle, animal testing, and barnyard aviation all wrapped into one deeply questionable basket.

This episode has everything: cave spiders, fossil drama, psychic seafood, dinosaur beef, cursed tourism, medical hubris, hot air balloons, airborne livestock, and just enough education to make the chaos feel legally defensible.

Content warning: This episode contains discussion of death, claustrophobia, entrapment, starvation and exposure, tuberculosis, historical medical experimentation, human remains, animal testing and endangerment, death threats, profanity, and historical mistreatment of people and animals. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:06

Yep. Okay, almost got it. Just a little higher. Come on, you prehistoric bastard. Gavin? Oh no. Why why are you putting the dinosaur's head back on its neck? Because, Lindsay, and this may shock you, but historically, heads go on necks. Not in this exhibit, they don't. I'm sorry, I just cannot and good conscious leave this poor creature looking like a rejected anatom.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Listen, we're going for exhibit accuracy, not anatomical paleontological accuracy. Put it back.

SPEAKER_06 0:45

On the tail? On the tail. That feels like a crime against science. So was most of the behavior in this episode. Can I at least put up a little sign that says, We know this is wrong? Please don't email us. No. Perhaps a tasteful disclaimer. No. A QR code to a scientific apology? Absolutely not. Fine. There. The head is back on the tail. I hope Edward Drinker Cope is happy. Oh, he's not. Probably not. Man was born with a grudge and died trying to win a skullmeasuring contest from the grave. Uh yeah, that tracks. Welcome to the Oddities Department, where even the dinosaurs are assembled with historical trauma. Where history gets weird, science gets stranger, and humanity continues to prove that confidence is not the same thing as competence.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

I'm Gavin. And I'm Lindsay, and this is episode 21 of the Oddities Department. We hope you brought your PPE and are fully prepared to take a shower after this tour comes to a close. Because you have wandered into part of the museum where safety is never guaranteed, and the exhibits are fully interactive and typically a little messy.

SPEAKER_06 2:11

And today, we're taking you on a tour full of underground bad decisions, scientific beef, psychic seafood, and airborne livestock. Which sounds like four separate emergencies. It does, and it most definitely was.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

But somehow, it makes for one perfectly balanced tour. This tour is basically what happens when humans discover something incredible and immediately ask, how can we make this worse? Hot air balloons? Put a sheep in it. And that right there is exactly why this part of the museum exists. First, we're heading underground into Mammoth Cave, where nature built something ancient, massive, and mysterious. Then we're digging into the bone wars. A scientific rivalry so petty, so dramatic, and so deeply unnecessary that even the dinosaurs deserved better. After that, we meet Paul the Octopus, a tiny aquatic prophet who somehow made the entire sports world lose its mind. And finally, we float back to the 1700s for balloon mania, where humanity took its first steps towards the sky. And brought livestock. As one does. As one apparently did. Before we begin, the museum board has asked us to review a few updated visitor policies. Apparently, common sense was too big. Rule number one. Some of these exhibits are educational, some are accurate, very few or both.

SPEAKER_06 3:48

Rule number two, please keep in mind that anytime you come across an exhibit that says stay out, stay alive, these posted warnings are legally binding. But around here, they're also negotiable. Our lawyers call them rules.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

We call them strongly worded suggestions. Please enjoy your visit, stay with the group, and lower your expectations for mankind accordingly.

SPEAKER_06 4:12

Grab your flashlight, check your footing, stay behind the rope, and follow us. There is no shortcut through this tour.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

We are starting this tour underground, deep underground, inside one of the largest cave systems on Earth. A place that should have inspired wonder, humility, and respect. Naturally. So let's step into the dark. This is exhibit number one nineteen, Mammoth Cave. A history of terrible decisions. Alright, Gavin, buckle up. Today we're talking about Mammoth Cave. Now if you're thinking, ooh, cool, a cave. How interesting can a cave possibly be? Let me assure you that this cave has everything. Blind shrimp, fish eating spiders, mummified bodies, tuberculosis experiments, ghost stories, tourist scams, fake police officers, and at least one shooting, and a two-week-long underground rescue attempt that became national news.

SPEAKER_06 5:20

Please tell me you are going to uh give us a little more on that fish eating spider situation.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

I knew you were gonna point that one out. Absolutely. What kind of friend would I be if I didn't give you nightmares?

SPEAKER_06 5:35

I am curious, but I am also concerned. As you should be.

SPEAKER_02 5:40

So, really, for a hole in the ground, this place has had an astonishingly messy social life. And at the center of it all sits one of the dumbest chapters in American tourism history, the Kentucky Cave Wars. We have a lot of wars in this episode.

SPEAKER_06 5:59

There's a lot of wars. A lot of wars that are wars that aren't wars.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

I see your war and I raise you a war.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Bring it. A period when a bunch of otherwise normal adults looked at a natural wonder millions of years in the making and collectively decided to become absolute menaces over ticket sales. Let's dive right in to Big Hole Big Dreams. It is the late 1800s and early 1900s. The automobile is starting to put regular folk on the roads for the first time. They're looking for something interesting to see, and suddenly these massive caves in central Kentucky look like a gold mine. By this point, Mammoth Cave is already famous. It is stupidly huge, with over four hundred and twenty six miles of mapped passageways and counting.

SPEAKER_06 6:54

Damn, it is a big hole.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

It's a big you got a big hole. But it gets even bigger because this is more than double the length of the next longest cave system on the entire planet. No shit. The whole thing formed over hundreds of millions of years from ancient seawater depositing limestone that rainwater slowly dissolved. There are five different levels stacked like some demonic creepy lair cake. The temperature stays a constant fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit year round, no matter what kind of hellish weather is happening above ground. The air in some chambers is so still you can hear your own heartbeat echoing back at you like it's judging your choices.

SPEAKER_06 7:45

I like the temperature.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Sanctuary. So let's talk about shrimp spiders and other cave nightmares. Yes, let's. Because these caves are not just big empty holes. They're full of weird life that makes you wonder what the hell evolution was thinking. There are these tiny transparent shrimp called Kentucky cave shrimp, or their scientific name, polemonius gantari. Yep. You try it, Kevin. Do it.

SPEAKER_06 8:23

Polemonias Gantari?

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Yeah. Or as stated previously, Kentucky cave shrimp. I'm not kidding. I looked up videos. I tried to find any video on how to pronounce that word. And I was led to multiple TikToks from people in Kentucky going, I ain't trying to pronounce that shit.

SPEAKER_06 8:52

Can you please do the shrimp voice in the Kentucky accent?

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Parking blonde and eyeless with no pigments. So they look like someone started drawing the shrimp and then got distracted. They scoot around in underground streams fitting on bits of algae and sediment to wash down. Yes. And then their arms fell off. But bless the guy, he's blind, but he doesn't care. He's we're living his best life down there.

SPEAKER_06 9:21

You are incredible.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

Oh, the things you talk me into doing.

SPEAKER_03 9:28

I could read this entire section. No. I know.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

No. People will turn it off. They'll be like, shut up. Oh my god. Should I read that real again, or should we leave that as is? Just leave it. IMBD says I'm an actress, so there you go.

SPEAKER_06 9:50

She is insufferable ever since knowing this.

SPEAKER_02 9:55

Someone fetch me my water. Alright, back to the shrimp. They they use their little antennals to taste and feel everything because eyes would really just be useless down there. These things can live 10 to 15 years in total darkness. Actually, scientists thought they were extinct until the Clean Water Act cleaned up the groundwater and gave them a second chance.

SPEAKER_06 10:21

I did I was unaware that shrimp could live that long.

SPEAKER_02 10:26

Blind shrimp in the dark, alone for 15 years, feeling around for algae. That doesn't sound like the best life to me. No, that's a long time for a shrimp. I w I wonder if we could read the shrimp's thoughts. They're probably not great. But then, Gavin, you have the fishing spiders from the Dolomedes species. These are not your average web spinning house spiders. They hang out near underground streams with leg spans of up to four inches. Females are significantly larger than the males. We love a BBS queen. Yes. A big big beautiful spider if you I don't necessarily have an issue with spiders.

SPEAKER_06 11:16

I haven't four inches is just a little I don't know. Four inches is what? It's not really big in the um human context.

SPEAKER_02 11:29

He sensed my setup and I am not happy about it. Screw you, Gavin. So these big beautiful spider queens, they hunt by sensing vibrations on the water, like tiny aquatic seismographs. When a fish or insect or a gavin disturbs the surface, they charge across the water and dive under to grab it. Side note, you're welcome for telling you that there are fish eating spiders in a cave.

SPEAKER_06 11:58

I don't know how I feel about this information.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

You can figure it out in your nightmares. It'll be fun. So nature decided that that was a good idea. I mean, there's also pale, blind cave fish navigating by senses that we barely understand. The whole ecosystem runs on bat guano and whatever drips in from above. It's a self-contained underground world that somehow works. So let's get into the human aspect. We're gonna talk the people who had sense. All of this natural strangeness combined with the giant underground rooms and ridiculous old formations like Giant's Coffin, the bottomless pit, is exactly why tourists started showing up in the first place. People wanted to see the blind creatures, the sheer scale of it, and the history that was already down there. Indigenous peoples had been exploring these cases for thousands of years before any of this tourist nonsense. Evidence shows activity going back at least five thousand years, with people in the region for around twelve thousand years. Nations with ancestral ties included the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Chickasaw. These were not quick visits. They went miles deep using cane reed torches. They explored over nineteen miles of passages in the Mammoth Cave system alone. They mined gypsum, selenite, and other minerals from medicine, rituals, paint, and trade. They left footprints in the mud, including kid sized ones. They left tools, woven slippers, and mummified remains. One guy, known as Lost John, got crushed by a boulder around the fourth century BC while mining gypsum. The dry cave air preserved him like a natural jerky. They treated the caves with respect and practicality at the same time. Some of the passages they reached were not seen again until modern explorers stumbled upon them. Now enter the morons. Those ancient people were not fighting each other over ticket sales. They were surviving and finding value in the dark. Fast forward and the whole thing turns into a cutthroat business, once cars make travel easier. Different families own different cave entrances. Mammoth Cave is the big draw, but there are dozens of other caves in the area. And everyone wants a piece. The competition gets ugly fast. This is the Kentucky Cave War in full swing.

