When it walked the earth trembled under the weight of 120,000 pounds, when it ate it filled a stomach enough to hold three elephants, when it was angry its terrible roar could be heard ten miles, and when it stood up its height was equal to eleven stories of a skyscraper.
—NEW YORK HERALD, 1898
REVENGE!
Apatosaurus was not the only dinosaur found in 1877 in Colorado (see chapter 7). Even though Marsh’s assistants Samuel Wendell Williston and Benjamin Mudge had little success with their Cañon City quarries when compared to what Lucas was finding for Cope, they did find important fossils and immediately shipped them to Marsh. These included some relatively large long-tail vertebrae from Felch Quarry near Cañon City, which Marsh received in 1878 and immediately published (with no illustrations) as a new genus and species of dinosaur, Diplodocus longus. The name Diplodocus means “double beam” in Greek, a reference to the V-shaped bones called chevron bones located beneath the tail vertebrae. The specimens were very poor and hardly the basis for a new genus because V-shaped chevron bones occur in most diplodocines (including Apatosaurus) and in a number of other sauropods as well. At the time, however, this was the first dinosaur known to have this feature, and Marsh thought it was sufficient to diagnose a new genus. Today we would say that Marsh’s original specimen of Diplodocus longus (called the “type specimen”) is insufficient to know what animal it belonged to. Some paleontologists argue that the name Diplodocus is no longer valid. In the interest of stability, they have proposed that a different specimen of a different species of Diplodocus be designated as the type specimen of the genus. But that discussion is beyond the scope of this book.
Meanwhile, the Bone Wars, which had peaked in the late 1870s, began to enter a new phase in the 1880s. Originally, Cope and Marsh had resorted to spying on each other and bribing people to switch sides or to reveal the location their rival’s fossil sites. Both men and their crews occasionally destroyed fossils they could not remove from the ground or take with them, and when they finished a quarry they took great pains to fill it in with rocks and dirt to hide it and make it hard to reopen. In one instance, the rival crews even threw rocks at each other. Luckily, they didn’t resort to gunplay as was common in the Wild West back then. By the 1880s, Marsh was flush with tons of bones arriving at Yale every week. Cope had only limited field crews working for him, and he already had so many bones in his house that there was no place for more.
Cope’s fortunes took a turn for the worse when he spent most of his inheritance to buy the journal American Naturalist (still a famous journal today). He also had a hard time landing a paying position in a college or a museum, possibly because of Marsh’s influence and also because of his legendary temper and grouchy attitude. Cope undertook several field seasons alone by himself, which damaged his health, especially after a bout of malaria. In desperation, Cope risked the remainder of his inheritance in various gold and silver mining investments, only to lose it all when they turned out to be worthless.
Meanwhile, Marsh had established powerful contacts in Washington and eventually became the official paleontologist of the newly created U.S. Geological Survey, headed by his friend John Wesley Powell. A one-armed Civil War veteran, Powell was now famous as the leader of the first expedition to float down the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Yet most of Marsh’s assistants hated working for him because Marsh never gave them any credit in the publications, paid them very little, or forgot to pay them entirely.
In 1884, the bad situation between Cope and Marsh reached a critical point. Powell told Cope that all his specimens obtained during the Hayden Survey and other government surveys belonged to the U.S. government, and he had to give them up. Cope disagreed, of course, because he had not taken government money while in the field but financed his work with the Hayden Survey out of his own pocket. Cope’s hatred of Marsh boiled over, and he decided it was time to get revenge. As Congress was looking into the U.S. Geological Survey, Cope sent them a long list of mistakes made by Marsh, accusations of plagiarism and theft of government specimens, and charges that Marsh had misappropriated government funds. The congressional inquiry didn’t get very far, so Cope then gave the damaging charges and evidence to a reporter, William Hosea Ballou. He wrote a series of sensational and shocking articles in the New York Herald that raised the issue to the level of a national scandal. The scientific community had known about the battle between the two men for years, but now their dirty laundry was causing public disdain for science. Elizabeth N. Shor wrote about it:
Most scientists of the day recoiled to find that Cope’s feud with Marsh had become front-page news. Those closest to the scientific fields under discussion, geology and vertebrate paleontology, certainly winced, particularly as they found themselves quoted, mentioned, or misspelled. The feud was not news to them, for it had lurked at their scientific meetings for two decades. Most of them had already taken sides.
