The Bone Wars

The friendship before the war

In the 1860s, American paleontology was a gentleman's hobby. The country had dinosaurs, but hardly anyone was looking for them. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh were, at first, colleagues — even something like friends.

They were almost perfect opposites. Cope was a Philadelphia Quaker, born in 1840 into a wealthy family that owned shipping lines. He was a prodigy: he published his first scientific paper at 19, spoke French fluently, wrote in elegant, fast, impassioned prose, and had no formal doctorate, only a brilliant restless mind and an income his father's money provided. Marsh was older by almost a decade, born in 1831 to a modest farming family in upstate New York. What Marsh had was a rich uncle — George Peabody, the London-based financier who would give his name to the Peabody Museum at Yale. Peabody sent Marsh to Yale, then to Europe for years of methodical graduate training, then home to a professorship his uncle had essentially endowed for him. Cope was flash; Marsh was patience. Cope was improvisation; Marsh was infrastructure.

They met in Berlin in 1863, while Marsh was finishing up a grand tour of European fossil collections. They got along. For the next five years they corresponded warmly, named species after one another, and visited each other's hunting grounds. Then, in 1868, came Haddonfield.

The betrayal at the marl pits

Haddonfield, New Jersey, doesn't sound like the birthplace of a great scientific war. It's a pleasant Philadelphia suburb. But its marl pits — greenish, wet, chalky diggings used for fertilizer — had coughed up, in 1858, the first reasonably complete dinosaur skeleton ever described: Hadrosaurus foulkii. By the late 1860s, Cope's team from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was working the same pits, finding marine reptiles and more hadrosaurs.

In early 1868, as a courtesy, Cope took Marsh on a tour of the Haddonfield pits. He showed his friend the productive seams, introduced him to the pit foremen, explained what they had been finding. It was, in the small collegial world of 1860s paleontology, an almost sacred gesture.

Months later, Cope discovered that Marsh had gone back behind his back, quietly paid off the Haddonfield foremen, and arranged that any interesting fossil they pulled out would be shipped north to New Haven rather than east to Philadelphia. Marsh had hijacked the pipeline.

That alone might have ended only in frosty letters. But then Cope did something that handed Marsh the perfect instrument for public revenge.

The head on the wrong end

In 1868, Cope described a spectacular long-necked marine reptile from Kansas. He named it Elasmosaurus platyurus, published a paper with a full skeletal reconstruction, and presented it proudly at scientific meetings. There was only one problem. He had put the skull on the wrong end.

Elasmosaurus had a preposterous neck — 32 feet of it, more than half the animal's length — and a short tail. Cope, reconstructing the scattered vertebrae from a partial skeleton, mistook the neck for the tail. In his mounted drawing, the head sat at the end of a short neck, and the long elegant serpentine part trailed behind like a whip.

It was a spectacular error. Joseph Leidy, the elder statesman of American paleontology and Cope's former mentor, spotted it quickly. So did Marsh. Cope, mortified, tried to buy back every copy of the journal issue. He failed. Marsh did not try very hard to be tactful.

After Haddonfield and Elasmosaurus, the relationship was dead. Now it was a race.

When I informed Professor Cope of his error, his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy.

— O. C. Marsh, in an 1890 letter to the New York Herald

The race West

The timing could not have been better — or worse, depending on your feelings about the preservation of geological evidence. Just as Cope and Marsh settled into mutual loathing, two things happened to American paleontology.

First, the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and a web of spur lines pushed into Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Montana, and Kansas. For the first time, a scientist in Philadelphia or New Haven could ship crates of bone east in weeks rather than years, at reasonable cost.

Second, those western territories turned out to be sitting on top of an almost absurd concentration of dinosaur fossils. The Morrison Formation — a thick layer of late Jurassic sediment laid down around 150 million years ago — outcropped along a long strip of the Rockies' eastern flank. In places, it was simply full of dinosaurs.

The pivotal discovery came in March 1877, when two Union Pacific workers in Wyoming — William Harlow Reed, a hunter and foreman, and William Edwards Carlin, a station agent — noticed that a ridge near the whistle-stop town of Como was dotted with what looked like large fossilized bones. They wrote to Marsh under pseudonyms, asking if he might be interested. He was.

