The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age [Hardcover]

David Rains Wallace (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0395850894 | ISBN-13: 978-0395850893 | Publication Date: October 12, 1999 | Edition: 1

When dinosaur fossils were first discovered in the Wild West, they sparked one of the greatest scientific battles in American history. Over the past century it's been known by many names -- the Bone War, the Fossil Feud -- but the tragic story of the conflict between two leading paleontologists of the Gilded Age remains a prophetic tale of the conquest of the West, as well as a watershed event in science. Edward Drinker Cope was a Philadelphia Quaker from a wealthy family, an old-fashioned naturalist in the Jeffersonian tradition. Othniel Charles Marsh, a farm boy who had risen to a Yale professorship, was the model of a modern scientific entrepreneur. Opposites in personality and background as well as in political orientation and scientific beliefs, they fought over fossils as bitterly as other men fought over gold. With Indian wars swirling around them, they conducted their own personal warfare, staking out territories, employing scouts, troops, and spies. When James Gordon Bennett, the sociopathic publisher of the New York Herald, got wind of their feud, he stirred up an inferno that destroyed the lives of both men and scarred the reputations of many others, including John Wesley Powell, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey. In the aftermath, Powell's environmentally progressive ideas for limiting settlement of the West lost out to his opponents' laissez-faire boosterism, and the repercussions of the Bone War linger in many of the conflicts that rend the country today.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's sad but true--Jerry Springer's roots go deep in American culture. Even scientists of the Victorian era could jump on stage and start slugging, as we learn in The Bonehunters' Revenge. This smart, adventurous book by nature writer David Rains Wallace examines the long-standing feud between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, and especially their month-long 1890 death match in the pages of the New York Herald. The bizarre--by modern newspaper standards--series of interviews, letters, and editorials, promoted and escalated by publisher James Gordon Bennett (a kind of proto-Hearst), threw accusations of theft, forgery, vandalism, plagiarism, and worse back and forth until both men fell back, exhausted and nearly broken.

Wallace gives his readers far more than a simple freak show, though; he shows us that behind the controversy lay a crucial political struggle for control not just of fossils but the fate of the western territories. The methods Cope and Marsh used to control and divert fossils inevitably guided the expansion and settling of these lands, and Wallace argues forcefully that this competition started the boom of unsustainable growth that we are only now beginning to recognize. So by all means enjoy watching the fists fly in The Bonehunters' Revenge, but remember what happens to those who don't learn from the past. --Rob Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were two of America's greatest 19th-century paleontologists. Together, they were responsible for unearthing and naming the vast majority of this country's fossil dinosaurs and mammals. Over the course of their careers, they competed mercilessly, and often unethically, each pushing the other to further discoveries. Their feud erupted into public consciousness during two weeks in January 1890, when the New York Herald, a tabloid published by James Gordon Bennett Jr., ran a series of articles leveling charges and countercharges between the two of scientific malfeasance, including plagiarism, ignorance, favoritism, sloth, dishonesty, fossil-stealing and incompetence. Wallace (The Monkey's Bridge, etc.) makes these articles the centerpiece of his disappointing history of 19th-century paleontology. Unfortunately, he all too convincingly demonstrates that the articles were filled with errors, as well as being both boring and impenetrable to the average reader. Wallace loses credibility when, in an apparent attempt to generate interest, he adopts some of the hyperbole so common in the tabloid press of the time. Not atypical is his description of the some-time journalist who penned the first Herald article on the feud: "a photo of Ballou, showing a sloping forehead, receding chin, shifty eyes, and strangely convoluted ears, might have come from the period's abnormal psychology textbooks." Though the feud between the scientists is one of the more tantalizing and contentious events in the history of science, Marsh and Cope, as well as their work, have been covered in numerous other works (apparently diligently consulted by Wallace, who offers a seven-page bibliography). This book, engaging enough but not nearly equal to the author's best work (e.g., The Klamath Knot), doesn't add much of significance to the record. Agent, Sandy Taylor. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 12, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395850894
• ISBN-13: 978-0395850893
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #498,788 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive history of America's greatest scientific feud, November 10, 2002

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs and Fate in the Gilded Age (Paperback)

This marvelous volume by David Rains Wallace is a balanced, thorough, and insightful recounting of the greatest, most needless, and most tragic scientific conflict in American history: the Cope-Marsh feud. I say "balanced" because most writers, especially those with an environmentalist/naturalist bent like Wallace, have tended to side with Othniel C. Marsh over Edward D. Cope. The reason isn't hard to find. Cope's feud with Marsh eventually [pulled] into the controversy John Wesley Powell, a major benefactor to Marsh and impediment to Cope, and occasioned Powell's fall from power. Environmentalists rightly consider this a tragedy, because perhaps no one in American history possessed the depth of understanding about the geological and geographical logic of the entire area west of the hundredth meridian than Powell. Had Powell remained in power longer, perhaps many of the great tragedies associated with the development of the American West could have been avoided. Most other evaluators of the feud tend to be biographers of either Cope or Marsh, and those side with their subject. But Wallace is able to look beyond the effect the Cope-Marsh feud's effect on Powell and beyond partisan loyalty to any single participant to achieve a fair evaluation of each.