The papers filled with more of Cope’s charges, then rebuttals by Marsh and Powell accusing Cope of similar misdeeds. Cope called Marsh and Powell “partners in incompetence, ignorance, and plagiarism,” and called the survey a “gigantic politico-scientific monopoly next in importance to Tammany Hall.” The controversy played out for a few more months, then died as public interest moved to other topics. Both sides were severely wounded, but their status remained unchanged.
In 1892, drought conditions and water problems out west caused Congress to launch another investigation of the U.S. Geological Survey, which led to close scrutiny of how Marsh had spent government funds. Many were upset about his support of Darwinian evolution and his description of creatures not in the Bible. Typical of these was a giant scientific monograph Marsh wrote on the “Odontornithes,” the early toothed birds Hesperornis and Ichthyornis from the chalk beds of Kansas. The inquiry led to such incredible scenes as fundamentalist Alabama Congressman Hilary Herbert saying on the floor of Congress, “Birds with teeth! That’s where your hard-earned money goes, folks—on some professor’s silly birds with teeth.” As a result, the appropriation for the U.S. Geological Survey was severely slashed, and Powell was forced to fire Marsh.
Meanwhile, Cope obtained a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, then support from the Texas Geological Survey, and succeeded Marsh as head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science when Marsh stepped down. Marsh, however, received the Cuvier Medal, one of the highest awards in paleontology.
The rivalry did not die until Cope himself died in 1897 at the young age of 56, all alone in his house crowded with unstudied fossils. As his health began to decline, Cope was befriended by a young paleontologist who started at Princeton and was now teaching there, Henry Fairfield Osborn. Soon to become the head of the burgeoning American Museum of Natural History, Osborn championed Cope’s work after his death. Desperate for money, Cope sold most of his fossil collection to Osborn, which became the core of the future American Museum collection, eventually the largest in the world. Many of Cope’s specimens were still in their crates when he died, so (for example) the famous Allosaurus skeleton now on the display in the American Museum was untouched in field wrappings until the American Museum preparators rediscovered it and worked on it.
Marsh lived two years longer than his nemesis, but he died in 1899 at age 67. Most of the people who chafed under his supervision and mistreatment did not mourn him much. In the end, he too was broke and asked Yale for a salary. He didn’t live long enough to see much of his collection removed from crates, let alone published. The Secretary of the Smithsonian, famous paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott, laid legal claim to much of the collection made by Marsh while in the employ of the U.S. Geological Survey, and the fossils were sent to the Smithsonian, where they still reside.
With the death of both men as the century ended, the field was soon taken over by the next generation: Osborn and many others at the American Museum, William Berryman Scott of Princeton, William J. Holland and others of the Carnegie Museum, plus Riggs at the Field Museum in Chicago, Knight and Reed at the University of Wyoming, and other rising museums. They soon developed their own competition for dinosaur bones to fill their halls, but it was a civil, friendly rivalry, not the bitter death-struggle of Cope and Marsh.
Even though the Bone Wars were unseemly and unprofessional, the consequences were mostly beneficial. Paleontology was just a tiny hobby science before the Bone Wars, with only Joseph Leidy publishing obscure articles for specialists. By the time Cope and Marsh died, paleontology was a major science, with a huge public profile, especially as giant dinosaur mounts came to the museums and captivated the public. Dinosaurs entered the public consciousness for good, and many of the poorly understood and incomplete specimens from Europe (such as Cetiosaurus; see chapter 3) finally could be reconstructed accurately. This would not have happened so quickly without Cope and Marsh.
Both men wrote and published papers at an astounding rate. Cope published over 1,400 scientific articles in his lifetime, describing more than 1,300 new species. These included living fishes, amphibians, and reptiles as well as fossils. As a result, he became one of the pioneers of American herpetology and ichthyology, and the primary journal, Copeia, is named after him. Marsh wasn’t quite as prolific, but he published dozens of short articles without illustrations each year, naming and staking claim to every fossil that had just emerged from a crate. Before the Bone Wars, only nine dinosaurs had been named from North America (based on isolated teeth named by Leidy, most of which are invalid now). By the time the Bone Wars were over, more than 150 dinosaurs had been named, including most of the famous ones that every kid recognizes. We will look at some of these in later chapters.
