Othniel Charles Marsh was born in Lockport in 1831, the son of Danvers, MA parents Caleb and Mary, who had moved to Lockport to take up a life of farming. In 1835, Mary died from cholera and Caleb retreated to Danvers with three-year-old Othniel and his younger sister, Mary. There, he remarried and a brood of step-brothers and sisters arrived. Caleb’s attempt at shoemaking failed in the depression of 1837 and, in 1839, he returned to Lockport, leaving Othniel behind in Danvers to live with his two aunts.

Othniel returned to Lockport in 1844, where the now-husky thirteen-year-old seemed doomed to be tied to the plow. His father struggled to survive on a marginal farmstead and desperately needed Othniel’s labor to keep the farm afloat. Thus, he attempted to obstruct any higher aspirations the young man might have had. Despite this, Othniel parlayed his few leisure hours into a love of the great outdoors, becoming an avid hunter. The same year he returned to Lockport, the young Marsh came under the wing of a character named Ezekiel Jewett. A flinty New Englander, Jewett had fought with distinction in the War of 1812. He then became a soldier of fortune, helping the Chileans gain their independence from Spain. Returning to the U.S. Army as a colonel, Jewett commanded Fort Niagara from 1826 to 1843. 

By 1844, when the newly-retired Jewett met Othniel, the colonel had become an expert geologist with an eye for collecting minerals and the primitive marine fossils known as trilobites in his spare time. That year the Lockport section of the Erie Canal was being expanded, revealing mineral deposits and trilobite fossils within the exposed rock strata, which Jewett eagerly sought out. With pickaxes in hand, the youthful Marsh and the elder Jewett roamed the digs, chipping out fossil remains and mineral specimens. It was from this experience that Marsh gained a love of—and even an obsessive compulsion for—collecting minerals and fossil treasures, an urge that would follow him for the rest of his life.

Othniel’s early education mirrored the demands of the agricultural community of that era in which children and young adults labored on the farm for much of the year and attended school during the winter months. At 16, he entered the Collegiate Institute in Wilson where he made “satisfactory progress” for two winter terms, and at 19 he briefly attended Lockport Union School. None of his early book learning, however, lent any direction to Othniel’s life, and despite having a “retentive mind that soaked up information,” Othniel “worked hard at nothing” and “aimlessly drifted through life.” 

Determined to leave his hard-scrabble existence, the 19-year-old took a teaching job in Millersport for $16 a month. He quit as soon as he earned enough to return to Danvers and the kind ministrations of his aunts. It was then that the Peabody family connection began to bear fruit, for Othniel’s mother and Aunt Judith were the sisters of George Peabody, an immensely wealthy entrepreneur living in London. Born to poverty in Danvers, Uncle George had risen to prominence as a drygoods merchant and eventually a merchant banker partnered with J.P. Morgan. Known today as the Father of Modern Philanthropy, Peabody would eventually invest much of his $16 million fortune supporting worthy institutions in the U.S. and England. 

Upon turning 20 in 1851, Othniel inherited a $1,200 endowment from Uncle George, which he used to attend Phillips Academy, a noted college prep school in Andover, MA. He spent five years at Phillips, remaining academically unfocused at first, preferring solo hunting and rock-gathering expeditions to classroom and library endeavors. In 1852, however, his beloved sister Mary died following childbirth, triggering a realization that life was too short to be messing around and a resolution to “take hold, and really study.” After applying for extra studies in minerology and geology, Othniel was asked why he was studying so hard. “To make up for lost time,” he replied. “I have spent enough time shooting ducks to fit myself for college.” A new Othniel Marsh emerged. His grades rose dramatically and through his newfound efforts as a football captain and a behind-the-scenes campus politics manipulator, he became a leader of men, an astute organizer and as some would have said, a self-centered conniver. 

Othniel’s success at Phillips motivated Uncle George Peabody to support his undergraduate and graduate studies in geology and minerology at Yale College (now Yale University) from 1856 to 1862, where he earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees. By 1862, Marsh’s self-esteem had soared and he now aimed at doing what most graduate students only dream of—starting out his career as a full professor. In this goal, he was eminently successful. Realizing that an expert in paleontology (as opposed to minerology or geology) would be in demand at Yale, Marsh spent the following three years in Europe studying in the field at German universities and at the British Museum. He also had several conversations with Uncle George in London, following which, in 1866, Peabody turned over $150,000 to establish the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, which would finally open in 1876. The grant delegated Othniel Marsh as a trustee, Yale established a chair of paleontology and, not surprisingly, appointed Marsh professor. The school’s paleontological professorship offered no salary, but Marsh proceeded to draw on a comfortable income guaranteed by Peabody. Also, no teaching duties were mandated, so Othniel was free to pursue whatever interested him. As Robert Plate notes in his book, The Dinosaur Hunters – Othniel C. Marsh and Edward D. Cope: 

At thirty-four Marsh became the second professor of paleontology in the world, the first in America. In fourteen years he had lived a scientific Horatio Alger story. With all the attributes of a successful tycoon—energy, persistence, a keen eye for the main chance, a talent for finding and manipulating power—he had risen from intellectual rags to riches.

