perhaps marsh and cope were fated to clash. Both men were notoriously flawed personalities competing in a relatively exclusive field. Paleontologist William Berryman Scott sided with Cope but was forced to admit that ‘Despite his greatness–in some measure, indeed, because of it–he had some unfortunate personal peculiarities, was pugnacious and quarrelsome and made many enemies.’ Scott had even worse to say about Marsh. ‘Indeed, I came nearer to hating him than any other human being that I have known,’ he wrote. Marsh, who never married and had few if any intimate friends, earned the nickname ‘The Great Dismal Swamp’ at one of his clubs. Throughout his life his detractors said that he was autocratic and petty; that he appropriated the work of his assistants and published it under his own name; and that he was a tightwad who never paid his employees on time.

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Marsh and a dozen students set out on his first Yale-sponsored expedition in August 1870. He picked up an army escort in Nebraska and explored portions of Kansas and the territories of Wyoming and Utah. (For one day his guide was ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody.) The expedition returned to Yale in December with 36 boxes of specimens, which included a hollow bone fragment that appeared to be from the wing of a flying reptile known as a Pterodactyl. Marsh himself had found the fossil in a narrow canyon in western Kansas. He calculated that the creature must have had a wingspan of 20 feet, ‘truly a gigantic dragon even in this country of big things, where hitherto no Pterodactyl large or small had yet been discovered.’

As the race to discover extinct species intensified, Cope and Marsh began to clash. In 1872 Cope attempted to search for fossils in a part of Wyoming Territory that Marsh considered his turf. ‘Thus began the intense rivalry in field exploration and the bitter competition for priority of discovery and publication, which led to an immediate break in the previously friendly relations between Cope and Marsh,’ wrote Henry Fairfield Osborn in his biography of Cope. By 1873 the two were exchanging heated letters. Marsh was particularly incensed when Cope temporarily lured away one of his field collectors, Sam Smith, and then somehow gained possession of Marsh’s fossils. ‘The information I received on this subject,’ Marsh wrote to Cope, ‘made me very angry, and had it come at the time I was so mad with you for getting away Smith I should have ‘gone for you,’ not with pistols or fists, but in print . . . . I was never so angry in my life.’

The dinosaur rush began in earnest in 1877 after a mining teacher named Ar-thur Lakes wrote to Marsh about fossil bones he had discovered near Morrison, Colorado. When Marsh did not reply, Lakes sent some samples to Cope. That move galvanized Marsh, and he quickly sent $100 to Lakes, who dutifully asked Cope to send the bones on to his rival. Marsh then dispatched one of his field collectors, Benjamin Mudge, a professor at the Agricultural College of Kansas, to look over Lakes’ find. ‘Satisfactory arrangement made for two months,’ Mudge cabled back, adding that ‘Jones’–code for Cope–’cannot interfere.’ Within a few weeks Mudge and Lakes shipped a ton of bones back east. The shipment included the first remains of a Stegosaurus.

At about the same time that Lakes made his discovery, another Colorado teacher, O.W. Lucas, found fossil bones near Cañon City, Colorado, and contacted Cope. Unlike Marsh, Cope responded quickly. Among the first specimens Lucas sent to him were the vertebrae of a huge animal that Cope named Camarasaurus (chambered reptile) after its hollow bones. Yet Lakes had come upon portions of the same species of creature, and Marsh had already named it Titanosaurus. Marsh had published first, and according to scientific tradition he won the right to name the animal. Cope declared that Marsh’s designation was already taken, and Marsh changed the name to Atlantosaurus.

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