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      An artist’s impression of the duckbilled dinosaur Corythosaurus.

      Jaime Chirinos/Science Photo Library

      The first recorded North American dinosaur find was made in 1838 by John Estaugh Hopkins in a mudstone quarry on the Cooper River in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Hopkins displayed in his house the bones he found, where they were seen by his friend William P. Foulke, a part-time geologist. Foulke returned to the quarry and discovered most of a skeleton, which he asked palaeontologist Joseph Leidy to help him extract and study. Leidy scientifically described the find and named it Hadrosaurus foulkii, or ‘bulky reptile’. The Hadrosaurus find would lead to what became known as the ‘bone wars’ which erupted between dinosaur hunters Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, who were both mentored by Leidy.

      Marsh, of Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, and Cope, of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, were initially cordial and shared information on their finds. But a dispute broke out over a fossil site that was discovered by Cope just south of the Haddonfield site. Cope was having the site’s new finds sent to him for examination, but when Marsh realized there were an untold number of bones to be recovered, he began paying those digging the site to divert the finds to him. Cope found out about Marsh’s underhanded tactics, and the gloves came off.

      For the next 20-plus years, Marsh and Cope used all means available – including bribery and theft – to outdo one another in the search for dinosaur bones. Both men spent considerable sums of money trying to win the ‘bone wars’ and to be recognized as the undisputed leader in the new field of dinosaur palaeontology. Marsh was backed by a wealthy uncle, George Peabody, the financial backer of Yale’s Peabody Museum, while Cope used his considerable family money. Some of their work was rushed and sloppy. Marsh named both Apatosaurus in 1887, and Brontosaurus in 1889. He did not have a skull for the latter and when it was mounted, a Camarasaurus skull was put on it. Eventually it was discovered that (other than the Camarasaurus skull) Apatosaurus was the correct name for both specimens. Cope made a similar hurried mistake on Elasmosaurus. Despite the duo’s lack of professional ethics, they found an exceptional number of specimens and localities for future study. Marsh was credited with discovering 80 new dinosaur species and Cope named 56 – and a competitive stage was set for future dino hunters.

      Two of the most famous dino hunters who followed them (but who did not resort to underhanded tactics) were Barnum Brown and Roy Chapman Andrews. Brown, who was named after the legendary circus showman P.T. Barnum, was the American Museum of Natural History’s main dinosaur collector in the early 1900s. He is best known as the man who discovered Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902 in the Hell Creek Formation in south-eastern Montana. Several years after that landmark find, he travelled to Alberta, Canada and led an expedition down the Red Deer River that discovered, among other dinosaur fossils, several Albertosaurus hind feet in the same location, which he had shipped back to the Museum of Natural History.

      Andrews was an adventurer who also worked for the American Museum of Natural History and later became its director. He began his natural history quest studying whales in the coastal waters near Vancouver Island in British Columbia, where he collected the skeleton of a humpback whale. He next convinced the museum’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn, to fund the first expedition to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia to search for the origins of man. Though Andrews failed to find any evidence of early man over the course of five expeditions from 1922 to 1930, he and his team found reams of dinosaur skeletons, among them the first Protoceratops, Oviraptor and Velociraptor. On their expedition in 1923, they identified the first fossilized dinosaur eggs, which were initially thought to be those of Protoceratops but were identified in 1995 as Oviraptor eggs.

      The work of Brown and Andrews set the standard for future dino hunters. Their finds were remarkable in their time, but they would become even more important as they were re-examined by future palaeontologists. Their work inspired and informed a group of palaeontologists who would revolutionize the discipline in the late 1970s and would ultimately galvanize public interest in dinosaurs.

      ‘The reason that the world needs palaeontologists is because, just think about it: if you go back 68 or 70 million years ago, the largest animal on land was a dinosaur, and mammals were very small,’ palaeontologist Louis Jacobs explains. ‘If you go to Africa now, the largest land animal in the world is an elephant, a mammal, and you can go and you can see a bird sitting on top of an elephant. That’s a dinosaur on top of a mammal. So what’s happened in the last 65 million years is the entire ecological arrangement of life has changed, and if we can understand how that ecological arrangement of life has changed and why it changed, that tells us about

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