THE BONE WARS

A 19th-century scientific feud fueled our modern mania for dinosaurs.

Sharing a fascination with fossilized bones and eager to find new dinosaur species, O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope started out as close collaborators—“friends forever,” as Kurtz puts it. But they had a massive falling out (“Hoo boy!”) over which end of a long-necked Elasmosaurus skeleton the head should be attached to. For the rest of their careers, they engaged in an “all-out competition” for new discoveries. Things turned so “mean and messy” as they spied on one another and sabotaged or seeded sites with fakes that both ended up “disgraced and broke.” But in the process they filled American museums with dino specimens and sparked a public interest in them that has yet to wane. Along with scenes of racially diverse groups of marveling modern museumgoers, Vidal mixes views of rough-hewn crews digging up bones and trying to figure out how they go together (or donning a false beard and other disguises to sneak into each other’s camps) with antique fleshed-out examples of early discoveries based on now-outmoded guesses about how they might have looked. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A wry case study in how bad behavior can advance scientific knowledge.