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The Bone Wars

The Bone Wars: Tracey Logan explores the extraordinary tale of dinosaur hunters Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh and their legendary feud set in America's Wild West in the late 1800s.

The Bone Wars

In the first of a new series looking at amazing events and characters from science history, Tracey Logan takes us back to the wild west of America, and looks at the extraordinary feud that came to be known as the Bone Wars. This is a tale of corruption, bribery and sabotage - not by cowboys, but by two palaeontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, who would stop at nothing in their race to find new dinosaur fossils. This was the golden age of dinosaur discovery, and their bitter war led to the discovery of some of our most iconic dinosaur species: Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Diplodocus and Camarasuarus to name a few. What led these two seemingly respectable men of science to behave in such an unseemly way, and what was the legacy of this now infamous feud? Tracey Logan investigates.

Producer: Alexandra Feachem

Available now

28 minutes

Last on

Mon 9 Mar 2020 21:00

Broadcasts

  • Wed 10 Jun 2015 21:00
  • Mon 9 Mar 2020 21:00

Podcast