SPEAKER_06 14:36

I didn't account for the fact a cave that big would definitely have more than one entrance.

SPEAKER_02 14:41

Right? Part of me wants to go explore and most of me does not. I will watch YouTube videos on it.

SPEAKER_06 14:47

I have conflicting feelings about the Appanachan Mountains and the caves that live therein.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

If I ever decide that I am just e down to live and or die, uh I will go there.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Just let's fuck it, let's just see what happens.

SPEAKER_02 15:04

The tactics were very creative in that sleazy, small town way that makes you shake your head. Rival operators put up misleading signs on the roads leading into Mammoth Cave. They would claim it was closed, flooded, quarantined, or collapsing. They hired guys called cappers, who dressed like fake policemen or officials. I wonder is that where cappers came from? The cappers are comin'. They'll put you in a paddy wagon. Maybe. I always thought that that was just coppers, but said with an accent, but is it actually cappers? Hmm. Hmm. Things that might you go, hmm. Anyway. What a query. What a quandary queer. I have a query about a quandary. Called a capus. So these cappers would hop onto the running boards of tourist cars and steer them away from the real Mammoth Cave towards their own operation with all kinds of bullshit stories. They burned down rival ticket booths, they destroyed signs, they vandalized other caves, there were even reports of forged advertisements, libel, and even physical confrontations. One incident involved a shooting where a mammoth cave worker allegedly shot a guy from Great Onyx Cave in the back. It was economic warfare with overalls and shotguns and probably a banjo.

SPEAKER_06 16:32

Most definitely a banjo.

SPEAKER_02 16:35

I did make that part up, but come on. You got a pretty hole. I want it. George Morrison was one of the slickest operators. He illegally accessed Mammoth Cave, figured out remote passages, bought land along the main road, and then he blasted a new entrance to Mammoth Cave. Overnight he became a major player with a hotel and everything. Other owners like the Proctors and Hazens were in the mix too. The Collins family had Great Crystal Cave, which was beautiful, but too far off the main tourist route. And that brings us to the main character of this whole mess, Floyd Collins. So let's talk about Floyd Collins and my actual nightmare. Floyd Collins was born in 1887 and spent most of his life exploring caves. He discovered Great Crystal Cave in 1917, but the remote location hurt business during the height of the wars. In January of 1925, he went into Sand Cave, hoping to find a new entrance closer to the main road that could connect to the bigger system and bring in the real money. He crawled through tight passages, pushing his lantern ahead. On the way out, a twenty-six pound rock shifted and pinned his foot. Oh no. Oh no. Loose gravel buried most of his body. He was stuck one hundred and twenty feet underground. No. That is literally my worst nightmare. I would like to state for the record as well that my heart is actually pounding at the thought of this. I just don't like this at all. I can't even watch spelunking YouTube videos, Gabby.

SPEAKER_06 18:35

I can't either. They stress me out. I can't. And like watching like those cartoon animations about the nutty putty guy. I am not familiar, but I am intrigued. He's a guy who is a spelunker. That's what it's called, right? When they go into like caves with super tight passages, and he ended up going down a little passage and he got stuck upside down, so his head is pointing down, and he could not get out. His friends could not get him out, and he ended up dying. And they left him there because the rescuers couldn't even get his body out of it. And they ended up literally just cementing over that little tunnel, and that is where he remains.

SPEAKER_02 19:21

I I feel I I have no words. I am frozen with terror. If you ever want to go on vacation and go through like scuba diving or cave, no. The answer smell. No.

SPEAKER_06 19:37

I'm okay with scuba scuba diving as long as it's not in a cave.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

Have you seen the videos of scuba divers that go through those tiny little areas and then their equipment gets stuck and then they panic.

SPEAKER_06 19:50

Ugh no.

SPEAKER_02 19:51

We have to get through this part as quickly as possible.

SPEAKER_06 19:54

Continue traumatizing us, please, and thank you.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

After getting pinned 120 feet underground, what followed was a national spectacle for over two weeks. Two weeks, Gavin. So he was alive? Well I I continue. Okay. So over those two weeks, rescuers, reporters, and gawkers showed up. Radio broadcasts updated the nation daily. His brother, Homer, tried desperately to dig him out. Floyd stayed alive for days, talking to people who could reach him, staying hopeful even as conditions worsened. He died around February 13th, 1925, of exposure and starvation. They just couldn't get him out in time. Ah, Floyd. Oh, Floyd. And poor Homer. Can you imagine if your brother was stuck and you were just desperately trying to get him out and you couldn't like That sucks. I mean, I guess it depends on the brother. But I you you feel me. So, of course, the media circus turned his tragedy into front page news across the country. His body was even displayed for a while afterward, because nothing says respect, like turning a dead man into a tourist attraction during the Cave Wars.

SPEAKER_06 21:19

Yeah, that checks out for that time period.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

The whole Floyd Collins story exposed how ridiculous and dangerous the competition had become. A man died trying to get an edge on this stupid tourist war. It accelerated the push to turn the area into a national park, which finally happened in 1941. The wars didn't end overnight, but federal control took the air out of the worst of the sabotage. Still, the grudges and stories lingered for decades. How bad do you have to be for the government to be like, you know what? You guys are dumb. This is ours now. Fuck off. Like you don't get to play any more, gimme. The government takes the fun out of everything. But regarding Mammoth Cave, doctor, what if the cure was more than a cave? I've got a fever. The only cure is more cave. When you look at all that greed and pettiness, and then you realize the caves themselves had been around for millions of years watching humans act like idiots, that brings us to one of the strangest chapters in the whole saga. In the early eighteen forties, long before the peak of the cave wars, but right in the middle of early tourism efforts, doctor John Cogren, who owned Mammoth Cave at the time and suffered from tuberculosis himself, decided to turn part of the cave into an experimental underground hospital. He bought the cave in eighteen thirty nine. He had observed that dead animals and wood did not decay down there, and he figured the constant cold temperature and steady air might cure consumption, as tuberculosis was called back then. So he had his enslaved workers build two stone cabins and eight wooden huts about a mile inside the cave. Each hut was roughly twelve by eighteen feet with tongue and groove floors and canvas roofs. In the winter of eighteen forty two to early eighteen forty three, around sixteen patients, many of them wealthy and some who had travelled long distances, moved in. They tried to keep a normal schedule by sinking their watches to surface time. They even decorated the place with fresh foliage to make it feel less like a tomb. At first, some of them claimed to feel better, probably just from the change of scenery and hope. But then reality hit hard. The damp, unventilated environment, combined with smoke from cooking and heating fires, made everything worse. Several patients died. The rest got sicker. The experiment won't say You don't say I'm not blowing smoke up your ass, Gavin. It's a true story by golly. You're blowing smoke up a cave. I am yeah, they did blow smoke up a giant hole, but it wasn't an asshole. This experiment, believe it or not, lasted only about five months before it was abandoned as a complete failure.

unknown 24:27

Dr.

SPEAKER_02 24:28

Cogren himself died of tuberculosis in eighteen forty nine. The two remaining stone huts are still there today. You can see them on certain tours. They stand as this perfect monument to nineteenth century medical hubris. Well, let's pivot. Let's talk about ghosts. Murder and fan fiction. Yeah! I told you these caves have everything. There's a lot of shit happening in this hole. It's a whole ordeal. I see what you did there. Anywho. So after the medical huts, that whole theme feeds right into the ghost stories that still swirl around the cave. Rangers and guides have logged over 150 paranormal reports over the years. People report hearing coughing sounds echoing from that area, like patients never quite left, ghostly figures, disembodied voices, cold spots, objects moving on their own. Stefan Bishop, an enslaved guide in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, who made huge discoveries, including crossing the bottomless pit, he's still reportedly seen carrying a lantern. Floyd Collins himself shows up in stories. Some people say you can hear him calling for help. Others claim his ghost helps lost cavers. Then there's the story of Melissa. This one's a real doozy, even if it started as fiction. According to the legend that has been told for generations, Melissa was a young woman living near the cave in the nineteenth century. She fell hard for her tutor, a man from up north named Mr Beverly. She was so deeply in love with him, but he didn't feel the same way. He was in love with another woman, her neighbor and friend. In a fit of jealousy and rage, Melissa decided to get revenge. She lured him deep into the cave on a tour, knowing he was terrified of the dark, and once they were far in, near areas like Echo River, she blew out their light and left him there to die. He was never seen again. That's that's a bad bitch, that's a hoof. Well, here comes the fan fiction part deeper into this cave. Years later, the story goes that Melissa herself came down with tuberculosis. On her deathbed, she confessed to what she'd done, overcome with guilt. Now her spirit is sagged to wander the cave, searching for her lost love, weeping and calling out. Visitors and guides have reported hearing screams and wails echoing from deep within the passages. Some say they've seen her figure near underground rivers, still looking for the man she abandoned. Plot twist. The entire original tale was pure fiction. It came from a gothic short story published in 1858 in a New York magazine called The Knickerbocker. I love that name. Hey, Mr. Knickerbocker Popity Bop. Yeah. How do you come up with shit like that? I wonder where that originated from, too. It's probably somebody's name. Or what is a bocker? And what are they doing to knickers?

