Background

Othniel Charles Marsh was born on October 29, 1831, in Lockport, New York, United States. He was the oldest son of a farmer and shoe manufacturer of modest means, Caleb Marsh, and Mary Gaines Peabody Marsh, the younger sister of a wealthy banker and philanthropist George Peabody. His mother died of cholera before he was three years old.

Education

Aided financially by his uncle George Peabody, Marsh graduated from Phillips Academy at Andover in 1956, Massachusetts, from Yale College in 1860, and from its Sheffield Scientific School in 1862 where he studied geology and mineralogy. Afterwards he studied paleontology and anatomy in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Breslau in 1862-1865.

Career

After three years of study in Europe, Othniel Charles Marsh became a professor of paleontology at Yale from 1866 until his death. From 1882 to 1892 he was also the first vertebrate paleontologist of the United States Geological Survey.

Through his many scientific descriptions and his popularization of extinct animals, Marsh established the infant field of vertebrate paleontology in the United States. Accompanied by Yale students and alumni, he led four expeditions from 1870 to 1873 through the western territories, from the White River badlands of South Dakota and Nebraska, to the Bridger, Uinta, and Green River basins of Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, to the John Day fossil fields in Oregon, and back to the Cretaceous chalk region of western Kansas. The startling fossil discoveries of these trips led Marsh into keen and bitter competition with Edward Drinker Cope for a quarter of a century. After his early collecting years, Marsh only rarely and briefly returned to the fossil fields, but he hired many amateur and professional collectors to seek specimens throughout the western United States. He urged his collectors to search out all fragments of each find, and so was able to describe remarkably complete specimens.

In his work on fossil mammals Marsh established the evolution of the horse as North American, with a series of specimens from Eocene to Pleistocene; he presented the earliest mammals then known, from Jurassic and Cretaceous beds; in competition with Cope, he described some of the extinct horned mammals called uintatheres and some of the massive brontotheres; and he established the existence of early primates on the North American continent. On the reptiles, Marsh enlarged the classification of the dinosaurs, and described eighty new forms, both giant and tiny, and he described Cretaceous winged reptiles and marine mosasaurs. He also presented the first known toothed birds, which proved the reptile ancestry of that class. He demonstrated the gradual enlargement of the vertebrate brain from the Paleozoic era forward. Marsh’s classifications and descriptions of extinct vertebrates were major contributions to the knowledge of evolution.

In 1882 he was placed in charge of the United States Geological Survey’s work in vertebrate paleontology, aggravating a fierce rivalry that existed between him and the American paleontologist Edward Cope. Credited with the discovery of more than a thousand fossil vertebrates and the description of at least 500 more, Marsh published major works on toothed birds, gigantic horned mammals, and North American dinosaurs. He also wrote Fossil Horses in America (1874) and Introduction and Succession of Vertebrate Life in America (1877). Marsh garnered national attention in the late 1860s when he revealed that the alleged remains of a prehistoric man known as the Cardiff Giant were fake.

Achievements

• Marsh was widely honored in the scientific world. He received the Bigsby Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1877 and the Cuvier Prize from the French Academy in 1897. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1874 and served as its president from 1883 to 1895. The Othniel C. Marsh House, now known as Marsh Hall, is designated a National Historic Landmark. The grounds are now known as the Marsh Botanical Garden.

Works

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  • The Dinosaurs Of North America 1896
  • Reply To Professor Cope's Explanation 1873
  • Birds With Teeth 1883
  • History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery 1879
  • Dinocerata: a monograph of an extinct order of gigantic mammals 1884
  • Odontornithes: A Monograph On The Extinct Toothed Birds of North America 1880

Views

Marsh’s scientific interests began in childhood with minerals and invertebrate fossils, chiefly from formations exposed by the nearby Erie Canal. He pursued mineralogy in his education but gradually turned toward paleontology. A marked characteristic was his keen acquisitiveness, which resulted in vast collections of fossils for the Peabody Museum at Yale, a gift of his generous uncle.

Membership

Marsh was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1877. He was the president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1883-1895.

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  American Antiquarian Society , United States

  1877 - 1899

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  President, 1883-1895

  National Academy of Sciences , United States

  1874 - 1899

Personality

Despite his nasty temperament and his often unscrupulous means of dealing with rivals and subordinates, Marsh was widely honored in the scientific world. He donated his home in New Haven, Connecticut, to Yale University in 1899.

Connections

Othniel Charles Marsh was never married and had no children. A bachelor, he lived in solitary grandeur near Yale.

Father:

Caleb Marsh

Mother:

Mary Gaines Peabody

Uncle:

George Peabody

opponent:

Edward Cope

The two began to develop a rivalry when Marsh allegedly pointed out that Cope had placed the skull of Elasmosaurus at the end of its tail. Cope attempted to buy back the papers containing his flawed reconstruction, but Joseph Leidy exposed his cover-up at a meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences. This rivalry went on throughout their lives. Marsh eventually "won" the Bone Wars by finding 80 new species of dinosaur, while Cope found 56. Cope did not take this lightly, and the two debated each other in scientific journals for many years to come.

References

• Battle of the Dinosaur Bones: Othniel Charles Marsh vs Edward Drinker Cope
  2012
• O.C. Marash: Pioneer in Paleontology
  1978
• Othniel Charles Marsh
  1899
• The dinosaur hunters: Othniel C. Marsh and Edward D. Cope
  1964
• Dragon Teeth
  2017
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volumes 9 & 10
  1980