Gilded Dinosaur, The

It was an age of counterfeit giants, corrupt politicians, and intrepid pioneers. It was a time of scientific ferment. The second half of the 19th century — the so-called Gilded Age — was a time when Americans were exploring the West and building a nation which stretched from coast to coast. It was also when scientists began finding dinosaur fossils across the western half of the nation.

Could the answer to the history of life and the proof of evolution be found in these bones? That was the question two young American paleontologists — Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh — set out to answer. But what began as a friendly contest quickly turned into a bitter rivalry that would spill over into American science and politics and rage relentlessly for nearly three decades.

Despite their Gilded Age celebrity, the names of Cope and Marsh have disappeared into the recesses of the library and archive. In The Gilded Dinosaur, Mark Jaffe exhumes from those archives the notes, journals, and letters of these two great opponents to reanimate and retell one of the most fierce rivalries in the history of science.