The “Bone Wars” for you historically oriented folks….

As I have made clear in the past, I am a bit of a zealot for the belief that everyone should read “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. It’s history, science, humor all rolled into one. In short, it’s the best book I’ve ever read. Naturally, none of you will read it.

Nonetheless, I was listening to it at work yesterday and it was discussing the early days of Paleontology and a rather memorable Hatfields/McCoy’s type fight between two bone hunters. Wiki actually has a fairly decent discussion of it:

The Bone Wars, also known as the “Great Dinosaur Rush”,[1] refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. Each scientist also attacked the other in scientific publications, seeking to ruin his credibility and have his funding cut off.

Their search for fossils led them west to rich bone beds in Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. From 1877 to 1892, both paleontologists used their wealth and influence to finance their own expeditions and to procure services and dinosaur bones from fossil hunters. By the end of the Bone Wars, both men had exhausted their funds in the pursuit of paleontological supremacy.

Cope and Marsh were financially and socially ruined by their attempts to disgrace each other, but their contributions to science and the field of paleontology were massive, and provided substantial material for further work—both scientists left behind many unopened boxes of fossils after their deaths. The efforts of the two men led to over 142 new species of dinosaurs being discovered and described. The products of the Bone Wars resulted in an increase in knowledge of prehistoric life, and sparked the public’s interest in dinosaurs, leading to continued fossil excavation in North America in the decades to follow. Several historical books and fictional adaptations have been published about this period of intense fossil-hunting activity.

Anyway, I was doing some more research on it yesterday, and I cam across a PBS special on the issue that you can watch on your computer. If you have 50 minutes to yourself today, perhaps during lunch or something, I highly recommend you watch this. (Of course, saying that virtually guarantees no one will watch it.) Nonetheless, after the jump I have embedded the video “Dinosaur Wars” from PBS’ American Experience.

NOTE: This embed only has the first 10 minutes, for the other 50, go to THIS LINK.

Watch Dinosaur Wars on PBS. See more from American Experience.

Category: Politics