The Bonehunters' Revenge (Paperback)

James Gordon Bennett becomes a distant member of this triage while he rebuilds the New York Herald into a major newspaper. Bennett, at least as unorthodox as the scientists, kept the dispute between the two rivals well fanned throughout the latter part of the 19th Century. It proved a fine technique for boosting circulation, at least for a time. Any student of the period will recognise that "selling" dominated nearly all aspects of life, from newspapers to new species. Bennett had a pair of newsworthy characters to portray during their dispute, in Wallace's account. Marsh's and Cope's lives made good stories in themselves. Marsh, a New England patrician had "come into money" through an uncle. Cope, a Philadelphia Quaker, poured increasing amounts of the family fortune into fossil collecting expeditions.

Wallace is unable to find any specific event leading to the great rivalry. Once started, however, it burgeoned quickly and with great intensity. There were accusations of pilfering of fossils and plagiarising of journal papers. Professional journals were less restrained in those times, but ultimately both men had submissions scotched as being too harsh. The issue was almost always primacy - which one had found and named new species. The journals were the mechanism, but newspapers were sometimes utilised to established a find or novel dinosaur. Bone collections grew as the pace of the hunt overrode the time needed to prepare descriptions. The pair were always close with neither gaining significant ground over the other, while the newspaper-reading public avidly followed the race.

It was government priorities and money that finally gave Marsh the edge, Wallace tells us. The new Geological Survey, established to find mineral and timber resources, also had the money and power to assign when and where expeditions might go and fund the chosen ones. Marsh had an ally in John Wesley Powell who was a force in the Survey. Bypassed by the Survey, Cope bled away his inheritance mounting fossil-hunting expeditions in the American West - some of them solo. His health suffered due to long excursions in the field. Ultimately, his wife, unable to bear financial instability and dealing with a man whose vast enterprises exceeded her ability to cope, departed. Cope, alone, continued.

Wallace's treatment of this famous dispute is sharply honed and finely balanced. With accusations between the two men and their adherents, this is no small accomplishment. There was much to learn in a relatively new field. The abundance of fossils from the West demanded careful study and analysis, but Cope and Marsh knew that expedition funding followed the first discoverers. Wallace accepts this with some reservations, but condemns neither man. With the addition of some photos and diagrams [a map would have been useful], this is an informative book and an excellent read. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]