2/11/2024 0 Comments Dinosaurs. By Steve Brusatte![]() He's a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. They had to deal with drifting continents and volcanoes and asteroids and rising and falling sea levels, changes in temperatures. These were animals that ruled the world for 150 million years. But they're more than just movie monsters or a childhood obsession. ![]() Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk, posted on May 23, 2018. ![]() And yet between them, the combatants presided over the discovery of hundreds of species, including what Brusatte calls “ones that roll off the tongue of every schoolchild: Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus.Edinburgh University paleontologist Steve Brusatte talks about his May 2018 Scientific American article, " The Unlikely Triumph of the Dinosaurs," and his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. The Bone Wars, as the conflict was called, reached their nadir when Marsh had a fossil field dynamited to keep Cope from exploring it to gain an edge, in other words, Marsh destroyed knowledge. Culp and Marsh didn’t want merely to name dinosaurs they also wanted to describe and classify them in scientific journals, each man showing off his erudition, buttressing his claim to be the discipline’s top dog. “Once chummy,” Brusatte writes, they “had let ego and pride metastasize into a full-on feud, which was so radioactive that they would do anything to one-up each other in an insane battle to see who could name the most new dinosaurs.” Here is one of the few places in the book where I wish the author had dug a little deeper. The only scientists Brusatte speaks ill of are long dead: the batty 19th-century rivals Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. ![]()
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