The Bone Wars

I can only assume that everyone saw the heading above and instantly thought "Finally, he's going to write about porn, it's about damn time!".  Well, I'm sorry to disappoint.  This Bone Wars has nothing to do with large breasts, but feel free to go look at some when you are done reading!

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.

In the end, the whole field of paleontology was disgraced and it took decades for future paleontologists to correct all of Marsh and Cope's idiotic mistakes all because these two nitwits couldn't get along.  And you thought your argument about taking the garbage out with your girlfriend was petty.  Sure, you both probably said some nasty things you wish you could take back, but at least you didn't ruin an entire profession that took until the release of Jurassic Park to fix.

"Yup, this never existed.  Thanks a lot, non-porno Bone Wars."