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The Bonehunter's Revenge: Dinosaurs and Fate in the Gilded Age – A Riveting History of Rivalry, Obsession, and Scientific Discovery - Softcover

Wallace, David Rains

 
9780618082407: The Bonehunter's Revenge: Dinosaurs and Fate in the Gilded Age – A Riveting History of Rivalry, Obsession, and Scientific Discovery
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0618082409 ISBN 13: 9780618082407
Verlag: Mariner, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

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 has been known by many names -- the Bone War, the Fossil Feud -- but the tragic story of the competition for fame and natural treasure between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, two leading paleontologists of the Gilded Age, remains prophetic of the conquest of the West as well as a watershed event in science.
With a historian's eye and a novelist's skill, David Rains Wallace charts in fascinating detail the unrestrained rivalry between Cope and Marsh and their obsession to become the first to make available to the world the abundant, unknown fossils of the western badlands. This story will surely fascinate anyone who has had to confront the myriad facets of professional jealousy, its sterile brooding, and how it leads to an emotional abyss.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Rains Wallace is the author of fifteen books, including The Turquoise Dragon, The Quetzal and the Macaw, The Monkey's Bridge (a 1997 New York Times Notable Book), and The Klamath Knot,which won the Burroughs Medal in 1984. He was raised in Connecticut and graduated from Wesleyan College. He now lives in Berkeley, California.

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Prologue: Assassination by Newspaper

