Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs, and other parts from cadavers and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlor. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retrieved the head, and rushed out again.

In 1825, aged just twenty-one, Owen moved to London and soon after was engaged by the Royal College of Surgeons to help organize their extensive, but disordered, collections of medical and anatomical specimens. Most of these had been left to the institution by John Hunter, a distinguished surgeon and tireless collector of medical curiosities, but had never been catalogued or organized, largely because the paperwork explaining the significance of each had gone missing soon after Hunter’s death.

Owen swiftly distinguished himself with his powers of organization and deduction. At the same time he showed himself to be a peerless anatomist with instincts for reconstruction almost on a par with the great Cuvier in Paris. He become such an expert on the anatomy of animals that he was granted first refusal on any animal that died at the London Zoological Gardens, and these he would invariably have delivered to his house for examination. Once his wife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway. He quickly became a leading expert on all kinds of animals living and extinct—from platypuses, echidnas, and other newly discovered marsupials to the hapless dodo and the extinct giant birds called moas that had roamed New Zealand until eaten out of existence by the Maoris. He was the first to describe the archaeopteryx after its discovery in Bavaria in 1861 and the first to write a formal epitaph for the dodo. Altogether he produced some six hundred anatomical papers, a prodigious output.

But it was for his work with dinosaurs that Owen is remembered. He coined the termdinosauria in 1841. It means “terrible lizard” and was a curiously inapt name. Dinosaurs, as we now know, weren’t all terrible—some were no bigger than rabbits and probably extremely retiring—and the one thing they most emphatically were not was lizards, which are actually of a much older (by thirty million years) lineage. Owen was well aware that the creatures were reptilian and had at his disposal a perfectly good Greek word,herpeton , but for some reason chose not to use it. Another, more excusable error (given the paucity of specimens at the time) was that dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles: the bird-hipped ornithischians and the lizard-hipped saurischians.

Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyes—a face to frighten babies. In manner he was cold and imperious, and he was without scruple in the furtherance of his ambitions. He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate. Even Owen’s son (who soon after killed himself) referred to his father’s “lamentable coldness of heart.”

His undoubted gifts as an anatomist allowed him to get away with the most barefaced dishonesties. In 1857, the naturalist T. H. Huxley was leafing through a new edition ofChurchill’s Medical Directory when he noticed that Owen was listed as Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Government School of Mines, which rather surprised Huxley as that was the position he held. Upon inquiring how Churchill’s had made such an elemental error, he was told that the information had been provided to them by Dr. Owen himself. A fellow naturalist named Hugh Falconer, meanwhile, caught Owen taking credit for one of his discoveries. Others accused him of borrowing specimens, then denying he had done so. Owen even fell into a bitter dispute with the Queen’s dentist over the credit for a theory concerning the physiology of teeth.

He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used his influence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant whose only crime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. Grant was astonished to discover that he was suddenly denied access to the anatomical specimens he needed to conduct his research. Unable to pursue his work, he sank into an understandably dispirited obscurity.

But no one suffered more from Owen’s unkindly attentions than the hapless and increasingly tragic Gideon Mantell. After losing his wife, his children, his medical practice, and most of his fossil collection, Mantell moved to London. There in 1841—the fateful year in which Owen would achieve his greatest glory for naming and identifying the dinosaurs—Mantell was involved in a terrible accident. While crossing Clapham Common in a carriage, he somehow fell from his seat, grew entangled in the reins, and was dragged at a gallop over rough ground by the panicked horses. The accident left him bent, crippled, and in chronic pain, with a spine damaged beyond repair.

Capitalizing on Mantell’s enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging Mantell’s contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to try to do original research but Owen used his influence at the Royal Society to ensure that most of his papers were rejected. In 1852, unable to bear any more pain or persecution, Mantell took his own life. His deformed spine was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeons where—and now here’s an irony for you—it was placed in the care of Richard Owen, director of the college’s Hunterian Museum.

But the insults had not quite finished. Soon after Mantell’s death an arrestingly uncharitable obituary appeared in theLiterary Gazette . In it Mantell was characterized as a mediocre anatomist whose modest contributions to paleontology were limited by a “want of exact knowledge.” The obituary even removed the discovery of the iguanodon from him and credited it instead to Cuvier and Owen, among others. Though the piece carried no byline, the style was Owen’s and no one in the world of the natural sciences doubted the authorship.

