The Bone Wars: Cope, Marsh, and the Birth of American Paleontology

Between 1877 and 1892, two American scientists waged a war across the fossil beds of the American West that was simultaneously one of the most productive and most destructive episodes in the history of science. The Bone Wars, as they came to be known, pitted Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia against Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale University's Peabody Museum in a race to name as many new dinosaur species as possible. Their rivalry shaped American paleontology, gave the world dozens of iconic dinosaurs, and left behind a legacy of both discovery and disgrace.

Cope and Marsh had begun as colleagues and even friends. Both were wealthy — Cope from his family's Quaker merchant fortune, Marsh from the patronage of his uncle George Peabody — and both had trained under some of the leading naturalists of the era. Their initial correspondence was cordial, even warm. But the friendship curdled rapidly. The precise moment of rupture is disputed; Cope claimed it was when Marsh secretly instructed fossil collectors who had been working for Cope to redirect their shipments to Yale. Marsh claimed prior grievances. Whatever the origin, by the mid-1870s they were engaged in full-scale scientific warfare.

The discovery of rich dinosaur bone beds in the Morrison Formation — the Late Jurassic rock layers exposed across Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and surrounding states — gave both men an arena for their competition. They hired teams of collectors, geologists, and laborers to excavate and ship fossils east in enormous quantities. At the height of the rivalry, both men were receiving boxcar loads of fossil bones. Speed was paramount: name a new species first, and your name goes into the scientific record permanently.

The scientific harvest was extraordinary. Between them, Cope and Marsh named over 130 new dinosaur species, though many of these have since been synonymized (found to be duplicates of previously named species or each other's species). Among their lasting contributions: Marsh named Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Brontosaurus (now revalidated after decades as a synonym of Apatosaurus), and Camarasaurus. Cope named Camarasaurus as well, Coelophysis, and many other important species. The descriptions came so fast that both men made serious errors — Marsh famously placed the skull of Camarasaurus on the skeleton of Apatosaurus when he mounted his specimen, creating the confusion that led to Brontosaurus losing its name for a century.

The methods were often deeply problematic by any standard. Fossil sites were sometimes dynamited to prevent rivals from excavating them. Collectors were bribed and poached. Scientific papers were rushed to publication with minimal verification. Both men accused the other of plagiarism, fraud, and theft, airing their grievances publicly in a series of increasingly vicious newspaper articles in 1890. The New York Herald ran both men's charges and countercharges in a splash of scientific mudslinging that scandalized the academic world and damaged both reputations.

Both men died diminished. Cope spent his later years in financial difficulty, having plowed his inheritance into the rivalry. Marsh, though financially more stable thanks to his institutional backing, saw his scientific reputation tarnished. Their estates were stripped of assets, and their collections passed to the institutions they had served.

But their legacy endures in the halls of natural history museums worldwide. The great dinosaur mounts of the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the Yale Peabody, and many others rest on foundations built by the Bone Wars collectors. Cope and Marsh, for all their faults, gave the world its first comprehensive view of the incredible diversity of Jurassic dinosaurs — and in doing so, they made paleontology a science that could capture the imagination of the entire world.