Bone Wars – The Dinosaur Hunters

This is a proposal to produce a documentary about a story I stumbled on while shooting a travel show in Wyoming.  It's a great piece of history.

Bone Wars

This is a story of real skull-duggery.  It’s about the two most prominent paleontologists of the 19^th century and their monomaniacal, competitive pursuit of the glory to be found by uncovering the most sensational, new species of dinosaurs. 

It’s a story of adventure tempered by bribery, theft, politics, incursions into Indian territories, virulent personal attacks and ultimately the discoveries of Edward Drinker Cope and his rival Othniel Charles Marsh that changed our understanding of the world we live in.

Working with modern day dinosaur hunter and renowned paleontologist, Robert Bakker, Ph.D, we will go back to the scene of the crime, Como Bluff, near Medicine Bow, Wyoming.  Dr. Bakker will kick off our story at the site where the great dinosaur craze was born over one hundred years ago, when the first large bones were found by two bored railroad agents.  Word of this find soon made it to Cope and Marsh and their fevered quest began.

Their tireless collecting increased the knowledge of dinosaur species from 18 to over 130 as they unearthed previously unknown creatures such as Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Their pursuit of bones led them from the rich bone beds in Wyoming to Colorado, Nebraska, and New Mexico.

Marsh’s work bolstered Darwin’s case for evolution and he became friends with both Darwin and Darwin’s chief defender, Thomas Henry Huxley.  Marsh added his own theories to the mix, proposing that birds were descended from dinosaurs.  Today, because of our guide, Robert Bakker, this is the most widely accepted theory of the origin of birds. 

Cope was a brilliant interpreter of fossils who endured numerous hardships and even personal danger in his pursuit of fossils in the American West. But he was also an extremely arrogant, abrasive and combative individual who managed to alienate many of his colleagues. He was a prodigious researcher who published more than 1400 papers and monographs on paleontology and other areas of natural history.

From 1877 to 1892, both paleontologists used their wealth and influence to finance their own expeditions and to procure services and fossils from dinosaur hunters.  Their spirited scientific shenanigans would end with their collections housed in most of the world’s largest museums with each embraced by their benefactor institutions; Marsh’s at the Peabody Museum and the Smithsonian while Cope’s was enshrined at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

By the end of the Bone Wars, Cope and Marsh were financially and socially ruined by their efforts to disgrace each other, but their contributions to science and the field of paleontology were massive; the scientists left behind tons of unopened boxes of fossils on their deaths. The feud between the two men led to over 142 new species of dinosaurs being discovered and described. The products of the Bone Wars resulted in an increase in knowledge of ancient life, and sparked the public's interest in dinosaurs, leading to continued fossil excavation in North America and around the world.

Our film will bring these two towering figures of science to life as we take the viewers on a journey into deep time.

Marsh’s Collections at the Smithsonian:

The Smithsonian’s largest collection of historical scientific illustrations consists of approximately 1250 drawings prepared under the direction of Othniel Charles Marsh in the late 19th century. Most were drawn by the artist, Frederick Berger. This collection includes preliminary sketches for drawings, carefully rendered ink wash illustrations of skulls and post-cranial material, large skeletal reconstructions of dinosaurs and extinct mammals, transfer drawings for stone lithographic printing, and the final printed unbound lithographs made from the ink wash drawings. The size of the individual pieces in the collection range from approximately 3 cm (less than 2 inches) to 183 cm (almost 6 feet) in width.

Marsh’s dinosaurs form the core of the dinosaur exhibition and research collections at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). The mounts of Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus and Triceratops on display in the NMNH dinosaur hall are just a few of the dinosaurs collected by O.C. Marsh’s team for the United States National Museum (now NMNH).

While Marsh’s main position was professor of paleontology at Yale University, he was also appointed United States Paleontologist for the U. S. Geological Survey from 1882-1892, and became Honorary Curator of the Department of Vertebrate Fossils at the United States National Museum in 1882. He held that position until his death in 1899.

Marsh was asked by then secretary of the Smithsonian, Spencer Baird, to collect vertebrate fossils for the Smithsonian Institution. It was Baird’s mission to build a collection of natural history objects for the U. S. National Museum. Baird contacted the best scientists he could find in the various natural sciences to fulfill his goal.

Marsh’s expeditions were funded by Yale University and by the U.S. Geological Survey. The vertebrate fossils collected by Marsh’s field crew were shipped from his field locality to his research laboratory at Yale University for study and publication. Collections funded by the U.S. Geological Survey were later transferred from Yale University to the U.S. National Museum and deposited into the collection as required by the 1879 Sundry Civil Act of Congress.