DINOSAUR MEN: THE NEXT GENERATION
“Most Colossal Animal Ever on Earth Just Found Out West” read the headline of the New York Herald in 1898, 14 years after it had run the nasty Cope-Marsh feud in its columns. With typical journalistic exaggeration, it described the monster in purple prose. “When it walked the earth trembled under the weight of 120,000 pounds, when it ate it filled a stomach enough to hold three elephants, when it was angry its terrible roar could be heard ten miles, and when it stood up its height was equal to eleven stories of a skyscraper.”
The specimen described in the article was a new sauropod they called “Brontosaurus giganteus,” which had just been collected from the Morrison Formation just south of Laramie. The photograph of the thighbone identified the collector as “Bill Reeder,” who had recovered the specimens for the new museum at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In actuality, it was the same William Harlow Reed who had started out as the Como railroad stationmaster and then worked at Como Bluff for Marsh for several years after 1877 (figure 8.1). He had been working for Wilbur Clinton Knight of the University of Wyoming since 1894 and had amassed a collection there weighing more than 72 metric tonnes (79 tons), almost as large as the collection he sent to Yale. That collection still fills their remarkable exhibit hall.
Figure 8.1
(A) Carnegie’s crew at “Camp Carnegie” (from left to right): Paul Miller, Jacob Wortman, William Harlow Reed, and Reed’s son Willie. (B) Legendary American Museum dinosaur hunters in 1895. From left to right: Olof A. Peterson (later with the Carnegie Museum), Jacob Wortman, Walter Granger, and Albert Thomson. ([A and B] Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
The newspaper headlines caught the attention of a very important man: Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie was the one of richest men in the world at that time, rising from an impoverished background in Scotland. Starting as a lowly telegraph operator, he used his hard work, determination, and business savvy to invest in railroads, bridge building, bond trading, and then got in on the ground floor of the growing steel industry. By age 33, he was a millionaire, and when he sold Carnegie Steel to J. P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million, he was unquestionably the richest man alive.
Carnegie had already decided that he would give away or invest most of his wealth in the public good, spending 90 percent of his fortune to endow hospitals, universities, and especially to build public libraries in most cities and towns. As Pittsburgh’s leading citizen, he felt that his adopted home should be civilized as well. He had already spent $24 million to found the Carnegie Institute, with its concert hall, art gallery, and small natural history museum. But the newspaper headlines made him determined that his Carnegie Museum of Natural History should also have gigantic dinosaurs to match those at Yale, the American Museum, the Field Museum, and the University of Wyoming.
For the director of the Carnegie Museum, he hired William Jacob Holland, a versatile and ambitious clergyman, entomologist, and paleontologist (figure 8.2). When Carnegie saw the newspaper article about the “Most Colossal Animal,” he clipped it and sent it to Holland with this instruction: “Buy this for Pittsburgh.”
Figure 8.2
The giants of paleontology in 1899—a meeting of the American Museum paleontologists as they take a break from their own excavations to visit the Carnegie Museum Sheep Creek Diplodocus quarry. From left to right: William Harlow Reed, Albert “Bill” Thomson, William J. Holland (Carnegie Museum Director), Henry Fairfield Osborn (American Museum DVP Head), William Diller Matthew, Walter Granger, Jacob Wortman, and squatting in the foreground, Richard Swann Lull. Osborn, Thomson, Matthew, Lull, and Granger were with the American Museum at the time, and Holland, Reed, and Wortman were with the Carnegie Museum. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Holland quickly figured out that “Bill Reeder” was actually William Harlow Reed and offered him a job at the Carnegie Museum. Reed agreed to find more fossils for the Carnegie Museum and gave the University of Wyoming his notice. Holland then hired former American Museum collector Arthur Coggeshall and another young paleontologist, Jacob Lawson Wortman (see figures 8.1 and 8.2), who would become famous for other discoveries. The three men met in Medicine Bow to see if they could find more of the “Most Colossal Animal.” The original “Brontosaurus giganteus” quarry was mostly exhausted, but they poked around the area to the north of Como Bluff in Sheep Creek, Wyoming. On July 2, 1899, they found toe bones and eventually nearly complete skeletons of several individuals of Diplodocus. Holland then sent Olof Peterson, a Swedish paleontologist working in their museum, and Charles Whitney Gilmore (who had studied at University of Wyoming and worked with Reed before) to join the field crew for the massive excavation. By patching together parts of four skeletons, they were able to mount a nearly complete skeleton (again, missing the skull, as happens so often with sauropods). It was over 26 meters (84 feet) long, the longest dinosaur ever found even today, with an extremely long whip-like tail.
