Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age - Couverture rigide

"David Rains Wallace's book, 'The Bonehunters' Revenge,' is a crisp, well-informed and fair-minded retelling of the Cope-Marsh 'bone war.' The characterizations of the two men are well drawn against a backdrop of 19th-century science, the opening of the American West and an expanding search for relics of past life, dinosaurs very much included." The New York Times

"Wallace's fast-moving and well-written book is sure to become the definitive work on the Marsh-Cope feud." -- John S. McIntosh, professor emeritus, Wesleyan University

"There is science, and then there are stories about scientists, and David Rains Wallace has dug up a great one. The Bonehunters' Revenge charts the great divide running through the collective culture of science: on the one side, scientific thought as indelible image of reason; on the other, the tangled mess of envy, paranoia, ambition, and bile in which some scientists find themselves mired. Few have been as throroughly mired, and for so long, as Wallace's obsessed pair of professors, Cope and Marsh. A fascinating tale of triumph, folly, and very old bones. -- John Vernon, author of A Book of Reasons

"David Rains Wallace is the best sort of nature writer - one unafraid to link natural history and the imagination. Like Peter Mattheissen, John McPhee, and Stephen Jay Gould, he asks large questions but knows the answer we find will always be too small. And he writes in a clear, graceful, completely non-technical style." The Chicago Sun-Times

"Wallace deftly recounts the famous and venomous fossil feud, how it damaged the lives and careers of both men and why it resonates today from the arid West's suburbia to the halls of academe." The San Francisco Chronicle

When dinosaur fossils were first discovered in the Wild West, they sparked one of the greatest scientific battles in American history. Over the past century it's been known by many names -- the Bone War, the Fossil Feud -- but the tragic story of the conflict between two leading paleontologists of the Gilded Age remains a prophetic tale of the conquest of the West, as well as a watershed event in science. Edward Drinker Cope was a Philadelphia Quaker from a wealthy family, an old-fashioned naturalist in the Jeffersonian tradition. Othniel Charles Marsh, a farm boy who had risen to a Yale professorship, was the model of a modern scientific entrepreneur. Opposites in personality and background as well as in political orientation and scientific beliefs, they fought over fossils as bitterly as other men fought over gold. With Indian wars swirling around them, they conducted their own personal warfare, staking out territories, employing scouts, troops, and spies. When James Gordon Bennett, the sociopathic publisher of the New York Herald, got wind of their feud, he stirred up an inferno that destroyed the lives of both men and scarred the reputations of many others, including John Wesley Powell, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey. In the aftermath, Powell's environmentally progressive ideas for limiting settlement of the West lost out to his opponents' laissez-faire boosterism, and the repercussions of the Bone War linger in many of the conflicts that rend the country today.