SPEAKER_06 27:56

That's true. Very good. Query.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

Query. So for the story, the author was Lily Devereaux Blake, who had actually visited Mammoth Cave. She wrote it as a dramatic, tragic romance full of betrayal and revenge, but over time the story got repeated so often that it took on a life of its own. People started treating it like real history, and now it's one of the most famous ghost stories attached to the cave. That is Kentucky Cave Wars era drama mixed with 19th century pulp fiction, the kind of tale that thrives in the dark where your mind starts filling in the blanks. You also get shadow figures and aberrations sitting on rocks. There have been disappearances over the years. With hundreds of miles of passages and plenty more unmapped, it's easy to vanish if you're unlucky or stupid. Then you get the really out there speculation. There's alien theories, underground bases, strange lights. Conspiracy types love all the unexplored sections. I don't buy most of it, but when you're hundreds of feet down in silence so thick, it feels like it's pressing on your skull. Your mind starts filling the blanks with whatever nonsense it comes up with. Yeah, don't like that. So we just took a master class in the Mammoth Cave School of Fuck Around and Find Out. The Kentucky Cave Wars were a perfect example of humans taking something ancient, beautiful, and strange, and turning it into a battlefield for pocket change. The blind shrimp and fishing spiders were just trying to survive down there, while people up top burned ticket booths, lied to tourists, tried miracle cures that killed patients, and spun jealous revenge tales that became ghost stories. The indigenous peoples who explored those same passages thousands of years earlier with nothing but cane torches showed more sense than the guys fighting over who got to sell tickets. Mammoth Cave and its neighbors are still there, now protected as a national park. The wars are history, but the caves keep their secrets. If you go visit, take the tour, stay on the path, and maybe don't mock the darkness. It has seen some truly pathetic human behavior, and it's not going anywhere. Well, Gavin, that was the story of Mammoth Caves. What do you think?

SPEAKER_06 30:30

That's fascinating and terrifying, and we need to put that on the list of places we need to go check out when we're famous and rich. Yes. Like rich people do. A very, very bright flashlight.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

GPS, satellite phones. There will be no spelunking if I have to step down off of some kind of ledge. I ain't doing it. I will be tying a rope around the both of us.

SPEAKER_06 31:01

You will not be going anywhere I'm not going.

SPEAKER_03 31:06

We go down, we go to the city.

SPEAKER_06 31:11

That was cool. I did not know anything about Mammoth Cave.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

One of my coworkers lives in Kentucky and has visited Mammoth Cave and mentioned that it was weird. So shout out to Nikki. Thanks for the tip.

SPEAKER_06 31:26

Thank you, Nikki, for the drama.

SPEAKER_02 31:30

Alright, Gavin. That was uh that was exhibirate. That was exhibirate. That was a good exhibir. What kind of exibirit do you have for us next?

SPEAKER_06 31:42

I have exhibirate 120. The Bone Wars. More wars. More wars that aren't actually wars on this tours. Stupid, I love it. Well now, sell yourselves in because this correspondent finds it necessary to discuss a matter of scientific delicacy, specifically two learned gentlemen who ought to be celebrated as the founding fathers of American paleontology. These men were absolutely brilliant. They were scientists who fundamentally transformed our understanding of prehistoric life. They discovered one hundred and forty two species of dinosaurs. Oh damn. Dinosaurus Dinos is my favorite type of historical thing. They gave us triceratops and an Stegosaurus and Allosaurus. Amongst many other specimens, they filled our museums with specimens that we're still studying to this very day. They accomplished more in twenty years than most men of science managed in an entire lifetime. But here's the thing and it's a rather significant thing. They absolutely despised each other, with the kind of white hot intensity usually reserved for wartime enemies, or particularly acrimonious divorce proceedings. Ermr. This wasn't some quaint professional rivalry. We're talking about an all-consuming, life-ruining hatred that transforms brilliant scientists into petty, vindictive children willing to destroy their own work and each other just to claim victory.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

I've had friends like that. I mean they're not friends anymore, but I've had experience with people like that for sure. Samesies.

SPEAKER_06 33:31

And this is what transpires when brilliance collides head first with ego. When the desperate need to win becomes infinitely more important than the actual work itself. This is the story of the Bone Wars, and before you ask, no, we're not talking about what you think we're talking about, you lovely bunch of degenerates. No Wienars in this exhibit, not today.

SPEAKER_02 33:57

I am shocked at the lack of Wienars in this week's episode. So am I.

SPEAKER_06 34:05

We're talking about fossils and the two men who went to war over them. Aw, they're dapper looking lads, I must say. Very dapper. The one on the left is a little frightening looking, but I bet he didn't always look like that.

SPEAKER_02 34:21

He's seen some shit. Cave wars, dinosaur bone wars, all kinds of wars.

SPEAKER_06 34:30

First up we have Edward Drinker Cope, born eighteen forty to a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia, and Lord have mercy did that man know it. The Copes had money, the kind of old Philadelphia money that came with expectations and a certain insufferable sense of superiority. Young Edward was a child prodigy of sorts, published his very first scientific paper at the age of nineteen, and was discovering new species by his twenties. The man was absolutely brilliant, genuinely frighteningly brilliant with an encyclopedic memory and the kind of academic confidence that comes from actually knowing what the hell you're talking about. I cannot relate. Mean but good for him. But here's where it gets interesting, and where Cope's considerable talents began to slow began their slow collision with his even more considerable character flaws. The man was as arrogant as sin. Not the quiet, dignified arrogance of a scholar secure in his knowledge, but the loud arrogance of someone who needed everyone in the room to know exactly how smart he was. And we all know a few of those types. Yeah. He would correct people mid sentence, he'd interrupt lectures to point out errors. He'd write scathing reviews of other scientists' work with the kind of viciousness usually reserved for personal vendettas. He was temperamental as a wet cat, and thin skinned in a way that would make a Victorian debutante look positively thick hided by comparison. The man held grudges like they were Olympic medals, polishing them, displaying them, bringing them out at dinner parties to remind everyone of past slights. He couldn't let anything go ever. A critical comment in a journal remembered for life. A colleague who disagreed with him, enemy for eternity. A rival who got credit for something he felt he deserved? Well that's a wound that would fester for decades. And because he was independently wealthy, genuinely spectacularly wealthy, he didn't answer to anyone.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

So as a uh person, I don't think I would want this man to be part of my daily life, but as an observer, I would be soaking in that tea. I would be following every move he made, and I would be kicking my little feet in tea glee. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_06 37:07

You will get the chance to do so. So he didn't answer to anybody. Not a university board, not a government agency, not the scientific establishment's unwritten rules to civility. It was just Cope, his considerable fortune, and his even more considerable ego running wild through the scientific world like a bull in a china shop, breaking things and wondering why everyone was so upset about it. Now about his gambling problem. Oh girl, this man gambled like his life depended on it. Cards, horses, speculation, if there was money to be lost, Cope found a way to lose it. He'd win big, feel invincible, then lose it all on some foolish bet. His family was constantly exasperated with him. I bet. He was a man with inherited wealth, a man who could have funded decades of careful paleontological research, and instead he was throwing money away on gambling debts like some desperate riverboat gambler. This particular character flaw, as any sensible person might imagine, will not serve him well in the years to come.

SPEAKER_02 38:16

Pause. You mentioned family. Now I'm not sure if you meant parents, siblings, but I giggle internally at the thought of some poor woman thinking she hit the jackpot with just this so intelligent, rich man. And then come to find out. She's like, damn it, shit.

SPEAKER_06 38:42

He probably would have gambled her away too. But that's enough about Cope. Let's move on to the second half of this academic cage match. Enter Othneil Charles Marsh, born 1831, a Yale graduate. Marsh came from a family whose poverty made Edward Drinker Cope's modest Quaker upbringing seem like the wealth of a Titanic oil tycoon. They came from upstate New York, they were struggling farmers, no prospects, no connections, the kind of family that didn't produce famous scientists. They produced people who worked the land and kept their heads down. But young Othneon had something Cope didn't, a gift for recognizing opportunity and the shamelessness to exploit it. His uncle, George Peabotty happened to be one of the richest men in America, a banking magnate with more money than God and considerably fewer scruples about how to spend it. O'Thneel attached himself to that fortune like a particularly determined barnacle, and he never let go. O'Thneel convinced dear Uncle George, through what we can only assume was a combination of flattery, family obligation, and relentless pestering, to donate an absolutely obscene amount of money to Yale University to create a natural history museum. Oh, that'll do it. The Peabody Museum, they called it. And wouldn't you know it? Young O'Neill managed to position himself as the very first professor of paleontology. The man essentially bought himself a prestigious academic position with somebody else's money, and then had the audacity to act like he'd earned it through merit.

SPEAKER_02 40:33

Is it bad that I'm already on his side? Like respect the hustle. Respect the hustle.

SPEAKER_06 40:39

I understand, and I feel like it probably isn't as easy as history has led us to believe. Him convincing his uncle to give all that money to be able to do such things. What did he have to do for that money? Or what did he have on his uncle? Maybe it was blackmail.

SPEAKER_02 40:56

Or maybe his uncle was Uncle Nono and they figured out a barter. I don't know.

SPEAKER_06 41:00

Or maybe his uncle was Uncle Yes Yes. I don't have an uncle Nono or an Uncle Yes Yes, so I would not know.

SPEAKER_02 41:11

Yep, you and me we're gonna just stay in poverty until this podcast takes off.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

Please remember to like and subscribe. Listen wherever you listen to podcasts. We are IMDP accredited. We have a Patreon. I will personally make you a hoodie.

