 The rivalry between the two increased towards the latter half of the 1870s. In 1877, Marsh received a letter from Arthur Lakes, a schoolteacher in Golden, Colorado. Lakes had been hiking in the mountains near the town of Morrison with his friend, H. C. Beckwith, looking for fossilized leaves in the Dakota sandstone. Instead, the pair found large bones embedded in the rock. Lakes wrote that the bones were "apparently a vertebra and a humerus bone of some gigantic saurian." While Lakes sent Marsh some 1,500 pounds of bone, he also sent Cope some of the specimens. Marsh published his finds first, and having been paid $ 100 for the finds Lakes wrote to Cope that the samples should be forwarded to Marsh. Cope was offended by the slight. Meanwhile, Cope received bones from school superintendent O.W. Lucas in March 1877 from Canon City; the remains were of a dinosaur even bigger than Lakes' that Marsh had described.
