Would-be witness

Yale Peabody Museum

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With the centennial of the famous Scopes “monkey trial” coming up this summer, Yale researchers unearthed a Yale connection to the trial in the archives of the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology. On July 10, 1925, the first day of the trial, defense attorney Clarence Darrow sent an urgent telegram (left) to Yale paleontologist Richard Swann Lull. “Distinguished colleagues of yours have suggested you might be willing to come to testify for the defense at Dayton Tennessee next week in the case of state of Tennessee versus Professor Scopes,” Darrow wrote. The trial pitted Darrow, defending the teaching of evolution by high school teacher John Scopes, against William Jennings Bryan, arguing against the teaching of evolution (and upholding an anti-evolution state statute). “Lull literally wrote the college textbooks on evolution used in the first half of the twentieth century,” says Daniel L. Brinkman ’94MPhil, a museum assistant in vertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum, adding that Lull had been on the cover of Time magazine just weeks before the trial began (above). As it turned out, Lull was not available, but it didn’t matter, as the judge did not allow much time for expert testimony.