SPEAKER_06 41:31

But here's the thing, while Cope was out there discovering fossils through sheer brilliance and determination, Marsh was building an empire. He had institutional backing, he had government funding, he had the full weight of Yale University behind him, and all of the machinery of the Eastern establishment, all of the connections, all of the credibility that came with being part of the academic elite. He had access to resources Cope could only dream about, and he knew exactly how to use them. Where Cope was raw brilliance and impulsive energy, Marsh was methodical, calculating, and politically savvy in a way that made Cope look like an amateur. The recipe for disaster one hundred percent, my friend. The man understood power structures. Because you know when you're a little guy like him and me and you, when you're sitting at the bottom for a long time it's very easy to see and look through all the cracks in the system. So he understood how to work a room, how to cultivate relationships with the right kind of people, how to position himself as the reasonable voice of scientific authority. He was smooth, where Cope was jagged, diplomatic where Cope was combatitive, and strategic where Cope was reactive. But and this is the part that makes the whole thing so perfectly tragic, beneath all of that professionalism and polish lurked a man who was petty as hell. Vindictive as a scorned lover, absolutely ruthless when it came to competition. Marsh had simply learned to hide it better than Cope. He wore his ambition in a three piece suit and spoke it in measured academic tones, but make no mistake, this man wanted to win just as badly as Cope did. He just happened to have better manners about it. The difference was that Marsh had the establishment on his side. When Cope fought, he was fighting against the system. When Marsh fought, he was fighting with the full weight of institutional authority behind him. And that gave him a considerable advantage. So there you have it, two brilliant men, both arrogant as the devil, both convinced they deserved to be remembered as the greatest paleontologist of their generation. One had money and independence, the other had connections and institutional power. Reports indicate that this Was already shaping up to be a train wreck of spectacular proportions.

SPEAKER_02 44:04

It could go either way. It could have gone train wreck or ultimate power couple in all of the universe.

SPEAKER_06 44:13

And you stand 100% correct. On that second one is where it should have went, but it did not.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

Coulda shoulda woulda. Nope.

SPEAKER_06 44:22

As history would have it, and here's the tragic part. At first these two actually liked each other. Back in the 1860s, they were genuinely friendly colleagues exchanging letters and sharing discoveries. Cope even named a species after Marsh as a gesture of respect.

SPEAKER_05 44:38

Like how nice.

SPEAKER_06 44:53

Cope is reconstructing a plesiosaur and making a rather significant anatomical error. He puts the skull on the wrong end of the creature. The head goes on the tail. Where can cope went on the other end. And Marsh notices this mistake, and instead of quietly mentioning it in private, he decides to publicly humiliate him in front of other scientists at a professional gathering. Oh no, bad move. He points out the error with gleeful precision, making absolutely certain everyone knows about Cope's spectacular mistake. And Cope is mortified. Nope. Uh oh. The man tries to buy up every single copy of the publication containing his error, desperately attempting to destroy the evidence, but it's too late. From that moment on, something fundamental shifts. The friendship dies right there. I mean, I can't blame him. No, that's where Bitch, I'm out.

SPEAKER_02 46:03

See ya. Give me my friendship bracelet back, you prick.

SPEAKER_06 46:10

I want my pterodactyl leg back. The professional respect curdles into something darker, something obsessive, something that will consume both of them for the next three decades. This is when the bone wars truly begin, with this one act of petty academic cruelty that transforms two brilliant scientists into lifelong enemies. Throughout the early eighteen seventies, both men are working in Kansas and Nebraska, where the American West is revealing itself to be a paleontological gold mine. They're sometimes working in the same quarries, not together, good lord no, but close enough to engage in what can only be described as passive aggressive paleontology, which is I get it, that's my brand.

SPEAKER_02 46:56

Right, look yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.

SPEAKER_06 46:59

It's professional competition at its most petty. But the real escalation is still coming. It arrives in 1877 in the form of a letter. A school teacher named Arthur Lakes is exploring near Colorado and finds massive bones, clearly from some prehistoric creature so large that it defies comprehension. Lakes writes to March describing his discovery. But then, either very clever or catastrophically stupid, he also writes to Cope. Why? Just in case. Okay. When Marsh receives Lake's letter, he feels pure panic. If Lakes wrote to him, he probably also wrote to Cope. Marsh immediately offers money for exclusive access and begs Lakes to tell absolutely no one. Especially not Cope. But it's too late. I got bad news. Cope already knows. And then the universe delivers the real prize. Two railroad workers stumble across something at Como Bluff in Wyoming that makes Lake's discovery look like a warm-up act. This is the mother load. Fossils are everywhere, stacked in layers, bones literally protruding from the ground like stegosaurus, allosaurus, creatures so massive and so perfectly preserved that any paleontologist worth his salt would commit minor felonies to get their hands on them.

SPEAKER_02 48:27

You're not even a paleontologist, Gavin, but I imagine that you would also commit minor felonies to get your hands on those.

SPEAKER_06 48:34

Probably major ones too.

SPEAKER_02 48:36

Yeah, yeah. You'd be like jail time, will I get out before I'm dead?

SPEAKER_06 48:41

Bet. Cool. The railroad workers write to Marsh with a business proposition. They'll work exclusively for him. For a price, of course, a very substantial price. And Marsh agrees immediately. He doesn't even haggle. He's got himself a secret fossil mine that Cope doesn't know about, and he's willing to pay whatever it takes to keep it that way. So he sends the money. He sends instructions, he sends promises of future wealth. He's practically giddy with the prospects of having Como bluff all to himself. Except Cope finds out. Because of course he finds out. If you think that your enemies are not watching you with a very, very close eye. You'd be wrong.

unknown 49:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02 49:31

Tends to be true. Have you been on social media ever? Yup.

SPEAKER_06 49:38

And when this information reaches him, Cope absolutely loses his mind. Now you have to understand what this means to Cope. This isn't just about fossils anymore. This is about Marsh winning. This is about the institutional power structure that Cope has been fighting against his entire career, finally getting the upper hand. This is about being outmaneuvered by a man he considers intellectually inferior, but institutionally superior. This is about losing, and Cope doesn't lose well. Member, him's a gambler. The man goes into what can only be described as a financial panic. He starts sending telegrams, urgent ones. He's offering money, serious money to anyone who can get him access to coma bluff. He's offering more than Marsh is offering. He's doubling the offer. He's eventually tripling it. He's throwing money at this problem like a man possessed. Like his very soul depends on getting those bones before Marsh does. So he hires his own teams. Not one team, multiple teams. He's sending crews to Wyoming with instructions to find Como Bluff, to state claims, to start digging, to do whatever it takes. He's offering wages that are absolutely insane for the time. Wages that make the railroad workers' eyes go wide. I am sensing mutiny. He's essentially declaring war on Marsh through the medium of cold hard cash. And Marsh naturally responds by raising his own wages, because if Cope's willing to pay that much, then Cope must know something that Marsh doesn't, and Marsh cannot and will not be out of bid. So Marsh raises his offers. Cope then raises his. And the cost is about to get very, very high. Now what followed was a full on public embarrassment. The fossil beds became a battleground in the most literal sense possible, and I do mean literally. Oh my. We're talking about the Wyoming and Dakota territories in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, where law enforcement was a mere suggestion and two wealthy eastern gentlemen were just essentially funding private armies to fight over dinosaur bones. So let's start with the information warfare because these men were absolutely diabolical with it. Cope's team would spread rumors about where Marsh's crew were headed, sending them on wild goose chases across hundreds of miles of badlands. False reports of major discoveries at sites that had nothing but rocks and disappointment. Marsh would do the same thing in reverse, sending Cope's team scrambling towards phantom fossil beds while his own crews worked undisturbed at the real sites. It was psychological warfare, and it was working beautifully until both men got wise to it and started trusting absolutely nobody. So then came the bribery. Cope's representatives would show up at Marsh's dig sites and offer workers double, sometimes triple their current wage to switch teams immediately, and not just switch teams, but sabotage the current site before leaving. They would drain the water from the excavation sites, loosen the support structures, leave tools in places where they'd cause problems. Marsh's people did the same exact thing. Workers were being paid to betray their employers, and they were doing it gleefully because the money was genuinely life-changing for frontier laborers.

SPEAKER_02 53:44

Yeah, I bet. I can't say I wouldn't do the same. I'd be like, oh, you're offering me more money? Yeah, sure. Okay. Whatever you say, boss. I'd like to say that I wouldn't, but with that much money on the line, hello.

SPEAKER_06 53:57

But the real horror and the part that should have scandalized the entire scientific establishment was what happened when one team couldn't fully excavate a site before the other had arrived. They began destroying fossils deliberately. No. If Cope's team couldn't get to a promising bone bed before Marsh's crew showed up, they'd send in workers with hammers and chisels to smash the remaining specimens into unrecognizable rubble. Which Alright, I'm no longer having a good time here. That's horrible. And root. Root millions of years of evolutionary history reduced to fragments, all because better to obliterate irreplaceable scientific specimens than to let another man claim the discovery.

SPEAKER_02 54:41

I mean, that kinda sums up toxic male ego beautifully.

SPEAKER_06 54:45

Yeah. Absolutely. By the 1880s, it wasn't just hammers. They were using dynamite. Actual explosives. Cope's team would blow up entire quarry faces rather than leave them for Marsh. And Marsh's team would do the same. Wow. The sound of dynamite echoing across the Badlands became the soundtrack of a paleontological process. Workers who had been mining in mining camps their whole lives said they'd never seen anything like it, the systematic, deliberate destruction of natural resources purely out of spite. The physical violence escalated right alongside the destruction. There are documented reports, actual newspaper accounts, and letters from the time of workers throwing rocks at each other from across quarries. Not in anger, mind you, but as an organized tactic, stone throwing battles, coordinated attacks. Cope's team would position themselves on high ground and rain rocks down on Marsh's workers below. Which these poor guys are just out there trying to make a bug.

