Bone Wars: The Cope and Marsh Fossil Rivalry of the American West

The Bone Wars were a bitter rivalry between two American palaeontologists, Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale, who raced each other to collect and name fossils in the American West from the early 1870s to the early 1890s. Their competition peaked between 1877 and 1892, when the great Jurassic dinosaur beds of Colorado and Wyoming were opened up. The feud produced dozens of famous dinosaurs, including Stegosaurus, Triceratops and Diplodocus, but also deceit, sabotage and a public scandal that damaged American science.

Background: two ambitious men

Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897) came from a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia. Largely self-taught, he was brilliant, quick-tempered and astonishingly productive, publishing well over a thousand scientific papers on fossil and living animals during his life.

Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–1899) grew up in a modest farming family in New York State, but his uncle was the banker and philanthropist George Peabody. Peabody’s money paid for Marsh’s education in the United States and Germany, and in 1866 funded the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, where Marsh became the first professor of palaeontology in the country. Marsh was methodical, secretive and politically skilled.

The two men met in Berlin in the early 1860s and were at first on friendly terms. They even named species after each other. The friendship soured by the late 1860s, as both competed for fossils from the marl pits of New Jersey, where Marsh reportedly arranged for quarry workers to send their finds to him rather than to Cope.

The Elasmosaurus affair

One episode in particular poisoned relations. In 1868 Cope described Elasmosaurus, a long-necked marine reptile from Kansas, and reconstructed it with the skull at the tip of the tail, mistaking the long neck for a tail. The error was pointed out by Joseph Leidy, the senior palaeontologist in Philadelphia and the scientist behind the earlier Hadrosaurus foulkii description.

Cope tried to buy back and destroy printed copies of the flawed paper and issued a corrected version. Marsh later took delight in recounting the mistake and claimed a share of credit for spotting it. Cope regarded this as a public humiliation, and the incident is often seen as the point of no return in their relationship.

The race in the West

In the early 1870s both men began leading or funding expeditions to the newly accessible West. The First Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, made it possible to reach remote fossil beds and to ship crates of bones east. In 1872 they clashed in the Bridger Basin of Wyoming, where both rushed to name the same horned Eocene mammals, the uintatheres, often publishing by telegram to claim priority.

The landscape itself shaped the contest. The western fossil beds lay in dry badlands where erosion constantly exposed new bones, but they were also far from towns and supplies. Collectors needed horses, wagons, guides and, at times, army escorts, since the expeditions took place during the wars between the United States and Plains nations.

Marsh also led Yale student expeditions from 1870 onwards, collecting fossil horses and toothed birds that he used as evidence for evolution. Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley praised his fossil horse series. Cope, for his part, worked with the government survey of Ferdinand Hayden and spent his own fortune on fieldwork and specimens.

The great dinosaur rush of 1877

The rivalry exploded in 1877, when three major Late Jurassic dinosaur sites came to light within months. Near Morrison, Colorado, the schoolteacher and amateur geologist Arthur Lakes found huge bones and wrote to both Marsh and Cope, sending samples to each. Marsh paid him to keep the find for Yale, angering Cope, who had already begun to describe the material he had received.

At Garden Park near Cañon City, Colorado, the collector Oramel Lucas found large bones and sent them to Cope. Marsh soon hired his own collectors to work nearby. In the same year two Union Pacific railway employees, William Harlow Reed and William Carlin, wrote to Marsh under false names about fossils at Como Bluff, Wyoming. Como Bluff became one of Marsh’s richest sources for years.

The field crews worked under difficult conditions, through Wyoming winters and occasional conflict over territory. Accounts from the time describe spying on rival quarries, poaching collectors and, in some cases, smashing unwanted bones to keep them from the other side. How often fossils were deliberately destroyed is hard to measure, but the practice is mentioned in several first-hand reports.

