All posts tagged with marsh

Synopsis of the Extinct Batrachia, Reptilia and Aves of North America by Edward Cope, published in Volume 14 of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, is arguably the most famous item either paleontologist published, not due to its academic qualities but because it exemplifies and magnifies how the competition between the two men and the rush to publish led to major errors by both.

Here at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the story of the so-called Bone Wars is well known.

In short, the Academy’s Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897), also affiliated with U. Penn, and Yale University’s Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899), also affiliated with the United States Geological Survey, were both prolific, well respected paleontologists. Both unearthed, described, and published their finds of fossil fauna in the post-Civil War era when the discipline of vertebrate paleontology was quite young in the U.S.