Wallace begins with a biographical narrative of both Cope and Marsh, from their family origins and early interest in science, to their maturation as paleontologists and their initial encounters with one another, and on to their growing competition with one another and eventual implacable conflicts and feud. Wallace shows how this really was not primarily a scientific controversy, but a conflict between two very different personalities. Both men were exceedingly gifted, both immensely competitive, and both were extremely neurotic. Of the two, Cope emerges as the more sympathetic, if only because he strikes the reader as the more likable of the two. Marsh is less sympathetic because of the ruthless way he attempts to cut Cope off from all governmental support for his research, and the manner in which he attempts to keep Cope, who was probably the more gifted paleontologist, on the scientific periphery. In fact, Marsh comes across as a completely unlikable person; not even his closest acquaintances seem to have liked him. If Cope emerges as more congenial, he also comes across as more manic, more paranoid, and obsessed.

In the end, one is left with a feeling of disgust at both Marsh (especially Marsh) and Cope's massive stupidity in the entire conflict. Although they had some scientific disagreements, most of their antagonism was generated by who was able to get the most fossils, and the efforts of Marsh to cut Cope completely out of government funding. One is left with a sense of regret that the two great founders of American paleontology were unable to coordinate their efforts and be collaborators instead of competitors.

Anyone enjoying this book might also enjoy Deborah Cadbury's TERRIBLE LIZARD, which tells the story of the birth of paleontology in England at the beginning of the 19th century, a few decades before Cope and Marsh. Sadly, that book also tells the story of a needless feud, with Gideon Mantell taking the Cope role and Richard Owen the Marsh one. The two books make great companion volumes, and jointly make a magnificent introduction to 19th century paleontology.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Science and Scandal, May 30, 2001

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Caitlin R. Kiernan (Birmingham, AL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age (Hardcover)

Rather than presenting just another account of the infamous Cope-Marsh "fossil war," Wallace has placed the conflict in a journalistic context, exploring the role New York Herald editor/huckster James Gordon Bennett played in the animosity between the two great paleontologists. A wonderfully detailed and readable book, with only a very small number of minor scientific errors to detract from its value. This probably won't be remembered as the definitive work on the subject, but it's a good place to start.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, April 17, 2008

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Gordon Adams - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs and Fate in the Gilded Age (Paperback)

Perhaps I read this book for the wrong reason. I've been reading my way through Steven Jay Gould's essay collections, and recently started on Fortey as well. Both are keenly interested in science not only for its own sake, but also as a human activity, both influenced by and influencing the society and culture of the moment. I don't always agree with their conclusions (particularly Gould's), but I always learn something, both about science and about its practitioners.

After many references to Cope and Marsh, it became obvious to me that there was a story here worthy of checking out for its own sake: arguably the two greatest palentologists of their age, locked in a decades-long feud. This book got good reviews, so I gave it a shot.

I did learn a lot more than I had known about Cope and Marsh, but frankly didn't learn a thing that I was interested in. Wallace's emphasis here is simply the feud itself, and even more particularly, a brief public battle that was waged between them for a couple of weeks in the pages of one of the day's scandal-prone newspapers. Wallace devotes 4 of the book's 20 chapters to this episode, as well devoting the book's prologue to the editor of the paper in question.

On the other hand, he devotes virtually no space to their actual professional lives, their publications, their theories, and the significance of their work. He's quite interested in Cope's futile struggles with Congress at one point, and in how the newspaper battle ultimately led to the decline in fortunes of John Wesley Powell. In another section he includes a line drawing of Marsh's reconstruction of a Brontosaurus, which more recently turned out to be an Apatasaurus with the wrong head, but doesn't show what the corrected skeleton should have looked like.

A final point which continued to irritate me was Wallace's use of the principals' first names throughout the book. Their full names were Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, and in my admittedly limited experience are usually referred to by their initials, E. D. Cope and O. C. March. Othniel, in particular, is hardly a common name. Although more frequently using their last names, as is customary, perhaps 10-20% of the time Wallace refers to them as Edward and Othniel. This implies a degree of familiarity and/or superiority on the part of the author which is altogether unwarranted, and set my teeth on edge every time.

In sum, Cope and Marsh clearly weren't saints, and clearly were products of their time, but they were perhaps the most highly respected American paleontologists of the 19th Century, and this book gives little indication of why.