It's summer, which means that instead of sitting in the shade and sipping cool drinks, hundreds of paleontologists and fossil fanatics are spreading out into the badlands of Canada and the U.S. right now. They'll be digging up the millions-of-years-old remains of dinosaurs, mammals, reptiles, fish, amphibians and plants.
This annual rite has been observed for more than 130 years, and its first incarnation was so vicious and competitive, it was dubbed the Bone Wars.
Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh were both paleontologists in the 1870s and 1880s, when the discipline was brand new and only a handful of dinosaurs were known in North America.
By the time their war petered out in the early 1890s, they had each identified dozens of new species, including not only dinosaurs but sea-going reptiles, prehistoric fish and mammals.
Both men travelled to the western United States, or more frequently sent teams of bone hunters, to scour exposed stone bluffs and valleys. They brought back petrified bones, and Cope and Marsh would each rush to be the first to describe and name the new species. From this mad rush came dinosaurs like Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus and Coelophysis.
Aside from massive numbers of new dinosaurs, bile was generated in great quantities by the two men.
Cope and Marsh hated each other. When Cope reconstructed an Elasmosau-rus with the head on the wrong end (hey, both ends are kind of skinny) Marsh had it pointed out. Publicly. Cope started keeping a journal of every mistake Marsh made.
Both men then either resorted to bribing each others' workers, or sneaking into their opponents fossil quarries, or smearing each others' reputations in the newspapers. On one occasion, their competing crews threw rocks at each other. Clearly, this was the high water mark for science.
Another product of the Bone Wars was a great deal of confusion that took more sober scholars years to unravel.
Consider Brontosaurus, which does not exist. In 1877, Marsh named a new species, Apatosaurus, a long-necked, long-tailed sauropod, which we now know lived more than 150 million years ago. Two years later, along came a new skeleton, a different size (the original Apatosaurus was a juvenile when it died) and, sadly, without a head. But what can you do? Almost every fossil skeleton is missing parts, and you're lucky indeed if you have even half a skeleton, or anything more than a few teeth and scraps of backbone.
So this new skeleton was more than enough for Cope to name a new species - Brontosaurus. A museum mount created a cast of a head, based on another type of sauropod dinosaur.
The error was actually noticed and corrected as far as science was concerned in 1903, but the name had entered the public consciousness.
Both Cope and Marsh eventually tired of the feud, and their later years were difficult, with financial problems and political scandals.
If I had to pick a winner in the war, I couldn't. Both men contributed much to science, more good than bad.
But the next generation was better. Charles H. Sternberg, who had worked for Cope, and his sons later competed with Barnum Brown in Alberta and the American west. Their competition was friendly, however, and still turned up amazing fossils, including the first good remains of Tyrannosaurus rex, the tyrant lizard king. [email protected]