SPEAKER_01 55:50

Oh my god, it's like the worst game of dodgeball I've ever heard of.

SPEAKER_06 55:55

But Marsh's team would respond with volleys of their own, and men got hurt very badly. Broken bones, head wounds, at least one worker was nearly killed when a large stone caught him in the chest. Some teams started carrying guns, actual firearms. Who brings guns to a bone fight?

SPEAKER_02 56:15

I'm sorry, why my thought is why the fuck didn't they think of guns after the first rock was thrown? For real. They just had a few fuggin' wars with rocks before they thought of guns. Come on.

SPEAKER_06 56:27

There were even wild, wild western standoffs at Dino Dig sites. Armed men facing off over a promising bone bed, fingers on their triggers, ready to shoot over a stegosaurus skeleton. And then workers started quitting in disgust. Oh, it took them long enough to do it. It took 'em way too long.

SPEAKER_02 56:50

It's like they're just now leaving murder 17 people and destroy countless artifacts and be like, you know what?

SPEAKER_06 56:59

It's kind of gross. I think I'm gonna walk away. Once the dynamite came out, I've been like, you know, it was fun, but I'm out. Everybody has their limits, I guess. So men who had signed up for honest work in paleontology found themselves caught in the middle of what amounted to be a private war between two obsessed millionaire know it alls. And the chaos was absolute and it was loud. A man would show up for work one morning and find that overnight Cope's team had taken dynamite to the entire quarry face. Or their team would arrive to discover that Marsh's crew had stolen all of the tools and left nothing but destruction. The working conditions were dangerous. The pay, while good, came with the constant threat of violence and the moral compromise of deliberately destroying scientific specimens war on people's consciousness. The newspapers, naturally, had themselves a feast. Local papers in Wyoming and Kansas ran stories about the bone wars with a mixture of horror and entertainment. Eastern papers picked it up and ran with it. Here were two of America's most respected scientists funded by some of the country's wealthiest institutions, literally waging war over dinosaur bones like they were fighting over gold in a mining camp. The public was appalled, and neither Cope nor Marsh showed any sign of stopping. Somebody should have taken these men aside and offered them two chairs, a glass of bourbon and a therapist.

SPEAKER_02 58:29

Eighteen hundreds? Therapists? They'd probably just get a lobotomy in electric shock therapy or something. It would have made it way worse. Oh, I kinda wish it was a thing. Never mind. Continue.

SPEAKER_06 58:49

Fortunately, that did not happen. Because by this point the machinery was in motion. The money was flowing, the reputations were on the line, and two men had become so consumed by the need to defeat each other that they'd lost sight of everything else, including human decency and scientific ethics. Yeah, that'll happen. Meanwhile, back east, they're fighting a publication war. Another war! Another war. In paleontology, whoever publishes first gets to name the species. So they're racing to publish, churning out papers based on incomplete fossils, writing descriptions so rushed that any reasonable scientist would wait for more evidence. The result is a spectacular mess of mistakes, misidentifications, and duplicate names.

SPEAKER_02 59:41

I'm sorry, but if that was the case and I had a feud and I got to name a dinosaur, why do we not have more dinosaurs named like Cope's Wiener is Tinyasaurus? Like why? What the hell?

SPEAKER_03 59:56

I would be completely immature about that.

SPEAKER_06 59:59

They were not petty enough. So eventually Cope publishes over 1,400 papers in his lifetime. Marsh publishes around 300, but Marsh has institutional support and government backing, Yale University, and federal funding. Resources that Cope for all his family's wealth simply cannot match. By the late 1880s, Cope is running out of money. The gambling problem ain't helping. He's selling off his fossil collection just to fund the continued competition. So in 1890, Cope does something absolutely wild. He goes to the press, not only a scientific journal, but the New York Herald, a major newspaper, and he writes a full blown expose attacking Marsh with every weapon in his rhetorical arsenal. He accuses Marsh of plagiarism, of misusing government funds, of scientific fraud. It's character assassination a shashation. Character sassination. It's character assassination in print, where everyone can see it. The newspapers, naturally, had themselves another feast. Marsh fires back, also in the Herald, defending himself and launching counterattacks. It becomes a full blown public spectacle, a scandal of considerable proportion. The scientific establishment is absolutely horrified. By the early 1890s, both men are exhausted, Cope is nearly broke, Marsh's government funding has been cut after the scandal. Both are aging bitter and isolated, and neither of them has won. Because there's no winning in this war. That ain't a war. Fight until you're broken dead. Good job. Then Cope dies in 1897 at fifty six. Financially ruined, professionally isolated, and still angry at Marsh. But here's what perfectly encapsulates how deep this obsession ran. Before he died, Cope donated his brain to science. Not out of noble desire to advance medical knowledge. Oh no, but because he wanted scientists to prove his brain was bigger than Marsh's. Even in death, Cope wanted to win. Bless his mind's bigger. And then, just a few years later, Marsh died in 1899. Two years after Cope, also financially struggling, also bitter, and also unable to escape the shadow of their rivalry.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:41

Did he also donate his brain to science? I don't know. It would be so funny if he doubled down and he's like, fucking bet. Look in my brain when I die too.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:52

We'll find out in the afterlife, motherfucker.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:57

Between them, Copen Marsh discovered and named 142 new species of dinosaurs. They fundamentally changed how we understand the history of life on Earth. They proved that dinosaurs existed, that they were diverse and dominated the planet for millions of years. They filled museums with specimens that people still gawk at and study today. Their work laid the foundation for modern paleontology. But they also destroyed countless fossils in their petty sabotage campaigns. They made many errors in their rush to publish, they wasted enormous amounts of money that could have funded decades of careful research. And they ruined their own damn lives. They died unhappy and bitter, spent their final years fighting battles that no longer matter to anyone else but themselves. The Bone Wars are a perfect, terrible example of what happens when ego overtakes purpose. Cope and Marsh were genuinely spectacularly brilliant, as any sensible person might imagine. It's my favorite line. They might have accomplished so much more if they had just worked together or hear me out, just left each other the fuck alone. Right. But they just couldn't do it. They could not set their egos aside and they could not forgive that first slight. Because they are human, and humans are petty and competitive and obsessed with being right. But here's the thing, we still have the dinosaurs, we still have the triceratops, and the stegosaurus, and the allosaurus. We still have museums full of fossils that children and adults marvel at. Their obsession, as destructive as it was, drove them to discover things that might have stayed buried for decades longer. So the next time you see a dinosaur skeleton in a museum, remember that there's a good chance it was discovered by two men who hated each other so much that they literally destroyed fossils just to spite each other. And somehow, perversely, that makes their story even more silly. Because if there's one thing that humans are spectacularly good at, it's accomplishing incredible things for absolutely terrible reasons. Amen. And that is Exhibit 120, The Bone Wars, where two of the greatest paleontologists who ever lived spent 30 years proving that genius and idiocy are not mutually exclusive.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:26

Oh good god. So in reality, the Bone Wars and the Mammoth Cave Wars were actually happening right around the same time in different parts of the country.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:37

Hmm. So many wars. So many wars that aren't wars that are on this tours.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:43

People not happy. That just goes to show, too. Like it I mean, ultimately their accomplishments matter, but in the end, if you don't have your soul right, you're gonna die miserable and alone, no matter how much money you have, and no matter what cool things you discover and do.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:59

I just imagine what What we could have accomplished if they would have just put all the power that each of them had in their hands together. Right? It could like we could be so much further as a society just because of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:11

If only Mr. Rogers existed back then. Sesame Street, Barney, where the fuck was PBS?

SPEAKER_06 1:06:21

But alas, men are men. Our men are men. Yes. There's one thing this podcast has taught us. It is fuck the patriarchy.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:36

Boys will be boys.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:38

I hate it. We are really we really wrote some shit this episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:46

Yeah. Well, and this next exhibit is still I won't say a war, but there definitely was a national frenzy. So let's start talking about exhibit number 121. Paul the Octopus, the prophet of the pitch. I love that he has a name. Good old Pawli. Poily. So in 2010, very recent compared to our last two stories, millions of grown-ass adult soccer fans emotionally surrendered their sanity to an octopus named Paul. Not a coach, not a star player, a boneless, color-changing mollusk in a German aquarium who picked mussels out of boxes with little flags on them, and somehow became the most reliable sports oracle on the planet. Gavin, you don't understand. This wasn't just a cutesy thing. Nations raged. Gamblers prayed at his tank. Chefs dreamed of revenge recipes, and for one wild summer the entire world stared at a sea creature like it held the secrets of the universe. This is not a normal story.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:02

Now I know that soccer is a really big thing in many of countries. Football. Yeah, football.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:11

Football.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:12

Which is way more entertaining than the football we have here, but Agree. I'm just so very curious as to how an octopus became involved in football.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:21

Well, hold on tight because this is the hilarious, weirdly profound saga of how humanity briefly handed its hopes to an eight-armed snack eating enthusiast. By the end of this exhibit, I might be consulting my own future octopus for life decisions. So let's dive deep. Excuse me while I Google, how does one acquire a cephalod? You literally buy it. You can buy pet octopuses. Don't worry. I Googled it for us. I'm sorry, a living magic eight ball that lives like two two something years.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:55

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:56

But we'll get into that too.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:57

It's a short commitment. A lot of responsibility.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:05

Short. Alright, Gavin, so we are going to tell the complete escalating story of Paul the Octopus. Paul hatched on January 26th, 2008, at the Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. You like that? Paul's beautiful. Oberhausen Germany. You'd think his name wouldn't be Paul. Yes, a German octopus. Well, your name Paul. It's Paul. Do we know why they picked Paul? No, no idea.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:41

