The Bone Rush of America
The very first dinosaur fossils to be found in America were a few teeth, discovered by Ferdinand Hayden in 1854, a noted geologist of the late 19th century. These were described by Joseph Leidy, a determined palaeontologist and parasitologist who was the funded by his own teaching and private work rather than rich relatives and high society. The major breakthrough came however with another dinosaur described by Leidy, discovered by William Parker Foulke. A Hadrosaurus skeleton, nearly complete from the marl pits of New Jersey. This truly was the beginning of an amzing era in palaeontology.
From the 1870s a huge interest developed in the dinsoaurs of North America. By far the most famous faces of this era in palaeontology are Cope and Marsh. Edward Cope (fig.1.) was a gifted palaeontologist, but with this brilliance came an arrogant, aggressive and determined scientist. Cope is credited with thousands of papers on reptiles both extant (modern living) and extinct, naming well over 1000 new species. The rapidity of his publishing showed in the quality of each paper however, and he frequently made mistakes. On one occasion placing the skull of an ancient marine reptile, called an Elasmosaur at the end of the tail rather than the neck. It was Othniel Marsh (fig.2.) the calmer yet egotistical scientist who took great delight in telling him of his mistake. Marsh himself published papers of equal or even lower quality, often employing young maturalist to wite on his behalf.
The rivalry between the two men seems to have originated when Marsh began paying Cope's fossil hunters for the specimens they found in New Jersey. It seems that in 1870, when Cope's slip-up concerning the Elasmosaur was pointed out by Marsh, the two men truly diverged. It was from then on that the single most productive decades of palaeontology ensued. Armies of men working for both men in often terrible conditions, baking sun, blizzards, threat of attack from local Native Americans, nothing it seemed could stop the work.
These workers were by no means experienced palaeontologists, specimens were often appallingly damaged by the time they reached home. Marsh's team eventually realised that in order to preserve at least the basic structure, plaster casing could be used to hold the bones in place as they were transported. The wonderful fossils of new dinosaurs were described and published with amazing speed, often taking only a week or so to describe new species!
The legacy these two men had left was incredible, museums were erected to fuel the public's insatiable apetite for dinsoaurs and the new generation of budding dinosaur hunters were working hard to collect and preserve a plethra of enormous beasts for the world to see. At the centre of these collection were many fossils from the Morrison formation, a Late Jurassic complex spanning western North America and Canada. It was very popular with Cope and Marsh after fossils were found there in 1877. After their deaths in the 1890s, new, less crude methods of excavation were developed, primarly by the American Muesum. It was Earl Douglass (fig.3.), of the Carnegie Museum who made one of the biggest impacts since Cope and Marsh. From around 1909 to 1923 hundreds of skeletons of around 300 individuals were excavated from a single bonebed, found through a chance sighting of a dinosaur vertebrae lying in the ground. It was here that Diplodocus carnegiei was found, and the famous cast in the Natural History Museum is from this original specimen.
See also - Edward Cope
Othniel Marsh
References and Further Reading
URLs
http://www.ansp.org/museum/leidy/paleo/bone_wars.php
http://www.levins.com/bwars.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars
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Fig. 1. Edward Cope
Fig. 2. Othniel Marsh
Fig. 3. Earl Douglass