Como Bluff became, almost overnight, the greatest dinosaur quarry the world had ever seen. Reed and Carlin's crews pulled out the type specimens of Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, Barosaurus, and more. The fifteen-year dig at Como would produce specimens still on display at the Peabody, the Smithsonian, the Carnegie, and the American Museum of Natural History.

The same spring, a Colorado schoolteacher named Arthur Lakes found enormous bones on a ridge near Morrison, Colorado, and offered them to Marsh. Marsh, distracted, didn't respond quickly. Lakes — with startling innocence about what he was walking into — also wrote to Cope.

Cope immediately agreed to pay for the bones. Marsh, when he realized what was happening, counter-offered and asked Lakes to ship everything to him and write to Cope asking him to forward whatever Lakes had already sent. Cope, to his credit, sent them. To his fury, he now had to watch his rival describe fossils from a site Cope had been first to secure.

The dirtiest tricks in American science

From 1877 onward, the feud metastasized. Both men ran paid crews in the same basins. Both men hired spies. Both men intercepted each other's mail. What had been a bitter professional dispute became something closer to corporate espionage conducted with hammers and glue pots.

Marsh had the deeper pockets and the better bureaucratic instinct. Through Peabody's bequest and, later, his salary as chief vertebrate paleontologist of the U.S. Geological Survey — a position he used to direct federal money toward his own research — he could keep a standing army of fossil hunters in the field. Cope had a smaller fortune and a temper that made him worse at retaining collectors; men quit on him.

Both sides did things that would get you fired from any modern museum.

Marsh's crews at Como Bluff, under instructions from their employer, routinely smashed fossils they couldn't take back and filled in quarries with rubble when they moved on. If Cope's crews were in the area, the destruction was more deliberate — dynamite, crushed bone fragments, exhausted pits. The logic, as Marsh explained it in surviving correspondence, was simple: if the fossils couldn't go to Yale, it was better that they were destroyed than that Cope describe them first.

Cope was no better. His crews raided Marsh's abandoned sites to salvage what was left, bribed Marsh's workers to defect, and on at least one occasion Cope himself — a patrician Philadelphian — showed up in a Wyoming quarry to supervise the theft. Fossil hunters recalled scenes of the two camps watching each other with field glasses across a valley, and of hastily packed rail crates being diverted onto the wrong trains.

Meanwhile, both men raced to publish. Marsh had the Yale journal and the weight of the U.S. Geological Survey behind him. Cope bought a journal — the American Naturalist — partly so he would always have a venue that couldn't reject him. The race to publish produced a deluge of hasty papers, many of them describing, in a single year, more new vertebrates than the rest of the world combined. It also produced extraordinary sloppiness. Cope once named the same dinosaur three times, not realizing the specimens were from the same species. Marsh described one animal from mismatched parts — a body belonging to one sauropod, a skull to another — creating Brontosaurus, a 'species' that took paleontology more than a century to fully disentangle from Apatosaurus.

The numbers behind the madness

It is tempting, given the bribery and the dynamite, to treat the Bone Wars as a purely destructive episode. It wasn't. The gentlemen's hobby of 1865 became, by 1895, a data-rich scientific discipline almost entirely because of the two men trying to ruin each other.

Before Cope and Marsh went west, North America had produced about nine named species of dinosaur. By the time the dust settled, the continent had 142. The fossils they pulled out of Como Bluff, the Morrison Formation, the Judith River, the Kansas chalk, and the Cretaceous beds of Nebraska and Montana are still, today, the backbone of the dinosaur halls in the Peabody, the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Carnegie.

More importantly, they didn't just find fossils; they defined the categories that dinosaur paleontology still uses. Marsh proposed the split between Sauropoda and Theropoda. He named Ceratopsia, the horned dinosaur group, after collecting the first Triceratops skulls. He classified Stegosauria. Cope worked out much of the anatomy of therapsids and early mammals. Between them — grudgingly, competitively, sloppily — they built the framework modern paleontologists inherited.

If you've ever seen a Stegosaurus, a Triceratops, a Diplodocus, or an Allosaurus — on a cereal box, in a museum, in a Jurassic Park film — you are looking at the direct product of two men trying to be the first to name a thing so they could beat each other to it.

If you could somehow subtract their work from the field, there would barely be a field. Almost every major American dinosaur group has a holotype with 'Marsh, 1877' or 'Cope, 1879' attached to it.

