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Both men had conceived a passion for fossils, and were to become the greatest fossil hunters of their – and arguably any other – age. Awareness of fossils had gathered pace since the early 19th century and the end of the American Civil War, and the opening up of the American West, particularly the rampant growth of the railways, had set the stage for a blizzard of discoveries (see box, page 54). Cope and Marsh would be at the forefront of these developments. Scientific renown, even glory, was at stake for those who could find, reconstruct, describe and name new species, but what truly drove them was something dark and atavistic: an insatiable hunger to possess. Each man would eventually amass vast collections; in Marsh’s case, at least, far more than he could adequately process.

At first there seems to have been a degree of cordiality, even cooperation, between the two men, but avarice soon overcame concord. Cope himself traced the beginning of their feud to 1868, claiming that he had taken Marsh on a tour of the New Jersey fossil beds, but that ‘soon after, in endeavouring to obtain fossils from these localities, I found everything closed to me and pledged to Marsh for money considerations.’ Marsh’s financial clout (he was backed by his uncle’s massive fortune, via the Peabody Museum at Yale) and political nous would increasingly enable him to ‘reserve’ fertile fossil sites as his private preserves.

Other reports date the start of the feud to an earlier incident in 1866, when Marsh published a report correcting an incorrect reconstruction of an elasmosaurus by Cope. The geologist Walter Wheeler, however, points to the summer of 1872, when both men were collecting in Bridger Basin, Wyoming; it appears it was at this time that their competitiveness boiled over into antagonism. The following year Marsh wrote to Cope to complain about his behaviour in Wyoming: ‘The information I received ... made me very angry, and ... I was so mad ... I should have “gone for you”, not with pistols or fists, but in print ... I was never so angry in my life.’ Cope’s response? ‘All the specimens you obtained during August 1872 you owe to me.’

Their row grew to encompass arguments over access to fossils, accusations of deliberate destruction, attempts to hijack collections and bitter and complicated feuding over priority when it came to publishing descriptions of specimens. Marsh quickly retired from front-line collecting, hiring proxies to do the work (but claiming all the credit); Cope, without the funds or the institutional backing of his rival, was still in the field when the conflict reached its apogee at Como Bluff in Wyoming, one of the richest fossil sites in the world.

In 1877, each man was alerted to the site by different sources. Marsh’s proxies resorted to code words and deception to throw Cope off the scent. His assistant Samuel Williston wrote to Marsh that the bones ‘extend for seven miles and are by the ton.’ Another assistant, William Harlow Reed, wrote to a colleague, capturing the excitement of the pursuit: ‘I wish you were here to see the bones roll out and they are beauties ... it would astonish you to see the holes we have dug.’