Key discoveries

The rush produced an extraordinary harvest. Marsh named Apatosaurus, Allosaurus and Stegosaurus in 1877, Diplodocus in 1878 and Brontosaurus in 1879, all from the Morrison Formation. Later he named horned and armoured dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous, including Triceratops in 1889.

Cope named Camarasaurus in 1877 and Coelophysis in 1889, as well as a long list of fossil fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. Among them was the sail-backed Dimetrodon, often mistaken for a dinosaur but in fact an earlier relative of mammals.

Haste led to errors. Because both men raced to publish, they sometimes named the same animal more than once, or described species from scraps. Marsh’s Brontosaurus was later judged by Elmer Riggs in 1903 to be the same genus as his own earlier Apatosaurus; a 2015 study argued that Brontosaurus is distinct after all, and the question is still discussed. Marsh’s well-known reconstruction of Brontosaurus also carried a skull from a different kind of sauropod.

The public scandal of 1890

By the 1880s Marsh had the upper hand. In 1882 he became vertebrate palaeontologist of the United States Geological Survey under its director John Wesley Powell, and he was president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1883 to 1895. Cope, meanwhile, lost much of his fortune in failed mining investments and struggled to publish his work.

Cope had kept a file of complaints against Marsh, including accusations of plagiarism, incompetence and misuse of government funds, gathered partly from Marsh’s own disgruntled assistants. In January 1890 the New York Herald published a long article based on Cope’s charges, written by the journalist William Hosea Ballou. Marsh replied in the same paper with counter-accusations, and the exchange ran for weeks.

The scandal embarrassed both men and drew attention to the Geological Survey’s spending. In 1892 Congress sharply cut the Survey’s budget, and Marsh was asked to resign his post. He had to start drawing on his own resources and even mortgage his house.

Key people

Consequences and legacy

By the usual count, Marsh named about 80 new species of dinosaur and Cope about 56, though many names have since been merged or abandoned. Together they established much of the basic picture of North American dinosaurs that is still taught today. Their collections, at Yale and later the Smithsonian for Marsh’s survey material, and at the American Museum of Natural History, which bought much of Cope’s collection, remain scientifically important.

The rush also helped open the American West to later expeditions. In the decades after the Bone Wars, museums in New York, Pittsburgh and elsewhere sent crews to the same rocks, leading to finds such as Dippy the Diplodocus and the first Tyrannosaurus.

The negative side was real. Hasty publication created a tangle of duplicate names that later palaeontologists spent decades untangling. Some fossils were badly excavated or lost, and the public spectacle of two eminent scientists attacking each other in the press harmed the reputation of American science abroad.

Cope died in Philadelphia in April 1897 and Marsh in New Haven in March 1899. Cope left his body to science, and his skeleton is kept at the University of Pennsylvania. A popular story says he hoped his brain would be measured against Marsh’s to prove which was larger; it is widely told but poorly documented.

Timeline

• c. 1863–1864: Cope and Marsh meet in Berlin and are initially friendly.
• 1866: George Peabody funds the Peabody Museum at Yale; Marsh becomes professor of palaeontology.
• 1868: Cope’s reconstruction of Elasmosaurus places the head on the tail.
• 1872: Both men compete over fossil mammals in the Bridger Basin, Wyoming.
• 1877: Dinosaur quarries open at Morrison and Garden Park in Colorado and Como Bluff in Wyoming.
• 1882: Marsh becomes vertebrate palaeontologist of the US Geological Survey.
• 1889: Marsh names Triceratops; Cope names Coelophysis.
• 1890, January: The New York Herald publishes Cope’s charges against Marsh.
• 1892: Congress cuts the Survey’s funding and Marsh loses his post.
• 1897 and 1899: Cope dies, followed by Marsh.

Why it matters

The Bone Wars turned dinosaurs into a North American story and filled museums with skeletons that still define what the public imagines a dinosaur to be. They also showed how personal ambition and rivalry can both drive and distort science. The species named in the heat of the feud, from Stegosaurus to Triceratops, remain among the best known animals that ever lived.