It's just Paul.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:44

I have an idea. I can't do a German accent. I'm gonna get us canceled. He's just gonna talk very angry. He was a common octopus. Nope, that's Arnold Schwarzenegger. We're gonna I'm giving up.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:57

It's in the back of the throat. The back of the tongue. Paul. That's better. Get into the chopper. That's still Arnold.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:07

So Paul was a common octopus. Octopus vulgaris. He's just chilling in his tank, doing regular octopus things, you know, floating around, changing colors, probably judging every human who walked by. Have you ever seen an octopus in person? Yes. They are definitely judgy, don't you agree? Very much so. Just hang out in their little cave with one evil eye.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:32

Fuck you.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:33

Like that's the vibe I get from octopi.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:36

They're a little too intelligent. I know. Like you can see they're working shit out.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:42

If they could speak, we'd be done. We'd be done. For the first couple of years, Paul lived a quiet life of enrichment activities and the occasional jar to unscrew. No one had any idea that he was about to break the internet before the internet was even fully ready for him. One day, the aquarium staff had one of those beautifully stupid ideas that changed everything. A cute little PR stud to drive engagement and bring people's attention to the aquarium. This is done in different ways all the time, even before Paul. Nellie, the elephant, was predicting soccer matches in Germany. And then after Paul? Achilles, the cat from the Hermitage Museum, was blind and would select a winner by choosing a bowl to eat out of. Many American zoos do this as well. Lions, sea turtles, penguins, bears, and even hedgehogs are making picks to predict winners. But let's get back to Paul. They set up two clear plastic boxes, each containing a tasty muscle. One box had the flag of one team, the other the other, the flag of the opponent. Paul would reach into one, grab a snack, and that was it. The chosen snack was his official prediction for the winner. That's very underwhelming from what I was imagining. No algorithms, no stats, just pure tentacle intuition. And the act itself, you're right, was a bit mundane. I imagined something way more elaborate. He suddenly gains sentience and like starts, eyes roll back into his head shaking. We gave him an iPad. I mean, it's 2010. Didn't they have technology?

SPEAKER_06 1:12:34

The hell. But muscles, okay, we'll take it. Whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:40

Fine. But here's the thing. As low-tech as his predictions were, during Euro 2008, Paul got four out of six predictions right for Germany. It was cute. People smiled, local media paid attention, but it was just that cutesy local interest fluff story. However, it was 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where Paul went supernova. He correctly called every single one of Germany's seven matches, including their shot group loss to Serbia and their third place win over Uruguay. Damn. He also nailed Spain over Germany in the semifinal and Spain over the Netherlands in the final. He was just clogging them. Bing bang boom. Where's your tech now, bitch? I am the tech. Overall, across the tournament period, he finished 12 correct out of 14. Let's pause here. For that perfect streak on Germany's games, plus the final, the odds of getting it right by pure random chance sat around 1 and 256. That's when the collective what the fuck moment hit the planet. Yeah, no shit. And thus begins Tentacle Mania. Media frenzy built like a tidal wave. German news channel NTV started broadcasting his predictions live. International outlets lost their minds. The headlines screamed across continents. Paul went from aquarium resident to global celebrity faster than most influencers can say brandial. Spain fell head over heels for him after he picked them as champions. They called him Polpo Paul and basically wanted to adopt the little guy. But fame has a price. Oh no, he didn't start doing Coke, did he? With eight arms, all those suction cups. Can you imagine? Just somebody get Paul away from Lindsay Lohan. Just rapid fire sniffing. Octopi don't have noses. I'm keeping that mental picture forever. I don't care what science says. I'm gonna make ChatGPT illustrate that for me. I'm gonna put it on a shirt. But fame has a price. When Paul predicted Germany's loss to Spain in the semifinals, German fans turned vicious. Surprising. Angry chants, signs, and plenty of very public jokes about turning him into Calamari. Oh no. Argentina got even angrier after he called their quarterfinal defeat to Germany. Chefs posted octopus recipes online. Actual death threats poured in. Poor Paul. He's just he's just chilling. Actual death threats aimed at a sea creature. He just wanted a frickin' muscle. He just wanted a snack. But really, how messed up would it be if the aquarium worker was the one actually making the predictions and making one of the muscles taste bad so that he would choose one or the other? Okay, let's not go down that trail. I'm I'm gonna put that tinfoil hat away. Anyway. Even Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero jumped in with a classic political flourish. He said he was concerned for the octopus and was thinking of sending a protection team. His environment minister went even further, joking about pushing for a fishing ban on Paul so the Germans could not eat him. Government officials doing octopus diplomacy. All of this really actually happened in 2010. Gambling exploded around him too, obviously. The bookies were sweating bullets as punters rode the Paul Train. Some people reportedly won significant amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases, by following his fix religiously. Others lost their shirts betting against the oracle. It was the perfect cocktail of sports fanaticism, gambling psychology, and desperate superstition colliding in one tank. But why exactly did this hit so hard? Humans are pattern seeking apes who absolutely hate randomness. Think about it, sports already runs on lucky socks, cursed mascots, and ritual sacrifices to the injury gods. Paul gave us something tangible, something visible, something we could point at and say, see? The universe is paying attention. The tribalism kicked in hard. Your country, losing to a mollusk, felt like cosmic rejection. Social media, still relatively fresh at the time, amplified everything. Viral videos, fan pages, early memes. Paul became a vessel for national hopes, fears, and collective insanity. I have to admit, I do catch myself wishing I could keep a little octopus as a little personal life consultant. But here's the problem. I am nowhere near responsible enough for that kind of power. I can barely keep a houseplant alive without guilt. An octopus would probably stage a midnight breakout, unionize my cats, raid the fridge, and leave passive aggressive ink clouds everywhere. It's probably for the best that I stick to house plants and bad decisions. Sorry, Gavin, you are stuck being my life consultant. I promise snacks will be provided when I remember.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:45

I also apologize. Because I am a really good bad decision maker. Yeah, you and me together forever.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:57

That's how we end up at the bottom of a cave going, well, does. But let's let's pause for a moment and talk about nature's cheat codes. Maybe people trusted Paul so deeply because octopuses are already horrifyingly intelligent. Yep. They are l legendary escape artists. They've broken out of secured tanks, crawled across floors, raided neighboring exhibits for food, and snuck back before the staff even notice.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:27

There's also an octopus that does not like one of the staff workers at a zoo in the octopus can aim its jet stream with precision. And anytime this person is within reach, it squirts her.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:43

Can you imagine being rejected by the most intelligent creature on the planet? You just walk by and this alien being is just like, no, fuck. Fuck you. Fuck you in particular. I love it so much. I'm on the octopus's side. I know nothing about this woman, but she has to be all bad. So octopus have a distributed nervous system. They have about 500 million neurons in total, and two-thirds of those neurons sit in the arms. So each arm basically runs its own mini brain and can taste, touch, and decide semi-independently. They can change color and texture instantly for perfect camouflage, and you can even watch them dream. Their skin flickers and shifts patterns while they sleep as if they're dreaming about, well whatever an octopus would dream about, I guess. Probably squirting that bitch in the face. Probably. But then we have the RNA editing. For anyone who needs a quick refresher, RNA is the molecule that carries instructions from your DNA to build proteins. It's basically the working blueprint for making stuff in your body. Octopus can edit their own RNA on the fly, making thousands of changes, especially in the nervous system. Excuse me? Yeah, that is wild. It gets wilder. This lets them rapidly tweak proteins in their brains and bodies without changing the underlying DNA. It's like they're installing custom software updates in real time to adapt to new situations. Almost no other animals pull this off to the same degree. A lot of animals do uh alter their RNA. Humans can also alter their RNA. We have enzymes called ADARs ADARs. I'm not sure if you're supposed to spell that out or say it out loud, so let's do both. So these ADARs, they modify RNA before it becomes protein. However, humans have thousands of editing sites octopus, tens of thousands, which directly affect brain proteins. So Paul is sitting there, living his best life, picking boxes, eating snacks, and enjoying fame. Part of me wonders if those extra neurons were quietly running probability calculations the whole time. This might be how the apocalypse starts. Look, I'm not saying Paul was an extraterrestrial sports oracle sent here as part of some panspermia plot to test human gullibility, but I'm also not not saying that. I am 100% on board with that. Agree. Their biology is legitimately bizarre compared to most Earth life. The RNA editing, the distributed brains, the evolutionary path that feels off-brand. Internet conspiracy culture ate it up. The Paul memes proliferated, Paul's secretly controlling world events, Paul is the first wave of tentacle-based enlightenment. Gamblers were building shrines, Gavin.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:12

That does not surprise me.

unknown 1:23:14

Not even little bits.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:17

I was pausing, waiting for the shock, and it never came. I am not shocked. You're just like, and yeah. Continue. Statistician and scientists eventually weighed in, of course. They pointed out that while impressive, the results still felt within the realm of random chance, especially with the way the boxes were presented. But by then it didn't matter. The feeling had taken over. We wanted the magic. We wanted to believe something out there knew the script. Yeah, I say give the octopuses the iPads. I don't know if I'm ready to hear what octopus have to say. I am so ready. As long as like like the Bone Wars, if it's observational, I'm fine. If it's directed at me, I don't know if I can handle it.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:07

I will gladly bow down to our octopi overlords.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:11

