Taken all together, Cope’s Colorado fossils were preferable to Marsh’s, because they were larger and easier to remove from the surrounding rock without breaking. In the spirit of underhanded competition that would characterize the relationship, Marsh asked Mudge to woo Lucas over to his side, but the schoolmaster remained loyal to Cope. For his part, Cope would try several times to win over Mudge, to no avail.

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Marsh got his chance to trump Cope in July 1877, when he received a letter from William Reed and W. E. Carlin, two railway workers from the Como, Wyoming, station, who wrote that they had discovered ‘a large number of fossils.’ Marsh sent collector Samuel Williston to check out their find. Williston cabled back, ‘They tell me the bones extend for seven miles and are by the ton . . . . The bones are very thick, well preserved, and easy to get out.’ Perhaps even more important, he added, ‘I think for three months the matter can be kept perfectly quiet & by that time I hope you will have the matter all your own.’

The site at Como Bluff proved to be a mother lode of dinosaurs from the Jurassic Period, a stage in the Mesozoic Era that ended 135 million years ago. In the first year of digging alone, Marsh’s men shipped 30 tons of bones east, including those of Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, Camptosaurus, and many others. From Como came another dinosaur, Brontosaurus (’thunder lizard’), which Marsh had the privilege of naming. Although perhaps the world’s best known dinosaur, the designation Brontosaurus was eliminated on a technicality. After Marsh’s death paleontologists determined that his Brontosaurus was really another example of a dinosaur Marsh had earlier named Apatosaurus.

Digging for dinosaur remains wasn’t easy. The men working for Cope and Marsh had to carefully extract the fossil bones from the surrounding rock, laboring through searing summer heat or frigid winter cold. They toiled in the West during a time when hostile Indians were a very real threat.

Cope and Marsh made occasional visits to the digs but usually continued their feud by proxy. After the discovery at Como Bluff, Reed became one of Marsh’s best collectors while Carlin transferred his allegiance to Cope. The competition between the rival camps grew in intensity and animosity. If Reed accumulated more bones than he could use, he smashed them so Carlin wouldn’t get them. Marsh’s man Samuel Williston was so paranoid about Cope that when a man arrived at his camp one day in 1878, Williston contrived to obtain a handwriting specimen to determine if the man was really Cope in disguise.

One day a year later, Cope really did show up at a Marsh dig and managed to charm his rival’s men. Lakes wrote in his journal that Cope ‘entertained his party by singing comic songs with a refrain at the end like the howl of a coyote.’ After Cope’s departure, Lakes wrote, ‘I must say that what I saw of him I liked very much his manner is so affable and his conversation very agreeable. I only wish I could feel sure he had a sound reputation for honesty.’

While Cope displayed genius in his work, Marsh had a financial advantage in the support he received from Yale and later the U.S. Geological Survey, which allowed him to hire many collectors. Some of them, like Williston and John Bell Hatcher, eventually went on to make their own names in paleontology. Williston, forbidden by Marsh from publishing in any competing fields, became an expert on extinct flies! Hatcher made his name recovering wonderful specimens of horned dinosaurs known as Ceratops, collecting portions of 50 of them between 1889 and 1892. The best-known example of these is a three-horned creature Marsh named Triceratops. Hatcher discovered it after some cowboys showed him horns they had broken off a huge skull embedded in the side of a canyon. They had tried to dig out the rest of the skull, which had ‘horns as long as a hoe handle and eye holes big as your hat,’ but the fossil broke free and tumbled to the bottom of the canyon. Hatcher found and recovered the shattered skull.

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