Othniel Charles Marsh

Othniel Charles Marsh (October 29, 1831 – March 18, 1899) was an American professor of paleontology at Yale College, famous collector of fossils of dinosaurs, mammals, and birds, persuader of his rich uncle to fund the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and great rival of Edward Drinker Cope in the Bone Wars (aka the Great Dinosaur Rush). Marsh scientifically described more than 200 new genera, including Stegosaurus and Triceratops. He was elected in 1874 a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and served as the Academy's president from 1883 to 1885.

Quotes

The origin of life, and the order of succession in which its various forms have appeared upon the earth, offer to science its most inviting and most difficult field of research. Although the primal origin of life is unknown, and may perhaps never be known, yet no one has a right to say how much of the mystery now surrounding it science cannot remove. It is certainly within the domain of science to determine when the earth was first fitted to receive life, and in what form the earliest life began. To trace that life in its manifold changes through past ages to the present is a more difficult task, but one from which modern science does not shrink.
(November 1877) "Article XLII.—Introduction and Succession of Vertebrate Life in America". American Journal of Science and Arts (1820-1879), 3rd series 14 (83): 337–378. (quote from p. 337; address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Nashville, Tennessee on August 30, 1877)

On the flanks of the Rocky Mountains, a narrow belt of strata can be traced for several hundred miles, marked always by the bones of gigantic Dinosaurs. Its position is above the characteristic red Triassic beds, and immediately below the hard sandstone of the Dakota group. Hayden, Cope and others have regarded this horizon as Cretaceous, but the abundant vertebrate remains now known from it prove its Jurassic age beyond a reasonable doubt. The writer examined a typical outcrop of this series, on the western slope of the mountains in Wyoming, in 1868, and determined it to be Jurassic; and he has recently named the series the Atlantosaurus beds, from the most striking vertebrates they contain. The strata consist mainly of estuary deposits of shale and sandstone, and the horizon is clearly upper Jurassic ...
- (1878) . "‘’Article XLIV.—Principal characters of American Jurassic dinosaurs". American Journal of Science 3 (95): 411–416.

Among the many extinct animals that lived in this country in past ages, none were more remarkable than the dinosaurian reptiles which were so abundant during Mesozoic time. This group was then represented by many and various forms, including among them the largest land animals known, and some, also, very diminutive. In shape and structure, moreover, they showed great variety, and in many other respects they were among the most wonderful creatures yet discovered.
The true place of these reptiles in the animal kingdom has been a matter of much discussion among anatomists, but the best authorities now regard them as constituting a distinct subclass of the Reptilia. Some of the larger, earlier forms are apparently related to the Crocodilia, while some of the later, small, specialized ones have various points of resemblance to birds.
- "The dinosaurs of North America". Sixteenth Annual Report of the U.S. Geological Survey. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1896. pp. 133–247; followed by Plates II – XLXXXV. (quote from p. 143)

The use of his personal fortune and of the funds put at his disposal by the United States Geological Survey made it possible for Marsh to bring together what was probably the greatest collection of Mesozoic and Cenozoic vertebrate skeletons ever amassed by one individual.
- Charles Schuchert, "Biographical Memoir of Othniel Charles Marsh, 1831–1899; presented to the Academy at the annual meeting, 1938". Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. 20. 1939.