What were the bone wars? The Bone Wars were a feud between two American fossil hunters in the 19th century. The two were Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Their war pretty much financially destroyed both of them.
Edward Drinker Cope was born in 1840. His family were very wealthy and he developed an interest in science from a very early age. His father wanted him to go into farming, as a landowner, but Cope became a scientist, specializing in paleontology. Othniel Charles Marsh was born in 1831, and his family were less wealthy. Luckily, he had a wealthy uncle who supported him through university. Marsh also became a scientist specializing in paleontology. Cope was self-taught and was more of a gentlemen scientist. Marsh went to Yale and became a professor at Yale. The time that these two were operating in was the early days of fossils and dinosaur research. Dinosaur bones had been found hundreds of years before, but nobody knew what they were. They had only first been identified as a different species in 1824, and the name dinosaur was coined in 1841. The second half of the 19th century was a huge time for dinosaur discoveries and many new species were discovered and named in this period. The years 1870 to 1890 are often known as the golden age of fossil hunting and many of the most famous dinosaurs that we know of were discovered and named in this period.
So many fossils were found at this time because the paleontologists were some of the first people to go looking for bones, and all of the easy to find fossils hadn’t been discovered yet. It was virgin territory, and there were literally fossils everywhere they looked. Another reason why so many fossils were found were because of the bone wars.
Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope started out as friends, well, perhaps not friends, but certainly civil acquaintances. They met a few times before their feud, and they both named a species after the other person in honor of them. They were both fascinated by paleontology, and they respected each other, at least at the start. It wasn’t long before they were both trying to outdo each other with the number of fossils they found and the number of dinosaurs they discovered and named. That would be all well and good if all they did was compete with each other, but their tactics were very underhand and sometimes even criminal.
Nobody really knows what started the two against each other, but it could have been because of their personalities. They were both incredibly stubborn, distrustful, and they would not forget a slight. There are two theories as to what started the feud, and both of them blame Marsh. The first one is that Marsh went fossil hunting with Cope in New Jersey and then paid the owners of the quarry they were hunting in to send any fossils they found to him and not to Cope. The second theory is that Cope discovered an Elasmosaurus, which had a long neck and a longer tail. Cope accidentally put the head on the tail and Marsh called him out about it publicly. Whatever the cause of the feud, they both escalated it very quickly.
They spied on each other. They accused each other of plagiarism. They paid people to steal fossils from the other’s sites. They even went as far as to have fossils that they couldn’t carry with them destroyed so that the other person wouldn’t be able to find them. Putting this petty rivalry above their love of paleontology shows how far it had gone and how both men took it so seriously. In the end, this rivalry destroyed their careers and their bank accounts.
Both men were wealthy, but they constantly needed to find more fossils than their rival and so they funded larger and larger expeditions. They had to pay more and more people to hunt for them. And they constantly tried to undermine each other’s credibility. They had spent huge amounts of their own money accumulating their fossil collections and towards the ends of their lives, that was the only financial resource they had. Which was why Cope was so distraught when the US Government demanded he give his collection to the Smithsonian. He believed that Marsh was behind it, which he may very well have been. Cope took his revenge by releasing a journal he had kept for years of every mistake and wrongdoing Marsh had committed. He had the journal published in a newspaper, and Marsh responded in kind. However, it turned out that the rest of the academic world were more embarrassed than angry, and the spat seriously hurt their careers. Cope died in 1897 and Marsh in 1899. They had lost respect, money, and nearly all of their fossils. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Drinker_Cope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Othniel_Charles_Marsh
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/bone-wars-paleontology-feud
Image By Frederick Gutekunst – File:Othniel Charles Marsh – Brady-Handy.jpg and File:Cope Edward Drinker 1840-1897.png, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61508381