Petulant Paleontologists

Before the adoption of the current system of indentured servitude and apprenticeship, science was primarily conducted by rich people with a lot of time on their hands.  There was a lot to be learned and if you had the time and money to give to science, it would see to it that you could claim some discovery for yourself.  Compare this arrangement of the leisurely pursuit of knowledge and waiting recognition in London's Royal Society to what you have to put up with today and tell me you wouldn't trade places with a 19th century scientist.  However, this edenic scientific community was rife with underhanded attempts to gain recognition.  There's nothing like seriousminded smart folks acting like children to make for light Saturday reading, so here we go.

Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur, was responsible for getting the British Museum of Natural History created and did pioneering work on the classification of species.  He also looked like this so obviously he was a creepy cheater whom everyone loathed.  When dinosaurs were first being discovered, he left the medical profession to begin his full-time pursuit of stealing other people's findings.  Despite dozens of other researchers already pursuing work on dinosaurs, Owen came up with the name and thus felt that he deserved credit for their discovery.  Unable to lay claim to finding an entire superorder of animal, he started making claims to finding specific species, like the Iguanodon.  Since Owen rarely ventured outside of his museum to make actual discoveries, he lacked anything like an accurate knowledge of what he was describing.  Instead, Owen decided Iguanodons probably looked like rhinos and depicted them as such.  When Gideon Mantell, the real discoverer, published corrections and rejoineders to the fabrications, Owen refused to retract his "findings".  Later, when Mantell suffered an accident that left him paralyzed, Owen took the opportunity to rename several of Mantell's species and claim credit for them.  When he wasn't stealing other people's work, he was attacking people for stealing his.  Owen carried on a famous feud with Charles Darwin over his failure to cite Owen's work on evolution and claimed Darwin made no original findings beyond a few comments on pigeon breeding.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh also succumbed to the desire familiar to every pre-adolescent boy: the desire to claim every damn dinosaur for yourself.  Cope and Marsh were once friends.  I would go further to say the best of friends because they named dinosaur species after each other and that is the greatest gift of frienship ever bestowed.  I guess it doesn't mean as much when there are so many new dinosaurs to discover, because the friendship quickly disolved into a violent rivalry.  After working together at one of Cope's digsites in New Jersey, Marsh bribed the site operators to send all future finds to him.   He also claimed Cope had incorrectly assembled a dinosaur at his museum by placing the head at the posterior.  Embarassed, Cope attempted to buy all the copies of the journal to prevent people from discovering his error.  Apparently dinosaurs are difficult to put together, because Marsh himself also stuck the head of an Apatosaurus on the tail and reckoned it a Brontosaurus.  I guess that means the Brontosaurus was never a real dinosaur, and I'm sorry for being the bearer of this awful news to you.  Anyhow, Cope retaliated by digging in Kansas, a state which Marsh had considered as his exclusive domain.  He continued to expand his operations westward, joining an existing team operating in the area and then siphoning findings away from one of the original partners until the team broke up under the strain of his ego.  Having destroying this partnership, Cope then hired several of the members of Marsh's expedition to found his own.  At this point, both Cope and Marsh begun excavating the West in earnest pursuit of as many species as possible.  In a period known as the Great Dinosaur Rush or the Bone Wars, the two rivals discovered over 136 new species.  Marsh, however, correctly named his species while Cope's naming conventions were not recognized.  As a result, Marsh discovered 80 new species while Cope was only credited with 56.  Eventually, the two had ruined so many teams of researchers that funding dried up and they were forced to continue their expedients alone and with their own finances.  Despite the slackening pace of research, the rivalry caused large and lasting rifts amongst naturalists who allied with either Marsh or Cope.  Cope's death eventually ended the divide, although his dying wishes challenged Marsh to compare the size of their skulls and therefore determine which of the two was more intelligent.  

The quality of scientific rivalries seems to have diminished greatly from this golden age but I guess that's professionalism for you.