Othniel

“Dinosaurs” quickly became a pawn in a power play when paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh started up the “Bone Wars” of the late 19th century, competing to name new dinosaurs and other fossil creatures to win the title of America’s preeminent paleontologist.

Grinnell’s introduction to a West he would champion for more than half a century was a Yale fossil-finding expedition under the tutelage of the paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh, one of the first curators of the Peabody Museum.

Scion of a well-to-do family that could trace its lineage to the Mayflower, Grinnell had been making forays to the Wild West since the summer of 1870, when he and other newly minted Yale graduates dug up dinosaur bones under the tutelage of one of their professors, the paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh.

This imposed some semblance of order after the wild west days of fossil hunting, when rivalrous collectors like Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh would freely roam public lands, digging up fossils to sell to museums or wealthy collectors.

In the nineteenth century, Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, the nation’s two leading paleontologists, engaged in a bitter competition to collect dinosaur fossils in the American West.