The "Bone Wars," officially known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, was a period of intense, bitterly competitive fossil hunting and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history (roughly 1877 to 1892). The conflict was driven by two brilliant, wealthy, and deeply paranoid paleontologists: Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and Othniel Charles Marsh of the Peabody Museum at Yale University.
Their rivalry was so vitriolic that it destroyed them both financially and socially. However, their feud inadvertently laid the foundation for modern paleontology, dramatically accelerating the discovery of dinosaurs while simultaneously leaving behind a tangled, corrupted taxonomic mess that took scientists over a century to clean up.
Here is a detailed breakdown of how the Bone Wars catalyzed and corrupted early American dinosaur taxonomy.
The Protagonists and the Spark
The rivalry began as a cordial professional relationship, but their personalities were fundamentally opposed. Cope was a pugnacious, brilliant, and hasty self-taught prodigy. Marsh was methodical, politically savvy, and heavily backed by the wealth of his uncle, the philanthropist George Peabody.
The spark that ignited the war occurred in 1868. Cope had reconstructed a fossil of a marine reptile called Elasmosaurus. Rushing to publish, Cope inadvertently placed the creature’s skull at the end of its tail. Marsh publicly pointed out the humiliating error, and Cope frantically tried to buy up all copies of the journal containing his mistake. From that moment on, the two men despised one another.
The War in the West
As the American West opened up via the transcontinental railroad, vast beds of Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils were discovered, particularly in the Morrison Formation in Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Cope and Marsh both sent teams into the field, and the scientific pursuit quickly devolved into a bitter turf war.
Their field crews engaged in bribery, theft, and espionage. They hired spies to infiltrate each other's camps, intercepted mail, and poached each other's workers. Most notoriously, crews were instructed to dynamite fossil quarries after excavating what they could, purely to ensure that the rival team could not claim any remaining bones.
Catalyzing Taxonomy: The Golden Age of Discovery
Despite their abhorrent methods, Cope and Marsh's manic drive to outdo one another fundamentally shifted the center of paleontology from Europe to North America. They catalyzed the field in several vital ways:
- A Monumental Increase in Species: Before the Bone Wars, only nine dinosaur species were known in North America. By the end of the conflict, Cope and Marsh had discovered and named over 130 new species.
- Iconic Discoveries: The pair discovered nearly all the dinosaurs most recognizable to the public today. Marsh named Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Diplodocus. Cope discovered Dimetrodon (a pre-dinosaur synapsid), Camarasaurus, and Coelophysis.
- Evolutionary Theory: Marsh’s meticulous collection of prehistoric horse fossils provided some of the first and most compelling physical evidence for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, tracing the horse from a multi-toed dog-sized creature to the modern hoofed animal.
Corrupting Taxonomy: The Taxonomic Nightmare
Because the primary goal of the Bone Wars was to "beat" the other man to the printing press, scientific rigor was routinely abandoned. The concept of scientific "priority" dictated that whoever published a description of a species first got the permanent right to name it. This rush corrupted early dinosaur taxonomy in several lasting ways:
1. "Telegram Taxonomy" Instead of taking years to clean, assemble, and study a skeleton, Cope and Marsh would routinely receive a fragmented bone in a crate, instantly decide it was a new species, and literally send a telegram to an academic journal with a hasty, one-paragraph description to secure the naming rights.
2. Rampant Synonymy Because they refused to look at each other's work—and because they were naming species based on fragmented remains—they frequently "discovered" and named dinosaurs that the other had already named. Furthermore, they failed to recognize variations within a single species. If Marsh found a femur of a juvenile dinosaur, and a year later found the femur of an adult of the exact same species, he would often declare the larger bone an entirely different, new species.
3. The Brontosaurus Blunder The most famous example of this taxonomic corruption involves the Brontosaurus. In 1877, Marsh discovered a partial skeleton of a sauropod and named it Apatosaurus. Two years later, his team found a larger, more complete skeleton of the same type of dinosaur, but it lacked a skull. Desperate to unveil a massive new beast, Marsh declared it a new species, Brontosaurus. To complete the mount for display, he arbitrarily stuck the skull of a different dinosaur (Camarasaurus) onto the Brontosaurus body. It wasn't until the 1970s that paleontologists definitively proved that Brontosaurus was simply an adult Apatosaurus with the wrong head on it. (Note: In 2015, a new study suggested Brontosaurus might actually be distinct enough to warrant its own genus again, proving how deeply tangled this taxonomy remains).
4. Nomen Dubium (Doubtful Names) Today, dozens of the species named by Cope and Marsh are classified by modern paleontologists as nomen dubium. This means the original fossil material (the "holotype") is so fragmented or generic that it is impossible to definitively tie it to a specific species. They cluttered the scientific record with "junk taxa" that took generations of graduate students and researchers to weed out.
The Legacy
By the late 1890s, the war had taken its toll. Cope had spent his entire massive inheritance on the feud and died in a rented room, surrounded by bones, in 1897. Marsh, who had cut off Cope’s government funding through political maneuvering, eventually fell out of favor himself, lost his federal backing, and died with exactly $186 in his bank account in 1899.
The Bone Wars represent a paradox in the history of science. Cope and Marsh made a mockery of the scientific method, prioritizing their own egos over accuracy, and left behind a corrupted taxonomic catalog riddled with duplicates, errors, and fabrications. Yet, without their feverish, obsessive rivalry, the incredible wealth of the American fossil record might have sat undisturbed for decades, and the global public's enduring fascination with dinosaurs may never have been born.