Although he had a desire to do so, Othniel never married. His bachelor Uncle George Peabody viewed matrimony as a hindrance to success and a proposition he was unwilling to underwrite. Peabody’s largesse, however, financed O.C.’s membership in several upscale men’s clubs where he nurtured backing from the scientific, governmental and bureaucratic elites of the era. It also allowed him to build an expansive 18-room New Haven mansion and hire an extensive staff of assistants to work in the newly-built Yale Peabody museum workshops.

Edward Drinker Cope was born in 1840 at his parents’ home in Philadelphia. He had two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Mary Anna. Like Marsh, his mother died when he was only three, and also like Marsh, his father eventually remarried. Contrary to Marsh’s story, however, Edward Drinker Cope raced out of the intellectual starting blocks early. He was a child prodigy as his father, Alfred Cope, a wealthy merchant and devout Quaker, soon realized. The family home, which sat on acres of farmland, woods and ponds, hosted a multitude of creeping, crawling, trotting, swimming and flying creatures. It was the perfect nursery for a mind infatuated with the living world, as Edward’s was. Unlike Marsh’s father, who obstructed his sone’s early intellectual development, Alfred Cope actively intervened in Edward’s education, personally home-schooling his precocious offspring, offering rhymes that highlighted the comparative anatomy of Fairfield’s creatures:

Pigs have bristles,

Cows have hair,

Birds have feathers,

Snakes are bare. 

This fostered an urge to classify the animals of the living world, which accompanied his uncanny abilities at observation, recorded in his journal as detailed sketches and written descriptions. 

From ages eight to 13, Edward was placed in two Quaker schools where “sound scholarship and stern discipline” abounded. He also frequented Philadelphia’s Museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences and filled his journal with further sketches and measurements of birds, elephant skulls, a fossil skeleton of Ichthyosaurus (an ancient sea lizard) and other creatures. At 14, Cope’s library included books on ornithology, herpetology and ichthyology, studies in which he would become a world-class expert. Through an avalanche of letters and journal entries, he revealed “the keen insight and independent reasoning [of a] brilliant young comparative anatomist at work.” In 1859 at age 18, Edward submitted a paper to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Although the greybeards there scoffed at the effrontery of the youth, it was soon recognized as “a masterly classification of salamanders,” and was published in the Proceedings of the Academy.

During these same school years, a less admirable character trait emerged. In the words of one biographer, although Edward “loved laughter and lively talk, not quiet restraint, he became more pugnacious than peaceful.” In other words, young Mr. Cope was quick to take offense over real or imagined slights, and voiced his opinion in an overly-aggressive manner. Joseph Leidy, professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, curator of America’s first dinosaur skeleton (Hadrosaurus) and friend of both Marsh and Cope, said of the latter that, “He does things in an unnecessarily offensive manner.” 

In order to overcome Edward’s physical frailty and perhaps to dampen his impetuosity, Alfred Cope arranged for his son to work on several farms during his 16th, 17th and 18th summers. He emerged from these agricultural forays with a toughened constitution, but also with a growing concern that his father was set on his becoming a full-time farmer rather than a full-time naturalist. At 19, Edward was given title to a Pennsylvania farm, which he received with studied indifference. The following year, he escaped that fate when he rented out the farm and wrangled work at the Smithsonian Institution, which he used as “his own kind of university.” Edward Cope, then, was one of the last self-taught American naturalists. Unlike Othniel Marsh, who had attained degrees in science, except for one class (Leidy’s anatomy course) Edward never attended a university. Within a year, however, he would publish 31 papers on snakes, lizards and amphibian frogs and toads, and “was well known in the scientific world, and on his way to becoming the outstanding comparative anatomist of the country.”

Cope eventually inherited a substantial sum from his father’s estate, which he used to purchase two adjoining Philadelphia brownstones. He and his wife Annie and their daughter Julia lived in one, while his study and workshop were located in the other. Edward, however, never enjoyed the wealth nor institutional backing that Othniel Marsh enjoyed, and as a result he could only hire one assistant to help him with his paleontological tasks in Philadelphia.

