🥊 This Means War.

🦴 The Bone Wars…

In late October, Rally will bring to market one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered: a nearly 100-foot Barosaurus, excavated from the same Jurassic rock that gave us so many of the giants we grew up visiting in museums and seeing re on the big screen. But before these colossal skeletons became cultural landmarks (and way before anyone ever envisioned them as investment opportunities), they were pawns in one of the fiercest rivalries in scientific history. 

The “Bone Wars” of the late 19th century - fought between O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope—was a chaotic, often cutthroat scramble for fossil supremacy. It was a story of ambition, ego, and spectacle, but also the origin of the very dinosaurs that still tower over us today, including the Barosaurus.

A quick departure from our recent pieces in the 201st installment of Shiny Things to tell the tale of an old school dino-fight…

A Race West, a Race Against Time

American science was young when the railroad carved open the West. The war was over, the nation was noisy with new fortunes, and the ground itself began to talk. Two names: Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, heard it first and loudest. 

What started as a collegial nod between naturalists became a 30-year sprint to pull prehistory out of badlands and into the public imagination. They chased bones the way speculators chase tickers: with borrowed money, borrowed loyalty, and a gambler’s belief that the next strike would crown them king. Their rivalry would burn reputations, empty bank accounts, and, almost by accident, founded American paleontology as we know it. 

The West answered with abundance. Quarries at places like Como Bluff and the broader Morrison Formation (where Rally’s Stegosaurus and Barosaurus were discovered) yielded vertebrae as long as a doorframe and armor plates the size of dinner platters. Teams under each man rode trains, mules, and moves quick off rumors, shipping literal tons of fossils east. In the press it was “The Great Dinosaur Rush.” In practice, it was industrial science akin to the busiest Amazon warehouse: field hands on quotas, ledgers swollen with crates, university halls reconfigured as bone depots. 

The tempo was brutal, and the goal was simple: name it first, and name it forever. 

Marsh vs. Cope (and Every Human Thing in Between)

Rivalries make good stories because they compress human weakness into a clean straight line: two geniuses, one finishing line. 

Marsh, the Yale professor with a benefactor’s bankroll. Cope, the prolific Philadelphian, fast with a pen and even faster to publish. Their letters curdled, their field agents defected, and soon the accusations piled up like tailbones… bribery, spying, even deliberate destruction of “lesser” fossils so the other side couldn’t have them. 

If you’re picturing a genteel debate over tea, you’re very very wrong. Sometimes the quarrels devolved into literal rock-throwing at dig sites. The scorched-earth tactics were real enough to be recorded by contemporaries and historians alike. And the most replayed humiliation hit early… 

Cope’s reconstruction of the seagoing reptile Elasmosaurus put the skull on the wrong end of the animal- a tail-tip crown on a creature that should have been all head-and-neck. Mistakes happen, but in a blood feud, mistakes metastasize.

The correction dogged Cope. Marsh gloated, as any hater or rival would, and a small error became a legend that outsized the animal itself. There’s a reason every telling of the Bone Wars keeps this scene: it captures the entire era’s velocity. The intense rush to publish, the fragile pride, and the public spectacle of science being done in full glare was never ending pressure to get it right, or get dragged.

Strip away the pettiness, though, and the ledger of discovery is staggering. Between them, Marsh and Cope named well over a hundred dinosaurs. That included household names today that were nothing but stone yesterday. Marsh alone stamped the record with Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Triceratops, and the “thunder lizard” that would spark decades of taxonomy debate. The Peabody’s own history calls their combined output “more than 140 new dinosaurs.” 

The cost was personal: both men died beleaguered, cash-poor, and exhausted. The legacy was public: museums swelling with bones, lecture halls with new syllabi, and a story good enough for PBS to keep retelling it basically every 3 years.

Attention as a Tool (and a Weapon)

Science moves on patience; markets move on attention. The Bone Wars, for all their muck, proved that attention - curated, theatrical, sometimes mercenary - can accelerate both. 

