The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age

Dinosaurs might have remained an obscure academic issue but for the antics of two competing men. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh stooped to nearly every form of chicanery, bombast, and personal vituperation in their quest to become the United States' foremost palaeontologist. Instead of burying their dispute in academic journals, it was widely broadcast in the media of the day - newspapers. In this excellent study, Wallace traces the histories of the two, their colleagues and defenders. Although the stack of books on "the bone wars" has reached staggering proportions, Wallace has found an overlooked pivotal figure around which to march the protagonists of this stirring account. James Gordon Bennett becomes a distant member of this triage while he rebuilds the New York Herald into a major newspaper. Bennett, at least as unorthodox as the scientists, kept the dispute between the two rivals well fanned throughout the latter part of the 19th Century. It proved a fine technique for boosting circulation, at least for a time. Any student of the period will recognise that "selling" dominated nearly all aspects of life, from newspapers to new species. Bennett had a pair of newsworthy characters to portray during their dispute, in Wallace's account. Marsh's and Cope's lives made good stories in themselves. Marsh, a New England patrician had "come into money" through an uncle. Cope, a Philadelphia Quaker, poured increasing amounts of the family fortune into fossil collecting expeditions. Wallace is unable to find any specific event leading to the great rivalry. Once started, however, it burgeoned quickly and with great intensity. There were accusations of pilfering of fossils and plagiarising of journal papers. Professional journals were less restrained in those times, but ultimately both men had submissions scotched as being too harsh. The issue was almost always primacy - which one had found and named new species. The journals were the mechanism, but newspapers were sometimes utilised to established a find or novel dinosaur. Bone collections grew as the pace of the hunt overrode the time needed to prepare descriptions. The pair were always close with neither gaining significant ground over the other, while the newspaper-reading public avidly followed the race. It was government priorities and money that finally gave Marsh the edge, Wallace tells us. The new Geological Survey, established to find mineral and timber resources, also had the money and power to assign when and where expeditions might go and fund the chosen ones. Marsh had an ally in John Wesley Powell who was a force in the Survey. Bypassed by the Survey, Cope bled away his inheritance mounting fossil-hunting expeditions in the American West - some of them solo. His health suffered due to long excursions in the field. Ultimately, his wife, unable to bear financial instability and dealing with a man whose vast enterprises exceeded her ability to cope, de

This marvelous volume by David Rains Wallace is a balanced, thorough, and insightful recounting of the greatest, most needless, and most tragic scientific conflict in American history: the Cope-Marsh feud. I say "balanced" because most writers, especially those with an environmentalist/naturalist bent like Wallace, have tended to side with Othniel C. Marsh over Edward D. Cope. The reason isn't hard to find. Cope's feud with Marsh eventually [pulled] into the controversy John Wesley Powell, a major benefactor to Marsh and impediment to Cope, and occasioned Powell's fall from power. Environmentalists rightly consider this a tragedy, because perhaps no one in American history possessed the depth of understanding about the geological and geographical logic of the entire area west of the hundredth meridian than Powell. Had Powell remained in power longer, perhaps many of the great tragedies associated with the development of the American West could have been avoided. Most other evaluators of the feud tend to be biographers of either Cope or Marsh, and those side with their subject. But Wallace is able to look beyond the effect the Cope-Marsh feud's effect on Powell and beyond partisan loyalty to any single participant to achieve a fair evaluation of each. Wallace begins with a biographical narrative of both Cope and Marsh, from their family origins and early interest in science, to their maturation as paleontologists and their initial encounters with one another, and on to their growing competition with one another and eventual implacable conflicts and feud. Wallace shows how this really was not primarily a scientific controversy, but a conflict between two very different personalities. Both men were exceedingly gifted, both immensely competitive, and both were extremely neurotic. Of the two, Cope emerges as the more sympathetic, if only because he strikes the reader as the more likable of the two. Marsh is less sympathetic because of the ruthless way he attempts to cut Cope off from all governmental support for his research, and the manner in which he attempts to keep Cope, who was probably the more gifted paleontologist, on the scientific periphery. In fact, Marsh comes across as a completely unlikable person; not even his closest acquaintances seem to have liked him. If Cope emerges as more congenial, he also comes across as more manic, more paranoid, and obsessed. In the end, one is left with a feeling of disgust at both Marsh (especially Marsh) and Cope's massive stupidity in the entire conflict. Although they had some scientific disagreements, most of their antagonism was generated by who was able to get the most fossils, and the efforts of Marsh to cut Cope completely out of government funding. One is left with a sense of regret that the two great founders of American paleontology were unable to coordinate their efforts and be collaborators instead of competitors. Anyone enjoying this book might also enjoy Deborah Cadbury's TERRIBLE LIZARD, whi

Rather than presenting just another account of the infamous Cope-Marsh "fossil war," Wallace has placed the conflict in a journalistic context, exploring the role New York Herald editor/huckster James Gordon Bennett played in the animosity between the two great paleontologists. A wonderfully detailed and readable book, with only a very small number of minor scientific errors to detract from its value. This probably won't be remembered as the definitive work on the subject, but it's a good place to start.