— A paraphrase of the common sentiment among modern paleontologists, captured in the National Geographic retrospective on the Bone Wars

Going nuclear in the Herald

By 1890, both men were exhausted. Cope had spent his inheritance. Marsh had lost his U.S. Geological Survey post in a political shakeup partly engineered by Cope's allies, and his personal finances had begun to tip. And then Cope did something bewildering even for him: he took the entire feud public.

On January 12, 1890, the New York Herald ran a front-page exposé titled 'Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare.' Cope had spent months feeding the paper's reporter a dossier of Marsh's alleged sins — plagiarism, misuse of federal funds, incompetent reconstructions, theft from Cope's collection. The Herald printed it. Marsh, stunned, fired back in subsequent issues. So did the allies of both men. For roughly two weeks, America's leading newspaper covered a dinosaur bone feud the way it would have covered a war.

The scandal destroyed what remained of the polite reputation of late-Victorian American paleontology. It destroyed Cope's and Marsh's friendships across the discipline. It blew up careers among their subordinates. It did not, however, resolve anything. Both men limped forward, weaker, bitterer, and poorer.

Jars on a shelf

Edward Drinker Cope died first, on April 12, 1897, 16 weeks shy of his 57th birthday. He died in the Philadelphia rowhouse he had converted into a combined library, laboratory, and fossil warehouse, surrounded by drawers of bones he could no longer afford to curate properly. Near the end, he had sold parts of his collection to the American Museum of Natural History for cash; his friends said he worked to the last day.

He left his skeleton to science. Part of this was genuine scientific conviction — Cope had a lifelong interest in human anatomy, and he requested that his remains be designated the holotype specimen of Homo sapiens (the official reference specimen for the species). Part of it, quietly, was one last strike at Marsh. Cope believed brain size correlated with intellect. He had, he believed, a bigger brain. If Marsh would agree to do the same — donate his skull, have his brain weighed — they could settle the matter. Posthumously, definitively, objectively.

Marsh declined. When he died two years later, in 1899, his skull remained on his head.

Cope's wish to be the Homo sapiens holotype was never formally honored — he was found unsuitable as a type specimen because of disease in his bones and because he had lost most of his teeth by the end, and dentition mattered too much to the comparative anatomy he and Marsh had spent their lives doing. His bones and brain were donated to the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, where they sat in storage. In 1994 a paleontologist named Robert Bakker, a Cope partisan, briefly attempted to revive the holotype proposal and paraded Cope's skull around academic conferences in a box. The attempt failed, but the skull made the rounds.

Marsh died richer in legacy than in cash. He had spent almost everything on fossils. His Peabody Museum, and the Yale collections more broadly, were the finest in the world. He had named Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus. His classification scheme was standard. He had also, by most measures, won the feud — his species count was higher, his institutional legacy larger. But the hatred had cost him too: friends, collaborators, and the kind of generous reputation Joseph Leidy or Louis Agassiz enjoyed.

What the war left behind

The Bone Wars are remembered today in a strange double register. Inside paleontology, they are a cautionary tale: a story of how personal animosity produced both catastrophic damage — pulverized fossils, lost context, duplicated names — and one of the great leaps of any scientific field. Outside paleontology, they are mostly a legend, half-true anecdotes about dynamite and saloon brawls and two eminent Victorians screaming at each other across geological time.

Both registers miss something. The Bone Wars were a product of a very specific moment — the American West suddenly accessible by rail, a nation flush with Gilded Age money, a science with no institutional guardrails, and two men with personalities that could not coexist in the same field. What looks like a farce is also a record of what happens when a discipline explodes faster than its norms can keep up. Modern genomics, astrophysics, and AI research have all, in their own ways, had their Cope-and-Marsh moments — races to publish, sabotage of rivals, grudges dressed up as principles.

The fossils, at least, remained. The Stegosaurus in the Peabody's great hall. The Triceratops skulls at the Smithsonian. Apatosaurus and Diplodocus, reconstructed in the long galleries of the American Museum and the Carnegie. Every one of them has a tag with a year and a name — Marsh, 1877; Marsh, 1887; Cope, 1878 — and behind each tag a story of a man in a tall collar and muddy boots trying to beat the other to it.

If you've ever stood under a cast of Diplodocus and looked up at the tail — fourteen meters of it, stretching halfway across the room — you are looking at a bone with a name attached that exists because two paleontologists from Philadelphia and New Haven couldn't stand to let the other one get there first.