Prior to 1873, Marsh and Cope were friends. They had met in 1863 while Marsh was studying at the University of Berlin and Cope was touring Europe. There, the newly-minted scientist and the brilliant young naturalist shared notes over coffee and then sent follow-up letters signed “with kind regards.” Later, in 1867, Cope honored Marsh by naming one of his amphibian fossil finds Ptyonius marshii while Marsh reciprocated in 1868, naming an ancient serpent Monasaurus copeanus.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 allowed easier access to western states and territories. That, in turn, facilitated access to geological sites in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming, which would most easily yield ancient mammal and dinosaur remains. Both Marsh and Cope took advantage of this transportation breakthrough. Throughout the 1870s, each mounted a series of personally-led expeditions and also hired teams of bone prospectors and diggers to work those sites. The result was a paleontological revolution. Along with his fossil hunters, Marsh uncovered nearly 500 new species of fossil animals, each of which he named himself. These included the remains of early horses, toothed birds, flying reptiles and 80 dinosaurs, including “classics” such as Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Allosaurus, Diplodocus and Apatosaurus. Cope discovered 56 new dinosaur species, including Lystrosaurus, Champhosaurus and Amphicoelias, while at the same time authoring hundreds of scientific papers on modern and ancient fishes, reptiles and amphibians.

The friendship between Marsh and Cope began to unravel, however, when Marsh toured a New Jersey marl pit where Cope was overseeing the removal of some fossil finds. O.C. bribed the pit manager to send any further treasures to him at Yale rather than to Cope. In fact, one of these bribed specimens turned out to be Monosaurus copeanus, which a now-embittered Cope called “the one that got away.” Things deteriorated further when Marsh visited the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, where Cope had assembled the bones of a marine dinosaur called Elasmosaurus. Marsh took one look at it and announced that Cope had mistakenly placed its head at the end of its tail rather than properly at the end of its neck. It proved to be true, and a total embarrassment to E.D. Cope, who had already published a paper picturing his mistaken assemblage.

The downward spiral of mutual antagonisms intensified as Cope accused the predatorily acquisitive Marsh of poaching fossils, saying, for example, “all the specimens during August 1872, you owe to me.” Marsh, in return, accused the amazingly productive Cope (who would publish over 1,400 scientific papers in his lifetime) of prematurely rushing papers to publication in order to pre-empt his own priority claims, arguing that “no less than seven of Prof. Cope’s papers are antedated.” In The Gilded Dinosaur – The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh, Mark Jaffe notes that this Marshian jibe was “tantamount to calling Cope a cheat.”

In this manner, both men labored for years to destroy one another’s reputation while spending their fortunes mounting self-led field expeditions and paying other agents in the field to prospect and ship the treasured bones to their respective workshops.

Poisoned by their boss’s invective, some of the fight was carried out by Marsh’s bone collectors. For example, one wrote to Marsh that, “I discerned marks distinctly made I presume by Cope, so I judged he could strike certain places next spring. Those marks are now defaced by the sole of my boot.” Another reported that he had “taken the liberty to demolish to the best of my ability [all remaining bones] as there are other partners in the field collecting.” 

Things in the field deteriorated even more. One day, after Cope watched March’s men work over a spot from a distance, he went down after they had left for the day. He discovered the pieces of a weathered skull and some loose teeth. Cope claimed the artifacts and used them to describe a new species. However, the artifacts were actually fossils from two different animals that had been planted by Marsh’s men. Twenty years passed before the error was corrected.

Much of the dispute concerned claims and counter-claims in the literature of supposed mistakes made over paleontological minutia. In fact, the point-counter-point became so exhausting and rhetorically personal that the editor of the American Naturalist, whose pages had hosted much of the argument, finally called a halt to it, saying:

We regret that Professors Marsh and Cope have considered it necessary to carry their controversy to the extent they have. Wishing to maintain the perfect independence of the Naturalist in all matters involving scientific criticism, we have allowed both parties to have their full say, but feeling that now the controversy between the authors in question has come to be a personal one and that the Naturalist is not called upon to devote further space to its consideration, the continuance of the subject will be allowed only in the form of an appendix at the expense of the author.

By 1877 Marsh had made an end-run around this impasse by frequenting the pages of the Yale-associated American Journal of Science. In response, Cope went out that year and purchased ownership of the American Naturalist. “I suppose you have heard,” O.C. lettered to Joseph Leidy, “that Cope has bought the copyright. There is a strong feeling…that this is a swindle.”

In 1878, a further controversy emerged. That year Marsh became president of the influential National Academy of Sciences. At the same time, Congress asked the Academy to untangle the land survey mess that had arisen over the previous decades. Congress had been underwriting four competing surveys of the American west (the King, Wheeler, Hayden and Powell surveys), an expensive undertaking. An Academy committee appointed by Marsh recommended that the four surveys be united into one and Congress responded by forming and financing the single-entity U.S. Geological Survey with John Wesley Powell as its chief. This angered Cope, who had once been employed by Ferdinand Hayden as the Hayden Survey’s official paleontologist. Under that arrangement, the Hayden Survey paid expedition expenses but no salary. More importantly, it promised the often cash-strapped Cope to cover any publication costs of papers or major books. This last pledge loomed large, as Hayden Survey funds had underwritten the publication of the first volume of Cope’s 1884 masterpiece, Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West, which ran over 1,000 pages with over 134 plates. The second volume of “Cope’s Bible,” however, was never published, as the newly-appointed John Wesley Powell deemed it too expensive an undertaking.

