In 1868, Edward Drinker Cope, the brightest young paleontologist in America, unveiled a new fossil reptile he had reconstructed in his Philadelphia laboratory. He had put the head on the wrong end. His Yale rival, Othniel Charles Marsh, came down to see it, and pointed it out. Cope spent the rest of his life trying to bury Marsh. So did Marsh.

They had once been friends. Cope was the rich Quaker prodigy from Philadelphia, agnostic, no formal degree. Marsh was the dour Yale professor whose millionaire uncle George Peabody paid for everything. They had been on field trips together. They had described each other's first species. Cope had named a fossil amphibian after Marsh. Marsh had named one of his own discoveries after Cope. Then came the head on the tail.

For fifteen years, between 1877 and 1892, Cope at the University of Pennsylvania and Marsh at Yale waged the Bone Wars. They raced to the great bone beds at Como Bluff, Wyoming, where the bones of the Jurassic literally poked out of the ground. They bribed each other's diggers. They sent spies to each other's camps. At one point Marsh's foreman locked Cope's foreman out of the Como Bluff train station to delay a shipment. The diggers threw rocks at each other. When Marsh's teams finished with a quarry, he ordered them to dynamite the remaining fossils rather than let Cope find them. They published rival species names on the same skeletons. They flooded the journals with corrections of each other. By the time they were done, they had named more than one hundred and thirty new dinosaur species: more than every paleontologist before them combined.

By the early 1890s both men had ruined themselves. Cope had sold his house and was living among his fossil cases. Marsh had emptied his uncle's estate. Edward Cope died on the twelfth of April, 1897, aged fifty-six. In his will he left his body to science. He instructed that his brain be removed and preserved at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. He stipulated that Othniel Marsh, when his turn came, should do the same, so the question of who had the bigger brain could finally be settled. Marsh refused. He died two years later. Cope's brain is still there.

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