in
History
—
The Bone Wars: How Petty Rivalry, Sabotage, and Ego Fueled America's Greatest Dinosaur Rush
In the late 1800s, paleontologists Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh engaged in the 'Bone Wars,' a bitter feud of sabotage and slander. Despite destroying fossils and careers, their obsessive rivalry incredibly led to the discovery of over 130 new dinosaur species.
In the rough-and-tumble expansion of the American Gilded Age, ambition wasn't just confined to railroads and oil. It seeped deep into the earth, into the very bones of the nation's prehistoric past. This era gave rise to one of science's most fascinating and ferocious rivalries: The Bone Wars. At its center were two brilliant paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Their story began with friendship but devolved into a bitter war of egos that involved bribery, theft, and dynamite, forever changing the field of paleontology.
A Friendship Fractured by Fossils
Initially, Cope and Marsh were amicable colleagues. They met in Germany in the 1860s and even named species in honor of one another. But their relationship soured over a simple, yet profoundly embarrassing, mistake. After discovering the fossil of a large marine reptile, Elasmosaurus, Cope hastily published a reconstruction. There was just one problem: in his rush to beat Marsh to the press, he had placed the skull on the end of the tail, mistaking the long neck for the creature's rear. Marsh publicly pointed out the humiliating error, and Cope, deeply mortified, scrambled to recall all copies of the scientific paper. The friendship was over, and the war had begun.
War in the Wild West
The main theater of the Bone Wars was the fossil-rich grounds of the American West, particularly in Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska. As news of major fossil beds like Como Bluff in Wyoming broke, both Cope and Marsh dispatched teams to excavate. The competition was savage. Each scientist's crew spied on the other, trying to poach prime dig sites. Workers were bribed to switch allegiances, bringing fossils—and information—with them. In what seems unthinkable today, both sides engaged in outright destruction. They would often destroy smaller or damaged fossils to prevent them from falling into the other's hands. In some of the most extreme cases, crews would dynamite their own quarries when they were finished to ensure their rival could never find what they had missed. It was a scorched-earth policy for science.
Scientific Slander and Ruin
The battle wasn't just fought with shovels and dynamite; it raged in the pages of scientific journals and the popular press. Cope and Marsh engaged in a frantic race to publish, often naming new species based on the most fragmentary of remains. This led to a taxonomic nightmare, with the same animal being given multiple different names by the two men, a confusion that paleontologists spent the next century untangling. The infamous case of the Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus is a direct result of this chaotic period. As their feud escalated, they launched vicious personal attacks, accusing each other of plagiarism, financial misconduct, and incompetence. The conflict culminated in a series of sensational articles in the New York Herald where they aired all their dirty laundry in public, damaging not only their own careers but the reputation of American science itself. The feud ultimately left Cope financially ruined.
A Tainted but Titanic Legacy
In the end, there were no true winners. Both men died with their reputations tarnished and their finances in disarray. Cope even willed his skull to science, challenging Marsh to do the same so their brains could be measured to see who was more intelligent (Marsh never accepted). Yet, despite their deplorable methods, the sheer volume of their work is staggering. Their obsessive competition fueled a golden age of discovery. Combined, Cope and Marsh named over 130 new species of dinosaurs. The world owes its knowledge of iconic creatures like the Triceratops, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus to their bitter conflict. The Bone Wars remains a powerful lesson: sometimes, great progress can emerge from the most flawed and petty of human motivations, leaving behind a legacy as monumental and complicated as the dinosaurs they unearthed.