Dragon Teeth

Postscript

Edward Drinker Cope died penniless in 1897 in Philadelphia, having exhausted his family fortune and his energy battling Marsh. He was relatively young still, only fifty-six years old. But he had seen the first Brontosaurus skeleton assembled at the Yale Peabody Museum and more than fourteen hundred papers published. He is credited with the discovery and naming of more than one thousand vertebrate species and more than fifty kinds of dinosaurs. One, Anisonchus cophater, he said he named “in honor of the number of Cope haters who surround me!” He donated his body to science and instructed that after death his brain size be compared with Marsh’s, it being commonly believed at the time that brain size determined intelligence. Marsh declined to accept the challenge.

Othniel Charles Marsh died two years after Cope, alone and embittered in the house he had built for himself. He was buried in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. He and his fossil hunters discovered five-hundred-odd different fossilized animals, including some eighty dinosaurs; he named them all himself.

Wyatt Earp died on January 13, 1929, in a rented bungalow near the intersection of Venice and Crenshaw Boulevards in Los Angeles, after acting in silent movies and then selling the rights to his life story to Columbia Pictures. In later years he was strongly influenced by the wishes of his wife, Josie. He told his life story as he remembered it, or chose to remember it, to Stuart N. Lake, a Pasadena writer, two years before his death. When published as Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, it made a terrific impression, and established his fame enduringly.

Charles Hazelius Sternberg became a celebrated American fossil collector and amateur paleontologist who wrote about his time with Cope. He was in fact working for Cope when Cope died, and learned of his death three days later, wired directly by his wife. Sternberg wrote two books: The Life of a Fossil Hunter (1909) and Hunting Dinosaurs in the Badlands of the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada (1917). He was responsible for finding the Monoclonius, or, as it is commonly known, the horned dinosaur. He quoted Cope as saying, “No man can say he loves us, when he wantonly destroys our work; no man loves God who wantonly destroys his creatures.” Fossils collected by Sternberg are displayed in museums around the world.