Marsh showed an early love of the outdoors and spent many hours with family friend Col. Ezekiel Jewell, a geologist. They collected minerals and fossils together, and Jewell took the time to talk to young Marsh about what they had found.
Marsh earned his BA from Yale College in 1860, and his uncle gave him money to attend graduate school at Yale and in Germany. In 1866, George Peabody was thinking about how he wanted to dispose of his considerable fortune at his death, and Marsh convinced him to add Yale College to his list of beneficiaries. Peabody gave Yale $150,000 to found the Peabody Museum of Natural History (now known as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology). Earlier that year, Marsh was made the Professor of Paleontology at Yale, the first such appointment in the United States.
In 1867, Marsh was appointed one of the museum's first curators, with two others. He then unofficially assumed directorship of the museum. In 1869, Peabody died, leaving Marsh a substantial inheritance. This allowed him to decline a salary from Yale, which meant that he was not required to teach any classes. Marsh was also able to build a large house, which is now Yale's School of Foresty and Environmental Studies, and to build a large collections of fossils and archaelogical specimens. Today, Marsh's fossil collections are housed at the Peabody Museum and at the Smithsonian. (See my article "What is Paleontology?" for information about the difference between paleontology and archaeology.)
Marsh was the Vertebrate Paleontologist of the U. S. Geological Survey from 1882 to 1892, and he was the President of the National Academy of Sciences from 1883 to 1895.
Over the course of his career, Marsh published over 300 scientific papers in which he described and named about 500 new species of fossil animals. For all his fame as a paleontologist, he only spent four seasons doing field work (1870 to 1873). Instead, he used the vast wealth he inherited from Peabody to pay crews of diggers to excavate fossils and ship them to him at Yale.
Marsh is probably best known for his high-profile feud with Edward Drinker Cope (see my article about Cope). The two of them actually started out as friends and collected fossils together in the eastern United States. Legend says that their well-known rivalry began when Marsh paid some of Cope's fossil diggers to send fossils to him instead. There were other altercations between the two. In 1870, Cope published a description of Elasmosaurus (a pleisiosaur), and Marsh pointed out that Cope had placed the animal's skull on the wrong end, on its tail!
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