The Bonehunters’ Revenge: Dinosaurs and Fate in the Gilded Age

Product Description

When dinosaur fossils were first discovered in the Wild West, they sparked one of the greatest scientific battles in American history. Over the past century it has been known by many names — the Bone War, the Fossil Feud — but the tragic story of the competition for fame and natural treasure between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, two leading paleontologists of the Gilded Age, remains prophetic of the conquest of the West as well as a watershed event in science.
With a historian’s eye and a novelist’s skill, David Rains Wallace charts in fascinating detail the unrestrained rivalry between Cope and Marsh and their obsession to become the first to make available to the world the abundant, unknown fossils of the western badlands. This story will surely fascinate anyone who has had to confront the myriad facets of professional jealousy, its sterile brooding, and how it leads to an emotional abyss.

Review

“Like Matthiessen, McPhee, and Gould, [Wallace] asks large questions but knows the answers we find will always be too small.”

The Chicago Sun-Times

About the Author

David Rains Wallace is the author of fifteen books, including The Turquoise Dragon, The Quetzal and the Macaw, The Monkey’s Bridge (a 1997 New York Times Notable Book), and The Klamath Knot,which won the Burroughs Medal in 1984. He was raised in Connecticut and graduated from Wesleyan College. He now lives in Berkeley, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue: Assassination by Newspaper

In January 1890, the New York Herald devoted a great deal of
space to a squabble between two paleontologists. Professor E. D. Cope
accused Professor O. C. Marsh of scandalous crimes against science
and morality, and Marsh responded by accusing Cope of worse. A crowd
of other scientists and officials jumped or were dragged into the
fracas, trading accusations, threats, and insults through column
after close-printed column for three weeks, to the bemusement of
readers who were, at most, vaguely aware that a paleontologist was a
kind of hybrid biologist-geologist who studied evidence of
prehistoric life.
Occurring years before dinosaurs became good copy,
this “fossil feud” was not the usual stuff of 1890s mainstream
journalism. The readers of some academic review might have expected
it (Cope and Marsh had been fighting in such reviews for years), but
the New York Herald had been the nation’s leading newspaper for
decades; its circulation only recently had become challenged by that
of Joseph Pulitzer’s World. In what was regarded as the metropolitan
daily, a month of paleontological squabbling must have seemed a
bizarre lapse, a kind of journalistic petit mal, and the affair,
predictably, was little noticed by a public better versed in the
natural history of love nests than of extinct beasts. Its descent
into the oblivion of most newspaper scandals also must have seemed
predictable; it was certainly craved by the officials and
academicians who’d become caught in it. A 1902 book entitled Leading
American Men of Science contained biographies of both antagonists,
but didn’t mention the feud. “It was an embarrassment,” wrote the
historian James Penick, “and held to be unrelated to the achievements
of either man.”
Yet the “bone war” did not lapse into oblivion. The feuding
paleontologists, Cope and Marsh, had been the leaders in their field,
and, as time passed, their rivalry became legendary as a colorful if
cautionary sideshow to scientific history. “The most important
feud … hindered and hampered the younger generation for years,”
commented William Berryman Scott, professor of geology and
paleontology at Princeton from 1884 to 1930, and himself an unhappy
figure in the Herald affair. “Even yet, its effects persist, although
in no very important ways, and crop out when one is least expecting
them.” The legend was mainly oral at first, but it crept into print
after Cope’s friend, the influentia