By 1901, the nearly complete skeleton (nicknamed “Dippy”) was back in Pittsburgh and being described and published by John Bell Hatcher (another legendary paleontologist discussed in later chapters). Hatcher officially named it Diplodocus carnegii, in honor of their benefactor, who was immensely pleased. (Paleontologists know that rich donors love having fossils named after them and often become more generous as a result.) It was Carnegie’s turn to have a dinosaur that made worldwide headlines, and he was not going to miss the opportunity to publicize his new museum and the dinosaur named after him. He hired a team of Italian plasterers to make numerous replicas of the original fossils in Pittsburgh, and then gave the extraordinary replicas to museums all over the world. Holland went with each gift to be feted and celebrated and then to supervise the mounting of the plaster replicas. In this way, museums in England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, Spain, Argentina, and Mexico all had copies of Carnegie’s dinosaur on display. Until recently, for example, the central hall in the Natural History Museum in London was decorated not by any British dinosaur (which were all too incomplete to feature in the main halls) but by Carnegie’s gift (figure 8.3). Coggeshall wrote that “to Diplodocus carnegii goes the credit of making ‘dinosaur’ a household word…presidents, kings, emperors, and czars besieged Andrew Carnegie for replicas to be installed in their national museums.”
Figure 8.3
Mounted replica of Diplodocus carnegii, donated to the British Museum by Andrew Carnegie and featured in the main entrance hall for over a century. It has since been moved elsewhere and replaced by a blue whale. (Photograph by the author)
THE REAL “JURASSIC PARK”
The Carnegie Museum’s luck with sauropods did not end with the Sheep Creek find. Another one of their paleontologists, Earl Douglass (figure 8.4), spent most of every summer in the early 1900s scouring the rocks of Montana, Utah, and Wyoming, mostly looking for fossil mammals. Holland was visiting Douglass in the field in the Uinta Range of northeastern Utah when they decided to follow up on a hunch. As Holland described it:
We decided that we would set forth early the next day with our teams of mules and visit the foot-hills, where Hayden had indicated the presence of Jurassic exposures. We started shortly after dawn and spent a long day on the cactus-covered ridge of Dean Man’s Bench, in making our way through the gullies and ravines to the north…. The next day we went forward through the broken foot-hills which lie east and south of the great gorge through which the Green River emerges from the Uinta Mountains on its course to the Grand Canyon of Arizona. As we slowly made our way through the stunted groves of pine we realized that we were upon Jurassic beds. We tethered our mules in the forest. Douglass went to the right and I to the left, scrambling up and down through the gullies in search of Jurassic fossils, with the understanding that, if he found anything he was to discharge the shotgun which he carried, and if I found anything, I would fire the rifle, which I carried. His shotgun was presently heard and after a somewhat toilsome walk in the direction of the sound I heard him shout. I came up to him standing beside the weathered-out femur of a Diplodocus lying in the bottom of a very narrow ravine in which it was difficult to descend. Whence this perfectly preserved bone had fallen, from what stratum of the many above us it had been washed, we failed to ascertain. But there it was, as clean and perfect as if it had been worked out from the matrix in the laboratory. It was too heavy for us to shoulder and carry away, and possibly even too heavy for the light-wheeled vehicle in which we were traveling. So we left it there, proof positive that in that general region search for dinosaurian remains would probably be successful.
Figure 8.4
Earl Douglass standing next to the bones of a dinosaur at the Carnegie Quarry, which later became Dinosaur National Monument. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Holland’s prediction came true a year later on August 17, 1909. Douglass was working in the same area with a local Mormon farmer, George “Dad” Goodrich. Douglass climbed up the ridge above where the femur had been found the year before and looked down. “At last, in the top of the ledge where the softer overlying beds form a divide—a kind of saddle—I saw eight of the tail bones of Brontosaurus in exact position. It was a beautiful site [sic].” He and Goodrich went back to town and recruited more helpers, then they began to quarry out the bones. “I have discovered a huge dinosaur Brontosaurus and if the skeleton is as perfect as the portions we have exposed, the task of excavating will be enormous and will cost a lot of money, but the rock is that kind to get perfect bones from.” This message brought Holland to Utah, and when he saw what Douglass had, he immediately telegraphed Carnegie to get him to agree to fund the excavation.
