Page 65 - All About History 58 - 2017 UK

Bone Wars
Modern revision
Although this Brontosaurus was debunked,
the name resurfaced in 2015 to reclassify the
Apatosaurus excelsus as Brontosaurus excelsus,
due to it being substantially different enough
to other Apatosauri to justify its own genus.
Marsh’s discovery of some 1,000
fossils made him famous enough to
be lampooned in Punch magazine
Heavy hips The not-quite-a-
Another relic of the reptile connection
(‘dinosaur’ is Greek for ‘terrible lizard’) Brontosaurus
is the size and placement of the hip
bones resembling lizards rather than
birds. Cope theorised that birds were Marsh and Cope’s race to
descendants of dinosaurs — a theory publish led to a historic
that’s been upheld.
case of mistaken identity
Caudal for concern
Another of Marsh’s errors was the low number of
anterior caudals, as the presumption their bones
were heavy (and not partly hollow like birds’) led
him to believe it wouldn’t support a longer tail.
This was one of the final blows in their decades-
long fight, and highlighted not only the depth
of their rivalry, but also the rushed, error-prone
and often unprofessional methodologies of
19th-century palaeontology.
The Bone Wars had put a stain on an entire field
of science, drained the resources of two of the
century’s greatest palaeontologists and ultimately
drained their health, too. Cope ended up falling
seriously ill in early 1897, by that time sleeping in
a cot surrounded by piles of his fossils, and died in
April aged just 56.
His final jab at Marsh came after his death.
Having had his body donated to science in a letter
issued at his death, he challenged Marsh to do the
same so that their skulls could be compared to see
which one of them had a bigger brain. Marsh died
of pneumonia only two years later in March 1899
at the age of 67 without ever responding to the
challenge. He was interred in a graveyard in New
Haven, Connecticut.
While many of their discoveries were less than
accurate, they did lay important groundwork for
today‘s field of palaeontology. And they certainly
managed to ignite people‘s imagination and
fascination with these ancient rulers of the Earth.
The passion Cope, Marsh and many others put into
their discoveries of dinosaurs in the 19th century,
however fiery those turned, still inspires minds
young and old today.
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