Around the 1860's, two colleagues named Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope started out as friends in the same profession. Both wanted to uncover the remains of dinosaurs and both sported wicked mustaches. A couple years after going on some expeditions together, they went their separate ways and even split amicably. However, after a discovery of fossils in New Jersey, Marsh bribed the pit operators to divert any new finds his way and when Cope found out about it, he was pissed. And thus, the Bone War began. So, let's break down some the stupidity these two got into during their stupid feud:
- Opposing research teams occasionally resorted to fighting and sometimes even used dynamite in said brawls.
- They would blow up recently excavated sites so that the other guy couldn't dig up any leftover fossils.
- In a race to discover the most dinosaurs, between them they "found" the same dinosaur 20 times and named it something different each time.
- Sometimes they would just put a different skull on the wrong body of a skeleton so they could claim another discovery. This resulted in the non-existent Brontosaurus which is actually just a Apatosaurus that Marsh put another skull on and claimed a new species. The mistake wasn't corrected for 70 years.
- Wrote fraudulent papers about each other trying to discredit the other guy with little research ever put into those articles.
- Sending spies into the other's research team who would report mistakes made by the other and even sabotaged some digs.
"Yup, this never existed. Thanks a lot, non-porno Bone Wars." |
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