steve brusatte rise and fall of the dinosaurs

And yet between them, the combatants presided over the discovery of hundreds of species, including what Brusatte calls “ones that roll off the tongue of every schoolchild: Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus. The Bone Wars, as the conflict was called, reached their nadir when Marsh had a fossil field dynamited to keep Cope from exploring it to gain an edge, in other words, Marsh destroyed knowledge. Culp and Marsh didn’t want merely to name dinosaurs they also wanted to describe and classify them in scientific journals, each man showing off his erudition, buttressing his claim to be the discipline’s top dog. That’s ridiculous, says Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh and author of a new Jurassic blockbuster, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of. “Once chummy,” Brusatte writes, they “had let ego and pride metastasize into a full-on feud, which was so radioactive that they would do anything to one-up each other in an insane battle to see who could name the most new dinosaurs.” Here is one of the few places in the book where I wish the author had dug a little deeper.

The only scientists Brusatte speaks ill of are long dead: the batty 19th-century rivals Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

Steve brusatte rise and fall of the dinosaurs