On October 23, 1994, a headline appeared on the pages of the newspaper Los Angeles Times Supposedly ambiguous features: “famous paleontologist’s skull distracts from ‘dinosaur hunting'”. The news, initially reported by the Associated Press news agency, refers to a rocambolesque story. In short, the photographer National GeographicLouie Psihoyos finished his world tour by taking pictures for his book Dinosaur hunting, a journey into prehistoric times, is told through the work of paleontologists in different countries. Psihoyos has amassed an archive of 50,000 images, with dozens of paleontologists, from the deserts of the American Southwest to the Chinese steppes. According to the article published in Los Angeles TimesThe success of the book alerted the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to a fact. On his journey of tens of thousands of kilometres, Louie Psihoyos was accompanied by the item numbered 4989. This, housed in a wooden box, identified the skull of the 19th century paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. “What I thought was an innocent act turned into a scandal,” Psihoios told the aforementioned newspaper, adding that he had “raised the skull on loan.” A fact that enraged curator Alan Mann, who classified the case as “scandalous”.
In the year and a half of his journey around the world, Psihoyos bore the skull of the man whose skeleton he wanted to surrender to science in his desire, not devoid of narcissistic impulse, to be declared the standard specimen of man. Homo sapiens. Such an announcement would not have occurred in the face of the remains of a paleontologist who left to science the discovery of 56 new species of dinosaur, collected from the 1870s onwards, when he died at the age of 56. He also left another mark in the annals of the history of science. For two decades, he starred in an episode known as “The Bone War.” No dispute is fought alone, on the other side of the ditch was a native of Cope, also a paleontologist and no less ferocious than the latter, though more introverted and methodical. Othniel Charles Marsh, born in 1831, looked to the American West and saw fertile ground in terms of the fossil records of the great prehistoric Tyrians. At the time, Cobb was aiming for the same prospects, specifically Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Between 1877 and 1892, the three states were the scene of one of the fiercest and least violent conflicts between two worlds. Cope and Marsh engaged in bribery, attacks, moral and physical crimes, the destruction of the geological heritage and succumbed to financial bankruptcy, as a result of unbridled competition, that of enriching the catalogs of paleontology with an even greater number of new species of dinosaurs. By accounts, the rival duo handed over to the 19th century, 136 species of prehistoric giants have yet to be cataloged (Marsh discovered 80 species), among them TriceratopsAnd allosaurusAnd Double focus and the Stegosaurus.
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