The bone wars (not a Palaeontology-based rip-off of a well-known sci-fi film series) is one of my personal favourite stories in the history of science. Not only does it highlight how far we have come in recognising such malpractice in the field, but also shows how some early professionals allowed their egos to get the better of them, rather than the purpose of discovery.
The story starts in the 1870s and involves two American naturalists; Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Like most scientists of the time, both men were able to pursue an education and career thanks to a wealthy inheritance, which allowed them to carry out their expeditions and research.
The relationship between the two actually started off as a rather positive one. They would collaborate in research together during the early ages of Palaeontology, and bringing discoveries from North America to Europe, which was revolutionary at the time. They even named discoveries after each other, Colosteus marshii and Mosasaurus copeanus, as an omen to their friendship and their mutual respect as scientists.
The relationship between the two first turned sour when Cope famously reconstructed one of his finds, the Elasmosaurus, by putting it's head on the end of its tail, thinking its body was in reverse to what we now know is correct. This caused him to be ridiculed by Marsh in a scientific paper, in which it seemed was written to mock Cope, rather than to amend the mistaken reconstruction, that would have otherwise benefitted scientific discovery. It is also thought that the differing ideologies of evolution that the pair had adopted was also a driving force for their bitter rivalry. Cope was a supporter of Lamarckism, the idea that an organism passes traits on to its offspring, that were acquired through the parent's life; a theory that was much more popular than it is today. Marsh, on the other hand, subscribed to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, a model which is most widely accepted today.
Cope's incorrect reconstruction of Elasmosaurus platyurus.
An aspect of the bone wars that makes the event so infamous is the sheer abundance of malpractice, ego, and all-around dishonesty that occurred throughout, where it seemed that the main goal of both Cope and Marsh was to simply out-perform the other, rather than to benefit natural science. One of the most famous incidents is the reported use of dynamite by both parties during excavation. The idea behind this was that by using explosives, they would be able to get through the rock and expose fossils much quicker than if they were to use tools such as pickaxes and trowels. Any palaeontologist today, or even at the time, would wince at the thought of this practice, and rightly so, as we will never know about any specimens that were destroyed by Marsh and Cope using this method. This malpractice would only continue once the bones were taken back to their institutions. It was known that the pair would rush through reconstructing and describing specimens, to the point where it left more gaps than it filled, and caused confusion on their discoveries long after both of them had passed away. This was done in an attempt to increase their number of discoveries quicker than the other.
On top of the malpractice that plagued the bone wars, bribery and dirty tricks were also at hand. Cope grew up in a much wealthier family than Marsh and therefore had more money at his disposal that could be used in expeditions. Rather than just use his fortune to fund honest scientific excursions, Cope was known to bribe members of Marsh's teams to send fossils to him, which Cope would claim as his own discoveries. Marsh was not innocent in this respect, however, as he was known to have hired people to pose as geological prospectors who would steal specimens from Cope's sites, to then be taken back to Marsh. This constant pettiness of trying to one-up each other caused the reputation of themselves and their teams, as well as American palaeontology, to decline over the later years of the 19th century.
Despite the temporarily tarnished reputations, countless destroyed specimens, the inaccuracies of reconstructed specimens, and the bitter rivalry between two egotistical scientists, the bone wars actually helped kick-start a public interest in dinosaurs and palaeontology in the US and around the world. The media coverage over the 20-odd years that feud continued for proved to bring plenty of attention to their discoveries, which subsequently lead to more visitors to museums where they were stored, which generated more income that could be used on more expeditions. It also led to many new dinosaur discoveries, some of which are still seen in popular culture today, such as Allosaurus fragilis and Stegosaurus stenops, two dinosaurs that had their own feud between them in the Late Jurassic of North America. Between them, Cope and Marsh *discovered 143 new species of dinosaur, however only around 40 of these are still seen as valid in 2022.
Stegosaurus stenops remains, discovered by Marsh in 1887. Now part of the collections at Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
*It wasn't just Cope and Marsh that discovered these species, but the teams of expeditionists that they employed. This was particularly the case in the later years of the bone wars, as Cope and Marsh would spend more of their time indoors describing specimens, whilst sending their teams out to find more.
It could be said that without the rivalry between Marsh and Cope, Palaeontology would not have become as popular and advanced in the late 19th-20th centuries, and its influences are still seen today, as it teaches us lessons on what
not to do when on fossil expeditions.
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