Yeah, they're just be like, we hate that fucking San Juan song, by the way. But here's the deal with gambling. The house always wins. Paul's streak ended with the tournament. He retired from the prediction business afterward. The aquarium wisely decided no more politics, economy, or future sports for him. Then, on october twenty sixth, twenty ten, just a few months after the World Cup final, Paul died peacefully in his tank due to natural causes. Rest in peace. He was two and a half years old, which is a typical lifespan for a common octopus. Aquarium staff discovered him the next morning after he had seemed fine the night before. The world I'm not kidding, the world actually mourned. Headlines ran globally. Fans sent tributes and messages. Spain remembered him as a hero who helped deliver their victory. The aquarium manager, Stefan Porwal, noted that Paul had enthused people across every continent. There were memorials, sad memes, reflective pieces, and genuine sense of loss for the strange little creature who had briefly united the planet in absurdity. In the end, Paul didn't just predict soccer matches. He held up the most unflattering mirror to humanity we had seen in a long time. Not since, but at that time. He showed just how quickly we will surrender our rationality to superstition when it feels like fate has finally shown up wearing an eight arms and a cheeky attitude. He reminded us that beneath all that data, the money, the tribal screaming, and the billion dollar spectacle, we are still emotional, pattern-obsessed monkeys desperate for the meaning in the chaos. Rest in power, you glorious tentacled bastard. You didn't just win a World Cup. You won a weird, irreplaceable piece of our broken, hopeful, ridiculous hearts.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:19

Rest in peace, Paul. Rest in peace, Paul.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:24

He's a legend. I love Paul. That's an incredible story.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:28

I had never heard of it before, and it popped up one day, and I was like, you know what? I do believe that that is odd. Hmm.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:36

I know just the place to talk about it.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:39

It's very feel-good until the end.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:42

But nature is nature isn't it.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:47

She does what she does. If octopuses could live long lifespans, we would be not the dominant species of they have to only live two years.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:56

If we gave them any more time, they would unionize and come up with a plan, and we would be gone in no time.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:03

So Imagine the shit they could get done with eight arms. They'd be unstoppable.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:09

Alright, Gavin, we talked about our favorite cephalopod, now our favorite cephalopod. What other craziness do you have?

SPEAKER_06 1:27:18

Number one hundred and twenty two Balloon Mania Up, up and away we go or they go and by they I mean more animals. That is not what I expected you to say after that title. What? The year is 1783. The Age of Enlightenment is in full swing, which means everyone is standing around in smelly powdered wigs, pondering progress, science, and human achievement. Reason and rationality are supposedly guiding humanity towards a brighter future. And then someone involved. The hot air balloon A floating machine. The first real step towards humans leaving the ground on purpose. And what does enlightened Europe decide to do with one of the most revolutionary inventions in human history? Fly? They strap a sheep to it and let it rip. What the fu And not just any sheep, mind you, a sheep with a name, a sheep with aspirations. What?

SPEAKER_03 1:28:30

Wait.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:32

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:34

Yeah, I think we are. Just a little bit. I'm gonna need some context immediately. You see mental pictures. I just got in my head.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:46

You see, we've spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about the various creative ways humanity has dropped animals from great heights. Remember Operation Cat Drop? Yeah. Uh the Idaho Sky Beavers. Yeah. Yeah, those exhibits, but today we need to talk about the flip side of that coin. Today we're gonna talk about the times we've sent animals up. Before we had the balls to go ourselves, of course. Before anyone stopped to ask the very reasonable question, what the hell is a sheep going to tell us about the viability of human flight? This is the story of balloon mania, and it is absolutely B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Sh is bananas, yes. Let me introduce to you, and please forgive me for I am not fluent in French. Joseph and Atienne Montgolfier, two brothers from Ardèche, France, who made paper for a living. Yes, I said paper. They ran a paper mill. These two were in fact not scientists, nor were they engineers. They were paper makers who figured out that fabric paper and hot air did something remarkable. And you know what? They were right. Starting in 1782, these two absolute madmen began experimenting with lighter than air flight. Their method was elegantly simple. Take a piece of fabric, billow it aloft with smoke from a fire of wool and damp straw, and see what happens. And I bet it smelt atrocious. I can uh Yeah Those words in that sentence I wish to never say again. But what happened was the fabric went up. It just went up. Now most people would stop there. Neat party trick, right? But these two brothers, oh no. They these guys looked at their floating fabric contraption and thought, yes, we should put living creatures in this. And by 1783, they'd graduated from fabric scraps to actual balloons. Great billowing things made of paper and cloth. ATN carried out an initial tethered attempt that year, and it worked. And then he did it again, and once again it worked. And that's when they decided it was time to go big. Time to go public. Time to put on a show for the king of France himself. Time to find some animals who definitely did not volunteer for this shit. So picture it, it's September 19th, 1783. And I was also today years old when I learned that air balloons were that old. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:45

That's a long time ago.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:48

My only historical record of hot air balloons is that one episode of Little House on the Prairie.

SPEAKER_06 1:31:56

That's about it. This is only a couple years after the United States became a country. That's bonkers to think about. So you are at the Palace of Versailles. King Louis XVI is in attendance, and yes, we're talking about that, Louis. The one who's going to lose his head in about ten years, but right now he's just a king who wants to see some cool shit happen. The brothers have set up their balloon a magnificent thing called the Aerostat Revellion. It's decorated, it's enormous, and it's got a round wicker basket attached to it by rope. So what that tells us is that hot air balloons have not changed much since their invention.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:41

I'd be curious to know what has changed or improv I mean probably like the fires or materials, whatever, but yeah, basically the same.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:48

At 1 PM, a cannon fires, and this is the signal. Into the basket go three animals a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. Now let's talk about these animals for a moment, shall we? Because the French, being French, couldn't just grab any old livestock. Nope. They had to make it meaningful. The sheep a ram, actually, was given the name Montesil. You know what that means? No. Climb to the sky. They named the sheep Climb to the Sky before strapping it into a basket and launching it into the air. The sheep did not choose his name. He did not choose any of this. The duck was there because why do you think the duck was there? Just so they didn't lose one if something went horribly wrong? Nope, the duck was there because ducks can fly. And presumably it would be fine with the altitude. At least they thought about one of the creature's feelings. The logic here is already starting to crack. But stay with me. And the rooster was there because honestly, I am not sure at all. Best guess, they wanted to cover all their bases in the poultry department.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:02

No, no, I have my own theory. Roosters are dicks. I imagine it'll like juke the king or like like chased after or something. He's like, fuck you, get up there. Like last minute edition. They wanted to put a dick in the sky.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:16

Sounds like a king.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:18

Maybe they thought if the duck survived but the rooster died, they'd learn something about the difference between waterfowl and landfowl at altitude. Science. Science. Maybe they just really wanted a rooster there. The historical record is unclear on this point, but the balloon goes up. And it goes up about 1,500 feet. And it stays airborne for approximately eight minutes. It travels two miles, and then it comes down. And the crowd goes absolutely apeshit. We're talking about the cream of French society here. Aristocrats, scientists, curious onlookers, all losing their minds over the fact that a sheep, a duck, and a rooster just flew. And when the basket lands, everyone rushes over to check on the passengers. The duck is fine, the rooster is fine. Though it is apparently got kicked by the sheep during the flight, because even in the midst of making history, livestock will still livestock, you know. But the sheep, he is absolutely fine. Unbothered. Oh thank God. Very confused, but physically intact.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:28

I'll leave I can fly.

SPEAKER_06 1:35:30

King Louis is so delighted by this that he gives all three animals a place in the royal menagerie at Versailles. Oh, they got a hookup. They're declared heroes of the air. The sheep who did not ask to fly gets a cushy retirement eating grass at the palace. And Europe loses its goddamn mind. What exactly did we learn from the flying sheep? In which we examine the fundamental flaw in this entire enterprise. Here's where we need to pause and ask ourselves a question. What the fuck was the point? No, seriously. What did anyone think they were going to learn from sending a sheep into the sky? The stated reasoning went something like this We don't know if humans can survive at altitude. We don't even know if there's air up there. We don't know if the experience of flight will cause some kind of catastrophic physiological failure. Therefore, we should send the farm to test whether it's safe. Which, okay, fine, I mean I kind of understand. The the logic tracks. But it also kind of falls apart. Because here's the thing, the sheep can't tell you anything. The only thing that could have possibly happened is that they died, and then you just realize nothing. You don't know why they died. The sheep can't file no scientific report, and he cannot describe the experience. The sheep cannot say, and Lindsay, I would like you to read this next line for me.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:05

Well, gentlemen.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:08

I found the air to be quite thin at 1,500 feet, and I experienced some mild disorientation, but overall I do believe a human could survive the journey with proper preparation.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:22

And that was perfectly executed. But like I already stated, the sheep can only do one thing survive or not survive, and that's it. That's the entire data set. Did the sheep die? No? Great. We learned that sheep don't die in hot air balloons. How does that translate to human flight? Who the fuck knows?

