The Great Dinosaur Bone Wars

In the 1880s, two paleontologists, Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope, engaged in a bitter and ruthless rivalry for fossil dominance in the American West. Their frantic competition, known as the 'Bone Wars,' led to incredible discoveries but was also marked by bribery, theft, and destruction, shaping the field of paleontology for a century.

A Special Kind of Friendship

Before the war for bones, there was a friendship. It began in Berlin, in 1864, a city of cold stone and ambition. Othniel Charles Marsh was methodical, a bit plodding, the nephew of a wealthy philanthropist who ensured his path was comfortably paved. Edward Drinker Cope was a prodigy, volatile and brilliant, born into Philadelphia Quaker money. He’d published his first scientific paper at eighteen. They met as young paleontologists, two rising stars in a discipline still finding its shape, and for a time, they were allies. They spent days together in Germany, corresponded, and even named newly discovered species after one another as a professional courtesy. In 1867, Cope honored his colleague with *Ptyonius marshii*, a small amphibian. Marsh returned the favor, naming a formidable marine reptile *Mosasaurus copeanus*. The first crack in this collegial facade appeared not in the vast, dusty plains of the West, but in a muddy marl pit in Haddonfield, New Jersey. It was 1868. Cope, in a gesture of goodwill, showed Marsh the fossil quarry. It was a generous act, an invitation into his world. But Marsh, ever the opportunist, saw more than bones. He saw an edge. Behind Cope’s back, he met with the quarry’s owner and made a private arrangement: any future fossils found in that pit were not to be sent to Cope, but to him, at Yale. The betrayal was compounded by a public humiliation. That same year, Cope rushed to publish a description of a magnificent new fossil, a plesiosaur he named *Elasmosaurus platyurus*. In his haste to reconstruct the creature for the Academy of Natural Sciences, he made a colossal error: he placed the skull on the tip of the tail, mistaking the long, elegant neck for the creature's hind end. It was Marsh who, on a visit, publicly pointed out the blunder. Cope was mortified. He scrambled to buy back every copy of the scientific journal containing his mistake, a frantic attempt to erase his shame from the official record. The friendship was over. The gestures of naming creatures after one another now seemed like bitter ironies. The war was about to begin.

A Special Kind of Friendship

The Race to Como Bluff

The true battlefield was the American West. The expansion of railroads in the 1870s sliced through ancient seabeds and forgotten floodplains, unearthing a world of giants. Reports of colossal bones trickled back east, and for two men nursing a growing hatred, it was a call to arms. The prize was not just scientific glory, but the chance to utterly vanquish a rival. In 1877, a letter arrived for Marsh from a schoolteacher in Morrison, Colorado, describing "apparently a vertebra and a humerus bone of some gigantic saurian." Marsh, slow to reply, nearly lost the opportunity; the teacher, Arthur Lakes, sent a shipment of bones to Cope as well. That same year, two workers for the Union Pacific Railroad, William Reed and William Carlin, stumbled upon a treasure trove of Jurassic fossils along a ridge in Wyoming called Como Bluff. They sent samples to Marsh, who immediately recognized their significance and dispatched his agents to secure the site. But secrets couldn't be kept for long. Word of the finds spread, and soon Cope’s men were there too, turning the original discoverers, Reed and Carlin, into bitter enemies loyal to opposing paleontologists. Como Bluff became the epicenter of the Bone Wars. It was no longer a scientific expedition; it was a siege. Teams spied on one another, bribed workers for information, and shadowed rival digs. The competition grew so petty that field crews would engage in rock fights, pelting each other from across the quarries. The work was brutal, conducted through harsh Wyoming winters, but the pace was relentless. The goal was not just to find more bones than the other man, but to prevent him from finding anything at all. When one team finished excavating a site, they would often destroy what remained. Marsh once ordered his men to smash smaller fossils and dynamite a quarry rather than let the fragments fall into Cope’s hands. Cope’s crews were accused of similar tactics, filling dig sites with dirt and rock to hide them from Marsh's men. One story even tells of Cope’s men diverting a trainload of Marsh’s fossils, rerouting them to Philadelphia. Amid this chaos and destruction, however, came astonishing discoveries that would define the age of dinosaurs for the public: *Allosaurus*, *Diplodocus*, *Stegosaurus*. Each find was a victory in a war that had no rules.

Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare

By 1890, the feud had festered for over two decades. The private betrayals and frontier sabotage were about to erupt into a final, public spectacle of mutual destruction. Marsh had used his considerable influence—and his position as chief paleontologist at the U.S. Geological Survey—to systematically cut off Cope's access to federal funding. He even attempted to have Cope's entire fossil collection confiscated, claiming it was gathered with government money and thus belonged to the state. Cope, financially strained and professionally cornered, decided to deploy his last weapon. For years, he had been meticulously documenting every misstep, every ethical lapse, every suspected act of plagiarism and fraud committed by his rival. He kept this ammunition in a desk drawer, waiting. Now, he gave it to a reporter from the *New York Herald*. On January 12, 1890, the newspaper published a sensational front-page story with the headline: "SCIENTISTS WAGE BITTER WARFARE." The article aired all of Cope's accusations: that Marsh was a serial plagiarist, a corrupt administrator who misused government funds, and a clumsy scientist who made countless errors. The public, which had imagined science as a noble pursuit, was suddenly given a front-row seat to a bare-knuckle brawl. Marsh, of course, fired back in the pages of the same newspaper. He dredged up the two-decade-old story of the *Elasmosaurus*, recounting in humiliating detail how Cope had placed the head on the wrong end. He painted Cope as a reckless, incompetent, and dishonest scientist. For weeks, the American public read as two of the nation's most eminent paleontologists tore each other's reputations to shreds. The fallout was catastrophic for both. The scandal prompted Congress to slash the budget of the Geological Survey, and Marsh lost his prestigious government position. Their names became synonymous with petty squabbling. They had spent their fortunes, burned their bridges, and tarnished the very field they had helped build. In the end, there was no winner. Cope died in 1897 at the age of 56, ill and nearly broke, having sold off much of his cherished fossil collection to make ends meet. In a final, macabre challenge to his rival, he willed his brain to science, to be measured against Marsh's, certain it would prove his superiority. Marsh, who died two years later, also in financial distress, did not accept the challenge. They left behind a legacy of ruin, but also something else: crates upon unopened crates of fossils. In their mad rush to out-discover one another, they had unearthed more than 130 new species of dinosaurs, giving shape and substance to a lost world and sparking a fascination that has never faded.