If you live in Pittsburgh and have visited the Carnegie Museum of Natural History you probably know what the "Bone Wars" were all about. But if you haven't visited Dinosaur Hall you probably don't know what I am talking about.
The "Bone Wars" also known as the "Great Dinosaur Rush" refers to the period when intense fossil speculation and discovery was marked by the heated rivalry of Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Both were paleontologists that used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting in theft, bribery, and destruction of bones. Each one attacked the others scientific publication of fossil finds to try to ruin each others credibility to get their funding cut off.
There was intense search for fossils in the western states of the United States that led them to Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska from 1877 and 1892. By the end of the Bone Wars, both of them exhausted their funds in the climb to have paleontological supremacy.
The both of them made mistakes in reconstructing fossil finds. Cope made a great error in reconstructing the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus. Cope tried to cover up this mistake by purchasing every copy he could find of journals that published his fossil find.
But Marsh made even a bigger mistake than Cope. Marsh put the wrong head on Apatosaurus and called it Brontosaurus. He found a fossil skeleton of Apatosaurus with no skull. So he decided to put a skull he found in another quarry to put on this dinosaur. Poor Brontosaurus no longer exists. Because in 1975, Dr. Jack McIntosh from the Wesleyan University and Dr. David Berman from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh convinced the scientific community that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were the same dinosaur. Apatosaurus stayed and Brontosaurus was dropped as being a dinosaur because it never existed.
For more information on Cope, Marsh and the Bone Wars go to http://Wikipedia the free encyclopedia.
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