10 Deeply Personal Historical Rivalries
1. Edward Cope Vs. Charles Marsh: A Bone To Pick
The feud between Edward Cope and Charles Marsh was so hot it even has its own popular subtitle: The Bone Wars. Palaeontologists, right?
The late 1800s marked a huge spike in interest and funding for the search for giant dead lizard bones, with Edward Cope and Charles Marsh at the forefront of this movement. The two men were friends, or at least cordial, but their friendship declined due to their differences of opinion on scientific theory and the fact they were competing for who could discover the most dinosaurs.
Feelings may have been hurt when Marsh informed Cope that he had incorrectly reconstructed an Elasmosaurus skeleton, with the skull on the tail rather than the neck. Marsh also paid excavators to bring him undiscovered samples from Cope's dig sites. Never dig in another man's pit.
What followed were years of oneupmanship and sabotage, with workers at different dig sites openly pelting each other with rocks. Cope dragooned many of Marsh's former employees into testifying against their former boss, and made public a diary Cope had kept recording every known crime and scientific mistake Marsh had committed.
Cope even challenged Marsh to a brain-sizing competition (seriously WTF?) upon both their deaths to decide who had the biggest brain. Marsh declined the opportunity to find out.