All of this was mistakenly perceived by Cope as a vendetta led by Marsh. Cope then started to collect and file away any scraps of negative information he could glean on O.C. It also didn’t help Cope’s mental state that, at this time, he was bankrupt after having poured most of his remaining inheritance into failed western silver mines. He was saved from destitution when, in 1889, he was awarded the Professorship of Geology and Minerology at the University of Pennsylvania, an interesting turn since he himself had never earned a university degree. Also, that same year, the Secretary of the Interior instructed him to hand over all the fossils gathered on the Hayden Survey to the National Museum (the Smithsonian Institution). Enraged, Edward Cope saw the heavy hands of John Wesley Powell and Othniel Marsh behind this move, which was a distinct possibility. Cope decided to “go public” to assuage his anger. Through the reporter William Hosea Ballou, he handed his file of “Marshiana” over to James Gordon Bennett Jr., publisher of the New York Herald. 

As David Rains Wallace points out in The Bonehunters’ Revenge – Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Ages, Bennett was literally a sociopath who delighted in sowing social chaos through the pages of the Herald. On January 12, 1890, Bennett’s paper unleashed an article whose cascading headlines read: “Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare – Prof. Cope of the University of Pennsylvania Brings Serious Charges Against Director Powell and Prof. Marsh.” 

Unfortunately for Cope, his allegations were based mostly on prior complaints already covered ad infinitum in the technical literature, misinformation and unconfirmed accusations supplied by disgruntled former Marsh employees or inflated financial claims. These were easily brushed aside in responses supplied by Powell and Marsh. 

One week following Cope’s initial blast, the Herald highlighted Marsh’s response: “Marsh hurls azoic facts at Cope - Yale’s professor picks up the gauntlet of the Pennsylvania paleontologist and does royal battle in defense of his scientific reputation.”

The newspaper battle then ended when the names of the “learned men” of the Cope headlines were named in the text. The men ostensibly corroborated his charges, which had been supplied by Edward Drinker without permission. They were indeed big names in the paleontological community, but when contacted for comment by the Herald, about half remained neutral or supported Marsh and voiced their disgust with Cope, while the other half backed Cope and asserted their aversion to Marsh. Echoes of this Cope-Marsh divide can still be heard within the paleontological community to this day. 

Marsh and Powell also suffered from this misadventure. Prompted by the Herald’s bombast, a heated Congressional attack ensued. In 1880, the Clarence King survey had funded Othniel Marsh’s great work on birds with teeth, Odontornithes—a sizeable tome containing numerous lithographs and woodcuts which brought the author international renown. At the same time, Othniel himself paid for a “special, lavish” edition with red leather covers, which he proudly forwarded to a select few, including the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, the political cartoonist Thomas Nast and Charles Darwin (whom he had met in England). This self-funded edition was erroneously raised in the House of Representatives as an example of government overspending, along with the fact that the U.S. Geological Survey under John Wesley Powell had hired Othniel as its resident paleontologist, which had netted Marsh $150,000. Congressional pressure forced Powell to fire Marsh and the House cut Powell’s budget by 40%, a $200,000 loss to the Geological Survey.

Edward Drinker Cope died seven years after this last cataclysmic confrontation. He lived those years in genteel poverty, surrounded in his Philadelphia brownstone by his fossil collections, which he was forced to sell off piecemeal to sustain himself. Othniel Marsh died two years after Cope under what would be, for him, strained circumstances. During the late-1800s, the U.S. economy went soft and the Peabody Trust, which had sustained not only Othniel, but other Peabody relatives, went south too. In 1887, the trust, which in its peak years had doled out about $50,000 to Marsh per year, paid practically nothing. That year, the imperious Othniel Charles Marsh was forced to mortgage his magnificent mansion, lay off all his museum workers and beg Yale for a salary.

Both men suffered loss of professional prestige, public luster and personal friendships because of their constant technical carping, culminating in the last unneeded public tantrum. Today’s paleontologists bemoan the nomenclatural chaos their competing claims unleashed and point to the fact that their brief insanity, funded by their lavish cash outlays, froze other equally qualified paleontologists and institutions out of the game. In turn, that slowed the pace of advancement within the paleontological community for decades. Cope and Marsh, however, did bring about a veritable 19th century revolution in the depth and breadth of paleontological knowledge. After all, it was the Lockport plowboy, Othniel Charles Marsh, who gave us the first clear pictures of equine (horse) evolution, toothed birds, flying reptiles and many of our favorite dinosaurs, such as Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops and Diplodocus!