In January 1890, the New York Herald devoted a great deal of
space to a squabble between two paleontologists. Professor E. D. Cope
accused Professor O. C. Marsh of scandalous crimes against science
and morality, and Marsh responded by accusing Cope of worse. A crowd
of other scientists and officials jumped or were dragged into the
fracas, trading accusations, threats, and insults through column
after close-printed column for three weeks, to the bemusement of
readers who were, at most, vaguely aware that a paleontologist was a
kind of hybrid biologist-geologist who studied evidence of
prehistoric life.
Occurring years before dinosaurs became good copy,
this "fossil feud" was not the usual stuff of 1890s mainstream
journalism. The readers of some academic review might have expected
it (Cope and Marsh had been fighting in such reviews for years), but
the New York Herald had been the nation's leading newspaper for
decades; its circulation only recently had become challenged by that
of Joseph Pulitzer's World. In what was regarded as the metropolitan
daily, a month of paleontological squabbling must have seemed a
bizarre lapse, a kind of journalistic petit mal, and the affair,
predictably, was little noticed by a public better versed in the
natural history of love nests than of extinct beasts. Its descent
into the oblivion of most newspaper scandals also must have seemed
predictable; it was certainly craved by the officials and
academicians who'd become caught in it. A 1902 book entitled Leading
American Men of Science contained biographies of both antagonists,
but didn't mention the feud. "It was an embarrassment," wrote the
historian James Penick, "and held to be unrelated to the achievements
of either man."
Yet the "bone war" did not lapse into oblivion. The feuding
paleontologists, Cope and Marsh, had been the leaders in their field,
and, as time passed, their rivalry became legendary as a colorful if
cautionary sideshow to scientific history. "The most important
feud ... hindered and hampered the younger generation for years,"
commented William Berryman Scott, professor of geology and
paleontology at Princeton from 1884 to 1930, and himself an unhappy
figure in the Herald affair. "Even yet, its effects persist, although
in no very important ways, and crop out when one is least expecting
them." The legend was mainly oral at first, but it crept into print
after Cope's friend, the influential paleontologist Henry Fairfield
Osborn, published the lengthy biography Cope: Master Naturalist, in
1931. The book was meant to rescue Cope from the disrepute partly
resulting from his role in the Herald squabble, but it prodded a
Marsh ally, Charles Schuchert, professor of paleontology at Yale, to
even the score by publishing, in 1940, an equally lengthy biography,
O. C. Marsh: Pioneer in Paleontology.
Since then, an unsteady but persistent stream of publications
has established the feud as a kind of hairline crack in American
science, suggestive of obscure stresses within. The New Yorker
recounted it in a 1962 "Onward and Upward with Science" piece, and
several popular books about it appeared in the next two decades. In
the 1980s and 1990s, books and articles on new dinosaur theories
mentioned it many times. Jane Pierce Davidson's Cope biography, The
Bone Sharp, came out in 1997, and I often heard of writers and
scientists working on new Cope or Marsh books while I did the
research for this one. A 1998 book included the rivalry among
science's "ten liveliest debates ever," along with Galileo's struggle
with Pope Urban VIII and Newton's arguments with Leibniz. The feud
has persisted in oral tradition as well, and its story has taken on
strange forms, as stories do in the amorphous realm of hearsay. As
the feud has receded in time, hearsay has mingled with history,
adding a distinctly mythic element that consistently colors the
published versions.
The bone war crept into my own consciousness in much the same
way that it entered history. I kept coming across it while reading
about paleontology, and it gradually evolved from a diversion to a
fascination. The fact that the two paleontologists discovered and
named many of the creatures that first interested me in the
prehistoric past-not only dinosaurs but the giant marine reptiles
that shared the Mesozoic Era with them and the strange mammals of the
subsequent Cenozoic Era-contributed to the fascination. So did the
circumstance that they made most of their discoveries in the West
during the Indian wars. Yet many other paleontologists have
discovered strange creatures in adventuresome places. Something
deeper than scientific and historical picturesqueness underlies the
abiding interest in Cope and Marsh: competition. Their rivalry was
virtually unrestrained, without the checks and balances that cultures
usually put on such disagreements, and in this they were typical of
late nineteenth-century America despite their esoteric profession. In
competing for a natural treasure-the abundant, unknown fossils of the
western badlands-they might have been timber barons or mining
tycoons, and their story is an example of a primal instinct that
underlies the highest human endeavor along with the lowest.
Cope and Marsh are likely to fascinate anyone who has had to
confront the myriad facets of professional jealousy-its sinking sense
of annihilation, sterile brooding, impotent anger. It is an emotional
abyss that is alluring as well as disturbing, and there is a
temptation to jump in, to engage in intrigue, publish attacks on real
or imagined rivals, and so forth. Like most people, I lack the
willpower for a wholehearted plunge, but I've wondered what it would
be like to let full-blown vanity sail me out over the steep canyons
of unbridled rivalry. Drawing back seems as ignoble as letting go,
since it doesn't end the base emotions; it merely manages them. In
Cope and Marsh, I saw a classic story of those who had not drawn
back, and I wanted to explore it. This was partly as ignoble as my
own recoil from the abyss; I wanted to enjoy vicariously the vanity
balloon ascension while witnessing the historical punishment of the
daredevils who had risked it. But there may have been something of
the nobler instinct that draws people to tragedy. I wanted to know
what, if any, wisdom or transcendence might lie beyond the folly of
unrestrained rivalry.
The 1890 Herald evidently was on to something more than an
esoteric argument, which raises a question of why the paper devoted
so much space to the feud. Memoirs and histories largely have
attributed the Herald's role to the only bylined author of the
coverage, an associate of Cope's named William Hosea Ballou. Having
assumed that Ballou was on the Herald staff, they took for granted
the newspaper's participation. Evidence, however, suggests that
Ballou was not a Herald staffer, that he was not even a professional
journalist; he was a barely competent free-lancer who wrote only part
of the Herald's bone-war coverage and bungled that, faking interviews
and infuriating named sources. An eminent paleontologist, Alfred S.
Romer, later said of Ballou that if scientists "merely passed the
time of day with him, they were liable to be misquoted for a column
or so." Since it seemed unlikely that this hack had controlled the
editorial policy of a leading daily, I began to suspect that a much
larger figure lurked below Ballou's minnow-like one, a man as
monstrous in his way as the paleontologists'...

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Verlag
Mariner
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0618082409
ISBN 13 
9780618082407
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
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