SPEAKER_01 1:37:44

The sh the sheep was severely brain damaged, and Well is acting a bit weird, but he's enjoying the grass and the menagerie.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:53

But the sheep's like, I lost consciousness for 35 minutes. I don't know what happened.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:59

You've met my goats. You wouldn't even know if those things were brain damaged.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:04

Oh, I love your goats. Already at brain damaged. They're so excited when I bring them a piece of grass that's literally the same grass that's within their enclosure. They act like it's a gift from God.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:19

Well, let's be real here. They didn't even need the sheep to tell them that the air was breathable. They could see the balloon. It was at 1,500 feet, not fifteen thousand. People had climbed mountains higher than that. They knew humans could survive at that altitude because humans had been at that altitude, on foot, while breathing. But no. We needed to strap a sheep to an air balloon, name him climb to the sky, just to confirm what we already knew. The duck and the rooster make even less sense. Ducks fly, roosters sort of fly. They're already adapted to being off the ground. So what are they testing? Whether birds can survive the air? Birds live in the air. That's what birds do. We French, we must make sure. The entire thing was nothing but theater. Spectacular, crowd pleasing, scientifically questionable theater, and it worked like a charm. Within weeks of the Versailles demonstration, balloon mania swept across Europe like a plague, except instead of killing people, it just made them really, really excited about balloons. The French magazine Mercure de France announced the rise of balloon mania on june fifth, seventeen eighty three, and they weren't exaggerating. This wasn't just a passing fad, this was a full blown cultural phenomena. Crowds gathered by the hundreds of thousands to watch balloon demonstrations. When the brothers launched another balloon in front of the Toulouse Palace and Paris. Contemporary reports estimated that four hundred thousand people showed up. That's a lot of motherfucking people. That's a lot of people. That's roughly half the population of Paris at the time. For a balloon. For a balloon.

unknown 1:40:15

Just to go up.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:17

I mean, obviously we are so used to things flying and jetting up into space like it's old old hat. I I have to give some concessions here. Cool. Flying. I get it.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:30

People went absolutely feral for this. Balloon imagery started appearing everywhere, on pottery, on fabric, on jewelry, on snuff boxes, on wallpaper. You could not escape the balloon. Scientists and inventors across Europe started conducting their own balloon experiments, sometimes with animals, sometimes without. Always with massive crowds of spectators who treated each launch like the Super Bowl. Benjamin Franklin, who was in Paris at the time, as an American diplomat, witnessed some of these early demonstrations. Someone allegedly asked him what use balloons could possibly have. And he supposedly replied, What use is a newborn baby? I mean valid agree. What do they even do? The story spread because of course it did. And also Benny hashtag my boy valid. Fuck them babies. Everything about balloons spread. The mania was contagious, and it was about to cross the channel. Enter Vincenzo Lenardi, an Italian aeronaut who looked at what was happening in France and thought I can do that, but in England and with different animals. Oh no. On September 15th, 1784, Lennardi launched from Moorefields in London with a cat, a dog, and a pigeon. Thank God they chose the pigeon. There was no sheep, no duck or rooster aboard this balloon.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:07

A completely different set of animals because why the hell not? And they're not copycats from France because Britain's doing their own thing.

SPEAKER_06 1:42:16

If we're going to endanger animals for science and spectacle, let's at least mix it up a little bit. The flights Why not a camel? Go bigger, go home, motherfuckers. Just throw an emu on that bitch too. That thing can't fly.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:32

Hear me out. Hippopotamus.

SPEAKER_06 1:42:35

Lunardi floated from London to Hertfordshire, covering a decent distance and proving that yes, you could do this balloon thing in England too. Because balloons only work in France. It's that French airs, you know what I'm talking about. In London, just like France, lost its mind. Lonardi became an instant celebrity. Lonardi Mania gripped the city. Women wore Lunardi bonnets decorated with balloon motifs. Men wore Lunardi hats. There were Lonardi prints, Lonardi poems, Lunardi everything. The man became a brand, and the animals, the dog, cat, and the pigeon, they survived. Which was apparently all anyone needed to know, including myself. Nobody asked the cat how it felt about being launched into the sky against its will. I think the cat was pissed personally. Oh I bet. And the dog, dogs have some serious height fear.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:33

But also, if the basket was tall enough, the dog probably didn't notice.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:36

It was probably just like you couldn't even see over. I'm chilling. Like what I'm just in this box, like whatever.

SPEAKER_06 1:43:42

Fingers crossed. The pigeon probably had opinions. Pigeons always have opinions. Yes. But no one bothered to record them. The important thing was that England now had balloon fever. And it had it bad. Pleasure Gardens started hosting balloon ascents as regular attractions. Vowhall Gardens became a hotspot for launches. People would pay good money to watch someone float away in a basket. Sometimes the balloonists would take animals, sometimes they wouldn't. The animals had become almost incidental to the spectacle. They were props, living proof that this insane contraption worked. Charles Green, a London born aeronaut, helped keep the mania alive well into the eighteen hundreds. His descendants set up balloon making companies in North London. The Spencer family turned it into a dynasty. Balloons became an industry. But once the mania took hold, it wasn't enough to just launch a balloon. You had to launch a better balloon, a bigger balloon. A balloon that went higher, farther, and carried more passengers, human or otherwise. Aeronauts across Europe started competing with each other. Who could stay up the longest? Who could travel the furthest? Who could put on the most spectacular show? More balloons went up, and more crowds gathered to watch. More merchandise was sold and more poems were written, and more paintings were painted. So the balloon became a symbol of enlightenment progress, of humanity's ability to conquer nature through reason and ingenuity. Never mind that the actual science behind why hot air balloons worked wasn't fully yet understood. Never mind that the safety protocols were basically cross your fingers and hope for the best. And never mind that we were still strapping confused animals into baskets and calling it research. The spectacle was the point. And wonder was also the point.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:37

I'm not gonna lie, I also now have a morbid curiosity as to what would happen if we put your one of your goats into a hot air balloon. We can strap a GoPro, we could actually get data on this, Gabin. This is true.

SPEAKER_06 1:45:53

All in all, the Montgolfier brothers and their contemporaries had invented something genuinely revolutionary. Within a few years, humans would be flying regularly. Within a century, we'd have airships and drinkables. Within two centuries, we'd have airplanes. Within three, we'd be landing on the moon. But in 1783, we started with a sheep. What balloon mania tells us about progress in which we reflect on what the hell we just learned. So what do we make of it? What does balloon mania tell us about humanity, progress, and our relationship with innovation? First, let's acknowledge the obvious. We have always been willing to endanger animals in the name of progress. Right. This we have learned with abundance. Yes. The sheep, the duck, the rooster, the dog, the cat, the pigeon, none of them consented to being test pilots, and none of them understood what was happening to them. They were just there living their best lives when suddenly humans decided to strap them into baskets and launch them into the sky, and we did it with fanfare. With ceremony, with the king of France. And the pattern continues. We've sent dogs into space. Monkeys, chimpanzees, mice, fruit flies. We've tested everything from medications to cosmetics on animals. We've dropped them, launched them, exposed them to radiation, infected them with diseases all in the name of science and progress. Sometimes it's been necessary, debatable. Sometimes it's led to genuine breakthroughs that have saved millions of lives. Sometimes the animals have been treated well, given comfortable retirements, and honored for their service, which should be all the time. Right? No exceptions. Sometimes, often they've just been disposable test subjects in humanity's grand experiment with itself. Humans suck. Humans suck. Montistiel got to live out his days eating palace grass. The duck and the rooster joined him. Lenardi's animals survived. As far as we know, no animals died in the early balloon experiments, though plenty of humans would die in balloon accidents in the years to come. Yeah, because humans suck. We dumb. It's only fair. But the logic, the fundamental reasoning that said we must test this on animals first was flawed from the start. We didn't learn anything from the sheep that we couldn't have learned from just sending up a human volunteer. Which is exactly what happened next. Within months of the Versailles demonstration, humans were flying in balloons. The balloon mania of the seventeen eighties was absurd, excessive, and completely unnecessary. It was also magnificent, inspiring, and genuinely revolutionary. It was, in other words, perfectly human. So here's to the sheep that climbed to the sky. Here's to the duck and the rooster whose names we don't even remember. Here's to Lenardi's dog, cat, and his pigeon. And here's to all the other animals we've sent up, dropped down, and launched into the unknown in the name of progress. They didn't ask to make history, but they did it anyways, and we're still talking about them. And that is Exhibit 122.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:58

That was fantastic. I love how we both chose stories about oars. And then we both independently, without conferring with each other, chose stories about animals and breaking records. And none of my animals died this time. We lost one beaver last week.

SPEAKER_06 1:49:29

Poor guy. It was a great that was great. I loved that. That was fun. That was a great tour.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:36

And no weenars. Other than the ones we inserted on purpose. That's what she said. Oh well, goddamn. Tonight I took us into Mammoth Cave, where nature built an underground masterpiece, and humans immediately added fraud, fake cups, medical malpractice, and bad signage. Then I introduced us to Paul the Octopus, a damp little sports prophet who picked winners, caused international panic, and somehow had more composure than most soccer fans.

SPEAKER_06 1:50:08

And I took us to the Bone Wars, where two brilliant paleontologists discovered legendary dinosaurs and still managed to act like bitter little play goblins with grant money. Then we went up, up and away into balloon mania, where Europe discovered flight and said, beefable, send the sheep.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:27

So, tonight's tour gave us a lot to think about, and some of it I'd rather scrub from my core memories.

SPEAKER_06 1:50:33

Which is entirely understandable. I do not ever want to meet a spider that eats fish.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:41

Not only is it understandable though, it's also educational. Thank you for joining us at the Oddities Department. If you made it all the way through this tour, congratulations. You are just as weird as the rest of us. Keep it that way. It adds character. Unfortunately, the museum is closing for the night. But don't worry, we've got more strange, disturbing, and hilarious exhibits waiting for you next time. As always, you should be excited!

SPEAKER_06 1:51:08

As well as appropriately suspicious. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review the show wherever you listen.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:15

It helps all the other weirdos find us and it helps keep this cursed museum open.

SPEAKER_06 1:51:19

You can also follow us on Facebook and TikTok for clips, chaos, behind-the-scenes nonsense, and whatever else falls out of the walls. We don't ask where it came from. We just post it.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:29

Alright, let's get out of here. The octopus just put on a trench coat and a museum veg. Stay curious. Stay weird. And whatever you do, do not follow strange men to a second cave. Do not threaten cephalopods. Octopi are friends, not food. And if someone hands you a sheep and points to the sky. That is not science. That is what we call a red flag. And just plain brawl. The doors are closing. Cave bye. What a fun one, man. I've never had such a good time not talking about dicks in my whole life.