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Factual: Science & Nature

Surprising stories from the history of science told by Naomi Alderman and Philip Ball.

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Science Stories: The Bone Wars

The Bone Wars

BBC Radio 4 - Science Stories, The Bone Wars

The extraordinary tale of feuding dinosaur hunters in America's Wild West .

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


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