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The Great Feud

Paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh were great rivals, and their mutual animosity fueled the search for fossils in theAmerican West.

By Tom Huntington

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, scientists as well as society at large were fascinated by the ancient, often enormous, fossils that were being unearthed in great quantities from North America. Many of the most exciting finds were due largely to the efforts of two men, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, who stood at the forefront of vertebrate paleontology. Between 1870 and the late 1890s, the two men classified 136 new species of North American dinosaurs. Scientists had previously known of only nine.

The extinct animals that Cope and Marsh introduced to science include many dinosaurs commonly known today, such as Triceratops, Allosaurus, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus. They also named and catalogued innumerable, long-vanished species of mammals, fish, and birds. Today, more than a century after their great discoveries, the names Cope and Marsh–like Lewis and Clark or Stanley and Livingstone–remain linked together in history books. Unlike these other famous duos, however, Cope and Marsh hated each other with a passion.

As their intense competition to uncover dinosaur bones raged across the fossil fields of the American West, Cope and Marsh quarrelled continuously in the press and amid the government circles of the nation’s capital. As a result, not all of the animals that they described became permanent additions to the roster of extinct species. Their race for preeminence sometimes caused the two paleontologists to give different names to the same species and announce discoveries of new animals without having adequate evidence. Yet while their mutual hatred often expressed itself in petty ways, it did spur activity in the field and greatly increased man’s knowledge of extinct creatures.

Born in 1831, Othniel Charles Marsh inherited at age 21 a dowry that his rich uncle, George Peabody, had provided for Marsh’s mother. He used the money to attend preparatory school where his advanced age earned him the nicknames “Daddy” and “Captain.” After graduating valedictorian, Marsh decided to pursue a career in the sciences, and he persuaded his uncle to finance his education at Yale College. He earned an undergraduate degree there in 1860 and a master’s degree from Yale’s Sheffield School of Science two years later. The scholar then traveled to Europe to study, and while visiting his uncle in England Marsh approached him with the idea of awarding money to Yale for a museum of natural sciences, which Marsh could run as a professor. After some negotiation–Peabody preferred Harvard–Marsh got his way. In 1866 he became the first professor of paleontology in North America.

Unlike Marsh, Edward Drinker Cope was an early achiever. Born in 1840, at the tender age of six he recorded his impressions of a fossil known as Icthyosaur. When Cope was 18 he published a scientific paper on salamanders, the first of some 1,400 writings he would produce in his lifetime. Like Marsh, he was attracted to the natural sciences, but Cope’s education consisted of briefly attending the University of Pennsylvania, studying abroad, and working at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Cope’s Quaker father sent his son to Europe not only to study, but to keep the volatile young man from signing up to fight in the Civil War. Both Marsh and Cope were attending Germany’s Berlin University in 1863 when they met and initially became friends. A year later Cope returned to the United States and joined the faculty of Pennsylvania’s Haverford College as professor of zoology and botany. In 1867 he left Haverford and moved to Haddonfield, New Jersey, to study fossils found there.

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