Random  | Best Random Tools

  • Cope Received A Government Appointment That Gave Him A Leg Up on Random Details About The Bone Wars: Feud That Created And Almost Destroyed Paleontology

    (#13) Cope Received A Government Appointment That Gave Him A Leg Up

    Edward Drinker Cope had the early advantage in the Bone Wars. In the early 1870s, Cope won a plum position with the U.S. Geological Survey that allowed him to search for bones in the West as it was being surveyed for the first time—literally hunting for fossils on the American frontier. Cope seemed determined to document and claim credit for as many species as possible while he had the lead, and this angered a number of other contemporary paleontologists, including Joseph Leidy and, more importantly, Othniel Charles Marsh. Marsh countered this by hiring men to infiltrate Cope's expeditions and send fossils to him instead of Cope.

  • Letters Published By Cope In 1890 Destroyed Marsh's Reputation For Good on Random Details About The Bone Wars: Feud That Created And Almost Destroyed Paleontology

    (#9) Letters Published By Cope In 1890 Destroyed Marsh's Reputation For Good

    Incensed that Othniel Marsh had still tried to rob him of his fossils despite his destitution, Edward Drinker Cope set out to destroy his rival once and for all. Congress had opened an investigation of the U.S. Geological Survey and their potentially illegal activities in 1884, and in 1890, Cope published a meticulously-documented list of his rival’s many misdeeds—including bribery and other outright felonies. Much of this information had been gleaned through Cope’s paranoid habit of hiring individuals who had worked for Marsh in the past and pumping them for dirt on their former boss.

    Not only was Marsh asked to resign, but his own lack of records proved his ultimate undoing in an ironic twist. Marsh had kept few records of who had paid for his massive fossil collection, which meant that—according to the law he himself created in an attempt to strike at Cope—his collection belonged to the Smithsonian. Marsh lost a large portion of his fossils, and Cope had the last laugh in the decades-long Bone Wars.

  • The Rivalry Almost Extended Beyond Death Via A Brain-Weight Challenge on Random Details About The Bone Wars: Feud That Created And Almost Destroyed Paleontology

    (#16) The Rivalry Almost Extended Beyond Death Via A Brain-Weight Challenge

    The Bone Wars should have concluded when Edward Drinker Cope died in 1897, but Cope couldn’t pass on without taking one last parting shot at his eternal rival, Othniel Charles Marsh. As one of his final requests, Cope asked that his brain be removed from his body and weighed. He invited Marsh to do the same whenever he died, and bet that his own brain would weigh more than Marsh’s—thus proving his superior intelligence once and for all. Marsh declined, and when he passed away in 1899, the Bone Wars truly came to an end.

  • The Intensity Of The Bone Wars Led To Many Scientific Mistakes on Random Details About The Bone Wars: Feud That Created And Almost Destroyed Paleontology

    (#3) The Intensity Of The Bone Wars Led To Many Scientific Mistakes

    While the Bone Wars were great for the field of paleontology in the long-term, they made a real mess of things in the short-term. In their haste to claim new species and beat the other to the prize, both Marsh and Cope engaged in some sloppy work full of errors and inaccuracies. This often led to them accidentally, or perhaps purposefully, “discovering” creatures that had already been discovered. It took paleontologists decades to sort through all their mislabeled fossils. At the end of their careers, Marsh and Cope had discovered 142 different types of dinosaur between them, but fewer than 40 of those discoveries are still considered valid today.

    In one infamous incident, Marsh thought he had discovered a new species that he called the Brontosaurus, but it turned out to be another example of an Apatosaurus, a species he had already discovered. This error wasn’t discovered until 1903, by which point the “Brontosaurus” had already become a well-known dinosaur. This was held up as an example of the Bone Wars gone mad. In a surprising twist, further study in 2015 of Marsh’s alleged Brontosaurus revealed significant differences between that original specimen and the Apatosaurus species, meaning that Brontosaurus did exist and Marsh had been right all along in this case.

  • Marsh Publicly Embarrassed Cope After A Bone-Headed Error on Random Details About The Bone Wars: Feud That Created And Almost Destroyed Paleontology

    (#2) Marsh Publicly Embarrassed Cope After A Bone-Headed Error

    One of the earliest skirmishes in the Bone Wars took place in 1870, when Cope discovered and reconstructed an Elasmosaurus specimen—or so he thought. Marsh publicly ridiculed Cope after it was revealed that Cope had accidentally placed the skull of the Elasmosaurus at the end of its tail, assuming it was a giant snake-like dinosaur. Marsh wrote in a letter to The New York Herald, "When I informed Professor Cope of it his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy."

    The actual discovery of this error came from another esteemed paleontologist, Joseph Leidy, who was a mentor of Cope’s. Cope attempted to buy back and destroy the scientific journals that contained his mistake, while Leidy and Marsh worked to expose him.

  • Eventually, Agents Weren’t Enough And The Paleontologists Hired Dinosaur Rustlers on Random Details About The Bone Wars: Feud That Created And Almost Destroyed Paleontology

    (#5) Eventually, Agents Weren’t Enough And The Paleontologists Hired Dinosaur Rustlers

    As the intensity of the Bone Wars picked up, the pair started to hire dinosaur rustlers to gain an advantage over the other. At the hotly-contested area of Como Bluff, WY, Cope hired a prospector to steal bones from Marsh’s dig site. This became standard practice, with dinosaur rustlers thieving fossils, spying on excavations, and even pelting rival workers with stones. On at least one occasion, guns were brandished and the Bone Wars threatened to turn into a real war, but cooler heads prevailed, and the bloodshed remained purely theoretical.

New Random Displays    Display All By Ranking

About This Tool

Bone Wars occurred in the late 19th century, two famous paleontologists competed with each other to discover more and more famous new dinosaurs. This fierce and notorious competition involves bribery, politics, violence in Native American territories, and personal assaults. They achieved great success but also damaged the reputation of paleontology with many misconducts.

The competition between them has lasted for 30 years, and they had a significant impact on paleontology, but many fossils have been destroyed and many important fossils may have disappeared from the earth. The random tool explained 16 facts about the Bone Wars here.

Our data comes from Ranker, If you want to participate in the ranking of items displayed on this page, please click here.

Copyright © 2024 BestRandoms.com All rights reserved.