By this stage, however, Owen’s transgressions were beginning to catch up with him. His undoing began when a committee of the Royal Society—a committee of which he happened to be chairman—decided to award him its highest honor, the Royal Medal, for a paper he had written on an extinct mollusc called the belemnite. “However,” as Deborah Cadbury notes in her excellent history of the period,Terrible Lizard , “this piece of work was not quite as original as it appeared.” The belemnite, it turned out, had been discovered four years earlier by an amateur naturalist named Chaning Pearce, and the discovery had been fully reported at a meeting of the Geological Society. Owen had been at that meeting, but failed to mention this when he presented a report of his own to the Royal Society—in which, not incidentally, he rechristened the creatureBelemnites owenii in his own honor. Although Owen was allowed to keep the Royal Medal, the episode left a permanent tarnish on his reputation, even among his few remaining supporters.

Eventually Huxley managed to do to Owen what Owen had done to so many others: he had him voted off the councils of the Zoological and Royal societies. As a final insult Huxley became the new Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons.

Owen would never again do important research, but the latter half of his career was devoted to one unexceptionable pursuit for which we can all be grateful. In 1856 he became head of the natural history section of the British Museum, in which capacity he became the driving force behind the creation of London’s Natural History Museum. The grand and beloved Gothic heap in South Kensington, opened in 1880, is almost entirely a testament to his vision.

Before Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even then it was difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospective visitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if they were fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket—that is assuming they had passed the interview—and finally come back a third time to view the museum’s treasures. Even then they were whisked through in groups and not allowed to linger. Owen’s plan was to welcome everyone, even to the point of encouraging workingmen to visit in the evening, and to devote most of the museum’s space to public displays. He even proposed, very radically, to put informative labels on each display so that people could appreciate what they were viewing. In this, somewhat unexpectedly, he was opposed by T. H. Huxley, who believed that museums should be primarily research institutes. By making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for.

Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin. In this he failed—though he did achieve a certain belated, inadvertent triumph. Today his statue commands a masterly view from the staircase of the main hall in the Natural History Museum, while Darwin and T. H. Huxley are consigned somewhat obscurely to the museum coffee shop, where they stare gravely over people snacking on cups of tea and jam doughnuts.

It would be reasonable to suppose that Richard Owen’s petty rivalries marked the low point of nineteenth-century paleontology, but in fact worse was to come, this time from overseas. In America in the closing decades of the century there arose a rivalry even more spectacularly venomous, if not quite as destructive. It was between two strange and ruthless men, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

They had much in common. Both were spoiled, driven, self-centered, quarrelsome, jealous, mistrustful, and ever unhappy. Between them they changed the world of paleontology.

They began as mutual friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other, and spent a pleasant week together in 1868. However, something then went wrong between them—nobody is quite sure what—and by the following year they had developed an enmity that would grow into consuming hatred over the next thirty years. It is probably safe to say that no two people in the natural sciences have ever despised each other more.

Marsh, the elder of the two by eight years, was a retiring and bookish fellow, with a trim beard and dapper manner, who spent little time in the field and was seldom very good at finding things when he was there. On a visit to the famous dinosaur fields of Como Bluff, Wyoming, he failed to notice the bones that were, in the words of one historian, “lying everywhere like logs.” But he had the means to buy almost anything he wanted. Although he came from a modest background—his father was a farmer in upstate New York—his uncle was the supremely rich and extraordinarily indulgent financier George Peabody. When Marsh showed an interest in natural history, Peabody had a museum built for him at Yale and provided funds sufficient for Marsh to fill it with almost whatever took his fancy.

Cope was born more directly into privilege—his father was a rich Philadelphia businessman—and was by far the more adventurous of the two. In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Horn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this was probably not the most prudent time to be taking treasures from Indian lands, Cope thought for a minute and decided to press on anyway. He was having too good a season. At one point he ran into a party of suspicious Crow Indians, but he managed to win them over by repeatedly taking out and replacing his false teeth.

For a decade or so, Marsh and Cope’s mutual dislike primarily took the form of quiet sniping, but in 1877 it erupted into grandiose dimensions. In that year a Colorado schoolteacher named Arthur Lakes found bones near Morrison while out hiking with a friend. Recognizing the bones as coming from a “gigantic saurian,” Lakes thoughtfully dispatched some samples to both Marsh and Cope. A delighted Cope sent Lakes a hundred dollars for his trouble and asked him not to tell anyone of his discovery, especially Marsh. Confused, Lakes now asked Marsh to pass the bones on to Cope. Marsh did so, but it was an affront that he would never forget.

It also marked the start of a war between the two that became increasingly bitter, underhand, and often ridiculous. They sometimes stooped to one team’s diggers throwing rocks at the other team’s. Cope was caught at one point jimmying open crates that belonged to Marsh. They insulted each other in print and each poured scorn on the other’s results. Seldom—perhaps never—has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully by animosity. Over the next several years the two men between them increased the number of known dinosaur species in America from 9 to almost 150. Nearly every dinosaur that the average person can name—stegosaurus, brontosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops—was found by one or the other of them.12Unfortunately, they worked in such reckless haste that they often failed to note that a new discovery was something already known. Between them they managed to “discover” a species calledUintatheres ancepsno fewer than twenty-two times. It took years to sort out some of the classification messes they made. Some are not sorted out yet.