The nearest town was tiny Vernal, Utah, over 32 kilometers (20 miles) away, so for the next 13 years (1909–1922), Douglass took up permanent residence in the area near Carnegie Quarry. There he and his crews lived and worked year round except when the weather was unbearable. He even brought his young wife and one-year-old baby out to live with him, first in a small tent heated by an iron stove, but eventually in a homesteader’s log cabin with a garden and cow and chickens and everything the family needed. First they exposed the Brontosaurus he originally discovered, only to find the neck twisted back into the rock—and the skull missing. Nevertheless, it was nearly complete and about 30 meters (98 feet) long, with a tail over 9 meters (30 feet) in length. When it was shipped to Pittsburgh, cleaned and mounted, Holland described it and named it Apatosaurus louisae in honor Carnegie’s wife Louise. Holland and Douglass both thought that a nearby skull like that of Diplodocus was probably the correct skull for Apatosaurus, but they were overruled by people who followed Marsh’s reconstruction and by Osborn, so this skeleton remained headless in Pittsburgh until after Holland died (see chapter 7).
Once the first skeleton had been removed, Douglass and his men found three other sauropod skeletons nearby and realized that the bone bed was a thick bed of sandstone that was tilted almost vertically. They blasted away the overburden of soft Morrison shales and trenched down to expose the top surface of the tilted sandstone layer. Eventually the trench was 180 meters (600 feet) long and 24 meters (80 feet) deep. Between 1909 and 1922, Douglass and his men removed the top half of the sandstone wall, which was over 90 meters (300 feet) long and 23 meters (75 feet) high. They also excavated the east and west side of the huge wall of sandstone.
They recovered 315 tonnes (347 tons) of fossils and took them by buckboard wagon to the nearest rail stop in Dragon, Utah, over 80 kilometers (50 miles) away. Altogether they found more than 20 skeletons and additional fossils representing about 300 additional individual dinosaurs. The sandstone layer apparently had once been a river channel in a Jurassic river, and portions of carcasses had floated down to that spot and then become buried.
In 1922, William Holland retired and Andrew Carnegie died, and the funding dried up. The Carnegie Museum was crammed to the limit with over 270 metric tonnes (297 tons) of bones that had not yet been prepared or cleaned, so the museum decided to end the excavation and close the quarry. In 1923, Charles W. Gilmore (now at the Smithsonian) reopened the quarry and hauled out about 50 tons of material, including the Diplodocus long on display at the Smithsonian, along with the complete, articulated skeleton of a baby Camarasaurus. In 1924, Douglass then began working for the University of Utah and collected another 33 crates of specimens, including a complete Allosaurus, the last large-scale excavation of the quarry. However, they never offered him a position, and he died in poverty in 1931 without seeing his vision realized.
Douglass’s dream was to see the Carnegie Quarry made into a national monument. He knew that the locality had amazing potential because they had removed only half of the original wall of sandstone. He wanted the rest to be left in place as a permanent monument for people to see dinosaur bones as they are found in the field. As he wrote, “I hope that the Government, for the benefit of science and the people, will uncover a large area, leaves the bones and skeletons in relief and house them in. It would make one of the most astounding and instructive sights imaginable.” Douglass tried to buy the mineral rights to protect the site, but the courts ruled that dinosaur bones were not minerals. But Holland had a powerful friend, Charles Doolittle Walcott, a paleontologist who was also head of the Smithsonian. Walcott convinced President Woodrow Wilson to designate the quarry area as Dinosaur National Monument in 1915.
The monument was isolated in the middle of the wilderness of Utah. There was almost no way to reach it in the days before cars were common and roads paved, so it remained primitive and undeveloped for years. During the Depression, crews of unemployed men came from the WPA to remove the overburden of Morrison shale from the sandstone layer in anticipation of resuming excavation and display in the future. Nothing much was built on the site during World War II, but in the 1950s the Park Service surveyed the area and determined it was worth developing. A modern glass-sided building was finished in 1958, and its north wall was made of the sandstone layer full of dinosaur bones.
