Othniel Charles Marsh

Othniel Charles Marsh was an American paleontologist and professor at Yale College who named 33 dinosaur genera over his career, including Stegosaurus, Triceratops and Allosaurus, and established five dinosaur suborders still used in classification today. From the 1870s through the early 1890s Marsh was locked in an intense and often bitter rivalry with fellow paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, a period of competing fossil-hunting expeditions across the American West that later became known as the Bone Wars; on Marsh's first major prospecting expedition in 1870 alone, his field teams discovered more than a hundred new species of vertebrate fossils. Marsh's fossil collections, particularly his sequence of early toothed birds and his series of horse fossils showing gradual change over time, provided some of the most compelling paleontological evidence supporting Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and Darwin himself wrote to Marsh praising the work. Marsh served as president of the National Academy of Sciences and spent his career associated with Yale, where his collections became a foundation of the Yale Peabody Museum.