Of the two, Cope’s scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakingly industrious career, he wrote some 1,400 learned papers and described almost 1,300 new species of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs)—more than double Marsh’s output in both cases. Cope might have done even more, but unfortunately he went into a rather precipitate descent in his later years. Having inherited a fortune in 1875, he invested unwisely in silver and lost everything. He ended up living in a single room in a Philadelphia boarding house, surrounded by books, papers, and bones. Marsh by contrast finished his days in a splendid mansion in New Haven. Cope died in 1897, Marsh two years later.

In his final years, Cope developed one other interesting obsession. It became his earnest wish to be declared the type specimen forHomo sapiens—that is, that his bones would be the official set for the human race. Normally, the type specimen of a species is the first set of bones found, but since no first set ofHomo sapiens bones exists, there was a vacancy, which Cope desired to fill. It was an odd and vain wish, but no one could think of any grounds to oppose it. To that end, Cope willed his bones to the Wistar Institute, a learned society in Philadelphia endowed by the descendants of the seemingly inescapable Caspar Wistar. Unfortunately, after his bones were prepared and assembled, it was found that they showed signs of incipient syphilis, hardly a feature one would wish to preserve in the type specimen for one’s own race. So Cope’s petition and his bones were quietly shelved. There is still no type specimen for modern humans.

As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope or Marsh. Buckland ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wreck in a lunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crippling accident. Mantell’s twisted spine remained on display at the Hunterian Museum for nearly a century before being mercifully obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz. What remained of Mantell’s collection after his death passed on to his children, and much of it was taken to New Zealand by his son Walter, who emigrated there in 1840. Walter became a distinguished Kiwi, eventually attaining the office of Minister of Native Affairs. In 1865 he donated the prime specimens from his father’s collection, including the famous iguanodon tooth, to the Colonial Museum (now the Museum of New Zealand) in Wellington, where they have remained ever since. The iguanodon tooth that started it all—arguably the most important tooth in paleontology—is no longer on display.

Of course dinosaur hunting didn’t end with the deaths of the great nineteenth-century fossil hunters. Indeed, to a surprising extent it had only just begun. In 1898, the year that fell between the deaths of Cope and Marsh, a trove greater by far than anything found before was discovered—noticed, really—at a place called Bone Cabin Quarry, only a few miles from Marsh’s prime hunting ground at Como Bluff, Wyoming. There, hundreds and hundreds of fossil bones were to be found weathering out of the hills. They were so numerous, in fact, that someone had built a cabin out of them—hence the name. In just the first two seasons, 100,000 pounds of ancient bones were excavated from the site, and tens of thousands of pounds more came in each of the half dozen years that followed.

The upshot is that by the turn of the twentieth century, paleontologists had literally tons of old bones to pick over. The problem was that they still didn’t have any idea how old any of these bones were. Worse, the agreed ages for the Earth couldn’t comfortably support the numbers of eons and ages and epochs that the past obviously contained. If Earth were really only twenty million years old or so, as the great Lord Kelvin insisted, then whole orders of ancient creatures must have come into being and gone out again practically in the same geological instant. It just made no sense.

Other scientists besides Kelvin turned their minds to the problem and came up with results that only deepened the uncertainty. Samuel Haughton, a respected geologist at Trinity College in Dublin, announced an estimated age for the Earth of 2,300 million years—way beyond anything anybody else was suggesting. When this was drawn to his attention, he recalculated using the same data and put the figure at 153 million years. John Joly, also of Trinity, decided to give Edmond Halley’s ocean salts idea a whirl, but his method was based on so many faulty assumptions that he was hopelessly adrift. He calculated that the Earth was 89 million years old—an age that fit neatly enough with Kelvin’s assumptions but unfortunately not with reality.

Such was the confusion that by the close of the nineteenth century, depending on which text you consulted, you could learn that the number of years that stood between us and the dawn of complex life in the Cambrian period was 3 million, 18 million, 600 million, 794 million, or 2.4 billion—or some other number within that range. As late as 1910, one of the most respected estimates, by the American George Becker, put the Earth’s age at perhaps as little as 55 million years.

Just when matters seemed most intractably confused, along came another extraordinary figure with a novel approach. He was a bluff and brilliant New Zealand farm boy named Ernest Rutherford, and he produced pretty well irrefutable evidence that the Earth was at least many hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more.

Remarkably, his evidence was based on alchemy—natural, spontaneous, scientifically credible, and wholly non-occult, but alchemy nonetheless. Newton, it turned out, had not been so wrong after all. And exactly howthat came to be is of course another story.