Over the years, the building has become one of the most popular national monuments in the country (figure 8.5). About 400,000 visitors a year come all the way out to northeastern Utah to gaze at the wall of dinosaur bones that were excavated in relief and left in place. In 2006, the quarry building was closed because it was beginning to rip apart as the swelling clays of the Morrison Formation expanded and contracted after each rain or snow, disrupting the foundation. A much larger Visitor’s Center was built down on the flats below the quarry (near where Douglass had his log cabin), and since 1979 a shuttle service has carried the flood of visitors coming to the tiny quarry parking lot. The quarry building was rebuilt with 70-foot steel pilings driven deep into the harder bedrock below, and it reopened in 2011. It houses just the paleontological exhibits; the main Visitor’s Center down on the flats has exhibits about the rest of the monument, plus a gift shop, offices, and other support facilities.
Figure 8.5
Dinosaur National Monument Quarry Visitors Center: (A) the glass structure built over the steeply dipping wall of dinosaur bones; (B) a view of the wall of dinosaur bones left where they were found but excavated in relief. ([A] Courtesy of D. J. Chure; [B] photograph by the author)
Dinosaur National Monument is the enduring legacy of Douglass, Holland, and Carnegie as well. More than 400 individual dinosaurs have been found, more than at any other Jurassic quarry. There are 10 genera of dinosaurs, including at least six kinds of sauropods, three kinds of theropods, plus Stegosaurus, an iguanodontid, a dryosaurid, as well as turtles, crocodiles, and even tiny shrew-sized mammals found elsewhere in the monument. Not only is it one of the most productive Jurassic sites ever found, but it is one of the few where visitors can see what the fossils were like as they were found and wonder at the huge number of enormous bones that were discovered here. An excellent website (www.carnegiequarry.com) allows anyone to explore many aspects of science and history at Carnegie Quarry.
FOR FURTHER READING
Brinkman, Paul D. The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Colbert, Edwin. Men and Dinosaurs: The Search in the Field and in the Laboratory. New York: Dutton, 1968.
Curry Rogers, Kristina, and Jeffrey Wilson. The Sauropods: Evolution and Biology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Davidson, Jane Pierce. The Bone Sharp: The Life of Edward Drinker Cope. Philadelphia, Penn.: Academy of Natural Sciences, 1997.
Douglass, G. E. Speak to the Earth and It Shall Teach You: The Life and Times of Earl Douglass, 1862–1931. 2009, www.booksurge.com.
Farlow, James, and M. K. Brett-Surman. The Complete Dinosaur. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Fastovsky, David, and David Weishampel. Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History, 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Hallett, Mark, and Mathew J. Wedel. The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Holtz, Thomas R., Jr. Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages. New York: Random House, 2011.
Howard, Robert West. The Dawnseekers: The First History of American Paleontology. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Jaffe, Mark. The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science. New York: Crown, 2000.
Klein, Nicole. Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Lanham, Url. The Bone Hunters. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.
Naish, Darren. The Great Dinosaur Discoveries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Naish, Darren, and Paul M. Barrett. Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2016.
Osborn, Henry Fairfield. Cope, Master Naturalist: Life and Letters of Edward Drinker Cope, with a Bibliography of His Writings. Manchester, N.H.: Ayer, 1978.
Plate, Robert. The Dinosaur Hunters: Othniel C. Marsh and Edward D. Cope. New York: McKay, 1964.
Remes, Kristian, Carole T. Gee, and P. Martin Sander. Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Schuchert, Charles, and Clara M. LeVene. O. C. Marsh: Pioneer in Paleontology. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940.
Shore, Elizabeth Noble. The Fossil Feud Between E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh: Spying, Dirty Tricks, Plagiarism—The Exciting Story of the Famous and Bitter Rivalry Between Two of America’s Greatest Paleontologists. Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1974.
Spaulding, David A. E. Dinosaur Hunters: Eccentric Amateurs and Obsessed Professionals. Rocklin, Calif.: Prima, 1993.
Thomson, Keith. The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.
Tschopp, Emanuel, Octávio Mateus, and Roger B. J. Benson. “A Specimen-Level Phylogenetic Analysis and Taxonomic Revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda).” PeerJ 3 (2015): e857.
Upchurch, Paul, Paul M. Barrett, and Peter Dodson. “Sauropoda.” In The Dinosauria, 2nd ed., ed. David B. Weishampel, Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmólska, 259–322. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Wallace, David Rains. The Bonehunters’ Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Wilford, John Noble. The Riddle of the Dinosaur. New York: Knopf, 1985.