The Bone Wars

The Bone Wars was the rivalry between Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia, the two leading American fossil hunters. Their feud began in 1868, when Joseph Leidy and then Marsh pointed out that Cope had put the head of Elasmosaurus on the wrong end of the skeleton. In 1877 it exploded when Arthur Lakes, a teacher, found huge bones near Morrison, Colorado, and wrote to Marsh, and others found bones at Canon City and Como Bluff, Wyoming, while Cope hired his own diggers.

Both men spent family fortunes and hired crews, bribed workers, spied on each other, and, at times, smashed bones or used dynamite to keep sites out of rival hands. The Morrison Formation gave them Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Diplodocus and Brontosaurus for Marsh, and Camarasaurus and, in New Mexico, Coelophysis for Cope. In 1889 Marsh named Triceratops. By the time Cope died in 1897 and Marsh in 1899, they had named dozens of new species.

The effort greatly expanded the known dinosaurs, which went to Yale's Peabody Museum and Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, and gave the public its first sight of giant skeletons. It also left a legacy of rushed descriptions, duplicated names and damaged fossils that took generations to sort out. Both men finished with their reputations bruised and their money spent.