Othniel C. Marsh

The description of the magnificent collections which he assembled, and
which have been studied continuously ever since, is still far from complete,
forty years after his death, and he left an impress upon his chosen science
of Vertebrate Paleontology that will last as long as the bones he gathered
and pages he printed endure.
Charles Schuchert and Clara LeVene. . . 1940
Othniel Charles Marsh still retains a reputation as an "armchair
paleontologist," too busy to work in the field, who owed his high standing
not to genius, but to luck and to his family's money. It is true that
his contributions to geology were not of particularly high quality, and
that his paleontological work was sometimes slipshod. Whereas his great rival
Edward Drinker Cope went into the field throughout his career, Marsh
himself spent only four seasons in the field, between 1870 and 1873. It is
also true that the chair of paleontology that Marsh occupied at Yale was
endowed for him by his wealthy uncle, who further endowed the Peabody
Museum of Natural History where Marsh's collections remain to this day.
Marsh's ambitious, possessive, and sometimes unscrupulous and egotistical
nature also made him a rather difficult person to work with. Yet for all
that, his contributions to paleontology and evolution were formidable.
He remains one of the great figures in American paleontology.
Marsh is perhaps most famous as the rival and enemy of
Edward Drinker
Cope, America's other great vertebrate paleontologist of the period.
The two men started out as friends, collecting fossils together in the
eastern United States. Legend has it that the feud between the men began
when Marsh paid some of Cope's hired diggers to send fossils to him and
not to Cope. Matters became worse in 1870, when Cope published a description
of Elasmosaurus, a giant plesiosaur -- and Marsh gleefully pointed
out that Cope had accidentally placed the skull on the wrong end
of the beast. The
battle was on: for the next twenty years, the two men attacked and slandered
each other in print, while they and their crews raced to find and describe
the most and the finest new fossils. Each scientist hired field crews to
unearth and ship back fossils as fast as possible. The rival crews were
known to spy on each other, dynamite their own and each other's secret
localities (to keep their opponents from digging there), and occasionally
steal each other's fossils -- all the time exposed to harsh conditions
and danger from hostile Native Americans. "The Great Bone Wars," or
"The Great Bone Rush," will live long in paleontological folklore.
Meanwhile, the two scientists worked furiously to describe their fossils.
In their haste, they often based descriptions of new species on sparse
material, and sometimes mixed up bones from different animals, or gave
different names to the same animal. To give the most famous case: In 1877,
Marsh hastily described a new species of
sauropod
dinosaur, which he named Apatosaurus. This description was not based on
anything like a complete skeleton; all Marsh had at the time were
some vertebrae and
part of the pelvis. In 1879, he hastily named and described another
sauropod, Brontosaurus, also based on incomplete material. In
1883, after more of the skeleton had been unearthed,
he presented a full reconstruction of the skeleton of
Brontosaurus, which remains one of the most complete sauropod
skeletons known. Not until 1903 did paleontologist Elmer Riggs show that
the bones described as Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus belonged
to the same species of dinosaur. By the rules of scientific naming, the
first name given a species supersedes all others. And so, as any
six-year-old dinosaur enthusiast will tell you, Brontosaurus is no
longer a valid scientific name. As if that weren't enough, Marsh had
mistakenly given his skeleton of Brontosaurus the skull of a third
sauropod, Camarasaurus -- an error that many paleontologists
suspected, but that wasn't conclusively shown to be wrong until the 1970s.
Despite such shenanigans, the feud between Marsh and Cope benefitted
paleontology immensely. When Marsh and Cope began to work, only eighteen
dinosaur species were known from North America -- many only known from
isolated teeth or vertebrae. Between them, the two men described over
130 species of dinosaurs. It was Marsh who described such famous dinosaurs
as Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Both also made great
discoveries of fossil mammals and other vertebrates. Although not the
first paleontologists to work in the "Wild West," Marsh and Cope opened
up the immense troves of fossils to be found in the western United States.
Who won the "Bone Wars"? The real winners were the museums that ended up
housing the two men's enormous collections -- Marsh's at the Peabody Museum
and the Smithsonian Institution; Cope's at the Academy of Natural Sciences
in Philadelphia. These have remained a rich source of data for generations
of paleontologists.
Where Cope was a neo-Lamarckian -- a believer in the inheritance of acquired
traits -- Marsh was one of the first American converts to Darwin's theory
of evolution. As it turned out, he also gathered an immense amount of
data to support it. Darwin's book Origin of Species was published
in 1859, during Marsh's senior year at Yale. In 1862 and 1865, Marsh traveled
to England, where he met scientists such as Charles Lyell,
Thomas Henry
Huxley, and Charles Darwin himself. Marsh later wrote of Huxley as
a "guide, philosopher, and friend, almost from the time I made the choice
of science as my life work."
Marsh's enormous collection of fossils enabled him to fill in a number of the
gaps in the fossil record that were troublesome for supporters of Darwinian
evolution. His descriptions in the 1870s of Cretaceous toothed birds such as
Ichthyornis and Hesperornis, coming right on the heels of the
discovery of Archaeopteryx, filled in a major gap in the early
history of birds. In 1877, Marsh proposed the theory that birds
were descended from dinosaurs, following Thomas Henry Huxley. Later,
in 1881, Marsh suggested a close affinity between birds and coelurosaurs
(small carnivorous dinosaurs):
In some of these [dinosaurs], the separate bones of the skeleton cannot be
distinguished with certainty from those of Jurassic birds. . . Some of
these diminutive Dinosaurs were perhaps arboreal in habit, and the differences
between them and the birds that lived with them may have been at first
mainly one of feathers. . .