In the early 1870’s two American scientists began a vicious personal contest for position and eminence in the world of science. As vertebrate paleontologists they delved into the crust of the earth for evidence of ancient life, at a time when the surface had barely been scratched and popular interest in such discoveries was intense. In the infancy of a new science, both men sought immortality. Their quarrel led them to maneuver within the institutions that served American science, and their story reveals much about the workings of that institutional complex. Edward Drinker Cope, a Philadelphia Quaker—elegant chestnut mustaches and a jaw that was an affront to the peace—was barely thirty when the decade opened, yet already his opposition to Darwin as well as his reputation for precocious brilliance was well established among fellow scientists. His chief rival was balding, bearded Othniel Marsh of Yale College, nine years older, slower, more methodical, and less established. Once they had been friends of a sort, but paleontology and old bones had come between them. Their enmity was destined to burn brightly as long as they both lived.

In 1873 their sulphurous fury ignited in the learned journals. The previous year Cope had invaded the Bridger Basin of southwest Wyoming, which Marsh considered his private boneyard, where strewn about were the remains of a large ugly ungulate with stumpy feet and three sets of bony protuberances that had flourished and become extinct during the Eocene epoch, about sixty million years ago. Even though Cope was brought back to Fort Bridger in October babbling out of his head with mountain fever and severe carbuncles, he nevertheless managed to publish sixteen articles on the uintatheres, thus matching Marsh’s production for the year. ” I have of late been subjected to a very unscrupulous rivalry,” Marsh was writing to fellow scientists during the spring, “and have thus lost more than half of the discoveries for which I risked my life during my western explorations.”

Full Story >>