Page 61 - The Restless Earth Fossils

60 Fossils

Schoolteachers Help Fuel

the “Dinosaur Wars”

Douglass was not the first one to find the Apatosaurus. That honor
fell to schoolteacher Arthur Lakes (1844–1917), who discovered
some huge bones in sediments near Morrison, Colorado—the location
from which the Morrison Formation gets its name. Shortly afterward,
teacher O.W. Lucas found large bones in similar sediments near Canon
City, Colorado.
Lakes first sent his specimens to a paleontologist at Yale:
Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–1899), who was famous, in part,
for his work in uncovering hadrosaurs in Kansas. Lucas sent his
fossils to Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897), another paleontolo-
gist famous for finding the first horned dinosaurs (a relative of
Triceratops). Lakes also sent some bones to Cope because Marsh
was slow in acknowledging his first letter and fossil shipment. Cope
later had to give these bones to Marsh when Marsh hired Lakes to
work for him.
Cope and Marsh had initially started out as friends early in their
careers, but personal and professional differences between them
grew. Finding the biggest and best dinosaurs turned into aggressive
competition for both of them. When two railroad workers found the
rich Como Bluffs site near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, Marsh hired them
to excavate the site. (Lakes also helped with some of the early work.)
Cope later sent men into the same area and the two crews eventually
got into fights that even resulted in the destruction of some bones
by one party so the others could not have them.
Marsh and Cope feuded from then on until Cope died in 1897.
Marsh only outlived Cope by two years. Although Cope and Marsh
described 135 species of dinosaurs between them, their behavior
did not live up to the standards that scientists expect from fellow
professionals.

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