Othniel Marsh

For twenty years, Cope and Marsh attacked and slandered each other, and paid their crews to find fossils as quickly as possible. The crews spied on each other and stole fossils. They would sometimes sabotage each other's dig sites, and even their own sites, to prevent the other crew from finding fossils there.

Cope's and Marsh's intense rivalry did, however, benefit the science of paleontology. When they started their competition only eighteen species of dinosaurs were known from all of North America, and many of those were only known from isolated teeth or vertebrae. Between the two of them, they identified 136 new species of dinosaurs, although many of those were actually duplications (such as the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus duplication by Marsh; see my article "Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus" for more information) that resulted from their race to be the first to describe a new species. (See my article "Biological Nomenclature" for more information about how biologists divide animals into groups.)

Othniel Marsh named the following dinosaurs: Allosaurus (1877), Ammosaurus (1890), Anchisaurus (1885), Apatosaurus (1877), Atlantosaurus (1877), Barosaurus (1890), Camptosaurus (1885), Ceratops (1888), Ceratosaurus (1884), Claosaurus (1890), Coelurus (1879), Creosaurus (1878), Diplodocus (1878), Diracodon (1881), Dryosaurus (1894), Dryptosaurus (1877), Laosaurus (1878), Nanosaurus (1877), Nodosaurus (1889), Ornithomimus (1890), Pleurocoelus (1891), Priconodon (1888), Stegosaurus (1877), Torosaurus (1891), Triceratops (1889). He also named the suborders Ceratopsia, Ornithopoda, Stegosauria, and Theropoda, and named the families Allosauridae, Anchisauridae, Camptosauridae, Ceratopsidae, Ceratosauridae, Coeluridae, Diplodocidae, Dryptosauridae, Nodosauridae, Ornithomimidae and Stegosauridae. The dinosaur Othnielia was named in 1977 by P. Galton as a tribute to Marsh. Marsh also named Pteranodon in 1876.

Be sure to visit my web site for more links to museums that feature paleontology.

A great new book about Cope and Marsh is The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, greed, and the greatest scientific feud of the gilded age, by David Rains Wallace, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999

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