Othniel Charles Marsh

Othniel Charles Marsh ( born October 29, 1831 in Lockport, New York, † March 18 1899 in New Haven, Connecticut) was one of the preeminent paleontologists of the 19th century and a pioneer of dinosaur research. He discovered, described and named many fossils, especially from the western United States.

Life and work

Marsh was born in 1831 in Lockport, New York. In 1860 he graduated at Yale College. He studied geology and mineralogy at the Sheffield Scientific School in New Haven and paleontology and anatomy in Berlin, Heidelberg and Breslau. After his return to the United States in 1866 he became professor of vertebrate paleontology at Yale College. He convinced his uncle George Peabody to the founding of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.

In 1871 he found the first remains of extinct horses and later published a family tree of the horse, which is found today in nearly every biology textbook. In May 1897 Marsh was the first American pterosaur fossils. Marsh described fossil birds such as the tooth birds from the American Upper Cretaceous as Ichthyornis and Hesperornis, capable of flying reptiles, dinosaurs from the Cretaceous and Jurassic Apatosaurus and Allosaurus including. Overall, he described 25 new genera of dinosaurs and built one of the largest fossil collections in the world.

One of Marsh in 1877 discovered and mistakenly identified as Nanosaurus dinosaur was renamed 100 years later in his honor in Othnielia. Even the dinosaurs Marshosaurus bears his name.

Marsh is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Bone Wars

Marsh replaced, albeit unintentionally, that became known as Bone Wars feud with Edward Drinker Cope from. During the reconstruction of discovered by Cope in 1868 Elasmosaurus this made ​​a mistake: He put the skull on the tail end of the animal. As Marsh saw the error, he began to laugh. Cope was of the opinion that one would blame him for ever. It is believed that this incident sparked the feud. It developed into a bitter struggle for dinosaur fossils. Each of them wanted to be the best and there were even the excavations of the other sabotaged. This important finds were destroyed out of pure hatred, not to fall into the hands of the other.