The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age [Anglais] [Broché]

It's sad but true--Jerry Springer's roots go deep in American culture. Even scientists of the Victorian era could jump on stage and start slugging, as we learn in The Bonehunters' Revenge. This smart, adventurous book by nature writer David Rains Wallace examines the long-standing feud between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, and especially their month-long 1890 death match in the pages of the New York Herald. The bizarre--by modern newspaper standards--series of interviews, letters, and editorials, promoted and escalated by publisher James Gordon Bennett (a kind of proto-Hearst), threw accusations of theft, forgery, vandalism, plagiarism, and worse back and forth until both men fell back, exhausted and nearly broken.

Wallace gives his readers far more than a simple freak show, though; he shows us that behind the controversy lay a crucial political struggle for control not just of fossils but the fate of the western territories. The methods Cope and Marsh used to control and divert fossils inevitably guided the expansion and settling of these lands, and Wallace argues forcefully that this competition started the boom of unsustainable growth that we are only now beginning to recognize. So by all means enjoy watching the fists fly in The Bonehunters' Revenge, but remember what happens to those who don't learn from the past. --Rob Lightner --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were two of America's greatest 19th-century paleontologists. Together, they were responsible for unearthing and naming the vast majority of this country's fossil dinosaurs and mammals. Over the course of their careers, they competed mercilessly, and often unethically, each pushing the other to further discoveries. Their feud erupted into public consciousness during two weeks in January 1890, when the New York Herald, a tabloid published by James Gordon Bennett Jr., ran a series of articles leveling charges and countercharges between the two of scientific malfeasance, including plagiarism, ignorance, favoritism, sloth, dishonesty, fossil-stealing and incompetence. Wallace (The Monkey's Bridge, etc.) makes these articles the centerpiece of his disappointing history of 19th-century paleontology. Unfortunately, he all too convincingly demonstrates that the articles were filled with errors, as well as being both boring and impenetrable to the average reader. Wallace loses credibility when, in an apparent attempt to generate interest, he adopts some of the hyperbole so common in the tabloid press of the time. Not atypical is his description of the some-time journalist who penned the first Herald article on the feud: "a photo of Ballou, showing a sloping forehead, receding chin, shifty eyes, and strangely convoluted ears, might have come from the period's abnormal psychology textbooks." Though the feud between the scientists is one of the more tantalizing and contentious events in the history of science, Marsh and Cope, as well as their work, have been covered in numerous other works (apparently diligently consulted by Wallace, who offers a seven-page bibliography). This book, engaging enough but not nearly equal to the author's best work (e.g., The Klamath Knot), doesn't add much of significance to the record. Agent, Sandy Taylor. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Award-winning nature writer Wallace (The Monkey's Bridge) recounts one of the most interestingAyet bizarreAepisodes in dinosaur paleontology. Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope started out as two men of means bent on pursuing a career studying and locating fossils. Marsh, as a member of the wealthy Peabody family, had ample means to finance expeditions and purchase more fossil bones than he would ever have time to study; Cope, also from a wealthy family, followed suit. Against the dramatic backdrop of Indian wars, Cope and Marsh battled each other to possess the dinosaur bones so plentiful in the West during the 1870s. Wallace does an excellent job of presenting the many factsAthose known and those unsubstantiatedAregarding the ruthless feud that drove them both to destruction. The greatest tragedy is that Cope and Marsh really made significant fossil discoveries, finding and naming many new species, but they became so obsessed with trying to destroy and discredit each other that they wasted their opportunities. Wallace adds an important viewpoint to a remarkable story in the history of scientific discovery.
-AGloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll. Lib., Kansas City, MO
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

...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... --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

After the Civil War, the American push West brought to light beds of fossils exposed in the badlands and buttes. Whoever could collect, classify, and place in an evolutionary framework the new finds would, Wallace notes in this thoroughly fascinating history, find fame in the new science of paleontology. Entering upon the high plains were two figures, Edward Drinker Cope from Philadelphia and Othniel Marsh from New Haven, naturalists who subsequently developed a vitriolic antagonism. The paleo-ossuarial matters the combatants fenced over supports Wallace's theme--vanity and the temptations and costs of indulging in it. Cope and Marsh, the former an easily read open book, the latter a self-contained, systematically ambitious sort, privately catalogued the other's infamies. Lying in wait was the sensationalist and socially ostracized publisher of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett. He struck the match in 1890, after which the careers of Cope and Marsh declined until their deaths later in the decade. This curious century-old feud comes alive with momentum and understanding in Wallace's skillful hands. Gilbert Taylor --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

A fine and dramatic rendering of the Marsh-Cope paleontological imbroglio, played out in the pages of the New York Herald, from Wallace (The Monkey's Bridge: Mysteries of Evolution in Central America, 1997, etc.). Professors O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope had been squabbling over their old bones for years before the Herald decided to inflate and sensationalize the feud in a bid to win their circulation war with the New York World. Both paleontologists were eminent in their own way: Marsh taught at Yale, advised presidents, was a protg of congressmen, and had a sheaf of discoveries to his credit; Cope was the more imaginative, if more reckless, of the two, and had a equal number of superb fossil finds under his belt. At first, the rivalry was quaint: ``The patrician Edward may have considered Marsh not quite a gentleman. The academic Othniel probably regarded Cope as not quite a professional.'' Wallace tells the story with enthusiasm and relish as the professorial beard-pulling got out of hand. Cope claimed Marsh stole fossils and ideas; Marsh counterclaimed Cope was a crank and a fool who put dinosaur heads on the wrong end of the beast. But when Marsh used his political power to freeze Cope out of the fossil lands, Cope engaged a hack to smear Marsh in the Herald. The paper's publisher, the nefarious James Gordon Bennett Jr., played the scientists like stringed instruments until both crashed in an embarrassment of accusations. More's the pity, as Wallace notes, as their work demonstrating ``evolutionary transitions linking mammalian humanity to the transmutational continuum'' was overshadowed, and the public feud ``smashed John Wesley Powell's farsighted attempt to develop the West in sustainable fashion,'' as Powell's (the first chief of the US Geographical Survey) reputation was severely damaged in the Herald's pages. An ugly little episode that typified ``an age so greedy that men fought over petrified bones.'' -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"A crisp, well-informed, and fair-minded retelling of the Cope-Marsh "bone war.""

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.