Marsh and Cope were not just collectors; they were promoters. They cultivated journalists, lobbed barbs through the papers, and turned fossil hunts into serial cliffhangers. The public followed along because the stakes felt mythic: these weren’t beetles in drawers; these were dragon-bones from a vanished world. Even the sabotage (the buried quarries, the scorched tailings, etc) became part of the lore.

Discovery is rarely tidy and never purely polite. 

If this reads like a 19th-century prototype for our modern hype cycles, that’s because it was. The spectacle made funding easier. Funding made expeditions bigger. Bigger expeditions produced more finds, which in turn demanded bigger spectacles - museum halls remade as cathedrals to scale, journal issues fat with new names, schoolbooks rewritten between printings. It’s not that different than the Cluely-style funding announcements of the tech world that often contribute to the optical success of the underlying business before anyone even truly understands what the business actually does. 

When the dust settled, America had a new bone-deep brand. This is where the giants were found, mounted, and made part of everyday civic life. The ground had given up its secrets; the city seized them and gave them stairs, plaques, and an audience.

The Long Neck in the Room

Walk into the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and you meet the afterglow of that age: a Barosaurus rearing, tail bowed like a drawn bowstring, facing down an Allosaurus in an arranged face-off. It is, by the museum’s own tally, the world’s tallest freestanding dinosaur - a fossil diorama where scale becomes theater and theater becomes memory. Every New Yorker who’s lost a Saturday there has felt it: the quiet gasp as the vertebrae climb like a spiral staircase into the ceiling coffers.

The creature itself was marshaled into science by - who else - O.C. Marsh. Barosaurus lentus bears his name twice over (genus and species, 1890), and its bones come from the same Morrison Formation that fueled so much of the Bone Wars. Taxonomically, it’s a diplodocid - kin to Diplodocus, a long-necked, long-tailed leaf-eater built like a suspension bridge. In other words: the exact kind of animal that demanded big dig crews, big shipping budgets, and bigger rooms to display it. The fossil record remembers eras in stone, but the credit line remembers people. On this one, the signature is Marsh’s. 

There’s poetry in the fact that the Rotunda’s rearing mount was engineered from casts because real bones are too heavy to hold that pose. Even now, spectacle requires some sleight of hand. But it’s honest sleight: a truth about weight and physics, not a fiction about the past. The effect is the same - the child points up, the parent looks for a bench, the city breathes a little deeper.

Dinosaurs do that to rooms. They make architecture feel provisional.

From Feud to Fellowship (and What Comes Next)

The Bone Wars were a mess, but they left behind the infrastructure of wonder. Collections at Yale, Philadelphia, New York, and beyond became the raw material for generations of scientists. The public got micro-lessons in deep time every time they passed a pedestal. And the culture learned something uncomfortable and useful: rivalry, when civilized (and when it doesn’t dynamite the dig), can be an accelerant for knowledge. Museums became the safe deposit boxes for that knowledge - public squares where bones are owned by everyone, curated in peace instead of contested in the field. 

Which brings us to this season and this audience. In a few weeks, we’ll invite investors to participate in the next chapter of that story: not a feud or a scramble to hoard, but a structure to share. Our Barosaurus offering doesn’t pretend the past was tidy - it honors the grit that got the bones out of the ground and into the light. It also insists on a different finish: broad access, transparent economics, and a museum-grade asset that belongs, from day one, to a community that shows up for it.

The old race made names. The modern version should make stewards.

When Marsh and Cope stared each other down, they were fighting for primacy—who got to stamp the label, whose bone would bear whose Latin. More than a century later, the names are settled and the bones are home. What’s left is the privilege of participation: to turn a story of rivalry into a practice of ownership. The Bone Wars concluded with two men depleted and the field enriched; ours begins with a field already rich and an open invitation to be part of its future.

In the end, the West did what the West always does. It rewarded the bold. It also demanded a price. The better version of the story - the one worth telling in 2025 - gives the boldness to the many, and spreads the price across a willing crowd that values the find, the craft, and the long view.

The giants are still teaching us. This time, we get to listen (and own a piece) together.

Until Next Week...