Page 62 - All About History 58 - 2017 UK

BONE WARS

The bitter feud between two 19th-century fossil hunters that spurred
some of history’s most significant dinosaur discoveries

Written by Erlingur Einarsson
rom Wyatt Earp versus the theft, the destruction of evidence, and both the Cope went one step further and travelled to
Tombestone Cowboys, to General figurative and literal throwing of stones. western Europe, which was at the forefront of
Custer facing off with Sitting Bull, Edward Drinker Cope was born in 1840 in palaeontology research at the time. It was here
the American Old West is famed Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to wealthy Quaker that he first met Othniel Charles Marsh.
Ffor its blood feuds. However, for parents, Alfred and Hanna. While working part- Marsh was Cope‘s polar opposite. Born in 1831
palaeontologists, this era conjures up one image time at the state’s Academy of Natural Sciences, in Lockport, in upstate New York, his family was
above all: the bitter rivalry between two of Cope published his first scientific paper in 1859, comparatively poor. However, he did have a rich
America’s greatest fossil hunters, Othniel Charles still only 19 years old. He also studied, catalogued uncle, George Peabody, who paid for him to go
Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. Known as and even reclassified a number of the academy’s the Philips Academy and later Yale University,
the ‘Bone Wars’, the competition between these specimens. His passion for science led him to learn from where he graduated in 1860. When the two
oversized egos stretched from the 1870s well into French and German so that he could read the men met at the University of Berlin, Marsh had
the 1890s and led to the discovery of hundreds latest natural history research. In 1863, possibly two degrees under his belt, while Cope had little
of dinosaurs. However, it also involved bribery, to escape the draft for the American Civil War, formal schooling beyond the age of 16.

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