Two paleontologists waged a 20-year war of bribery, espionage, and dynamited fossil sites — and accidentally discovered most of the dinosaurs we know today.
In the 1860s, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh were friendly colleagues who named fossil species after each other. Within a decade, they had become the bitterest enemies in the history of science, willing to destroy careers, fortunes, and fossils to defeat the other.
The rivalry ignited around 1872 when Marsh secretly bribed workers at Cope's New Jersey fossil pits to redirect their finds to him. He then publicly humiliated Cope by announcing that Cope had mounted a plesiosaur skeleton backwards, putting the head where the tail should be. Cope reportedly tried to buy up every copy of the journal that printed the correction.
Both men deployed full espionage operations in the American West. Marsh paid prospectors to work exclusively for him and sent agents to shadow Cope's excavations. Teams at the rich Como Bluff, Wyoming fossil fields literally threw rocks at each other. Workers destroyed bones they couldn't carry away just to deny them to the rival team.
The sabotage went further: Marsh's quarries were physically undermined, nearly killing his assistants. Cope planted competing dig sites directly adjacent to Marsh's operations. Both men ordered the dynamiting of excavation sites when they abandoned them, to prevent the other from finding anything left behind.
The scientific output was extraordinary despite — or because of — the chaos. Before Cope and Marsh began their rivalry, only nine dinosaur species had been named in North America. Between them they discovered and named 142 new species, including Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Triceratops, Diplodocus, and Apatosaurus. They single-handedly created the popular image of prehistoric life.
The financial destruction was total. Cope spent his fortune buying a scientific journal and backing failed mining ventures; he ended his life selling fossil collections and renting out rooms in his own house. Marsh had to mortgage his home and beg Yale for a salary. Both men died broke.
Cope issued one final challenge before his death in 1897: he donated his own skull to science, hoping his brain would be measured and found to be larger than Marsh's — a period belief about intelligence. Marsh never accepted. Cope's skull sat in a Philadelphia lab for decades, waiting.