David Rains Wallace is the author of fifteen books, including The Turquoise Dragon, The Quetzal and the Macaw, The Monkey's Bridge (a 1997 New York Times Notable Book), and The Klamath Knot, which won the Burroughs Medal in 1984. He was raised in Connecticut and graduated from Wesleyan College. He now lives in Berkeley, California.
"Like Matthiessen, McPhee, and Gould, [Wallace] asks large questions but knows the answers we find will always be too small." The Chicago Sun-Times --
"Like Matthiessen, McPhee, and Gould, [Wallace] asks large questions but knows the answers we find will always be too small." The Chicago Sun-Times --
Award-winning nature writer Wallace (The Monkey's Bridge) recounts one of the most interestingÄyet bizarreÄepisodes in dinosaur paleontology. Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope started out as two men of means bent on pursuing a career studying and locating fossils. Marsh, as a member of the wealthy Peabody family, had ample means to finance expeditions and purchase more fossil bones than he would ever have time to study; Cope, also from a wealthy family, followed suit. Against the dramatic backdrop of Indian wars, Cope and Marsh battled each other to possess the dinosaur bones so plentiful in the West during the 1870s. Wallace does an excellent job of presenting the many factsÄthose known and those unsubstantiatedÄregarding the ruthless feud that drove them both to destruction. The greatest tragedy is that Cope and Marsh really made significant fossil discoveries, finding and naming many new species, but they became so obsessed with trying to destroy and discredit each other that they wasted their opportunities. Wallace adds an important viewpoint to a remarkable story in the history of scientific discovery. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/99.]ÄGloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll. Lib., Kansas City, MO Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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