None of what follows will make sense absent a single social fact: The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, “a honeypot of narcissists.” It is “a snake pit of personality disorders.” “An especially nasty area of academia,” the Field Museum’s Jingmai O’Connor calls it. Among the subfields, nastiness correlates with the size and carnivorousness of the creature under study, the comity possible among those who study ammonites being unlikely among those who study T. rex. A “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism” is how his biographer describes Sir Richard Owen, the man who coined the term dinosaur. The first two famous American paleontologists, the prickly academic Othniel Marsh and the gentleman naturalist Edward Cope, savaged each other in print, hired spies and counterspies, destroyed fossils, and generally worked harder to humiliate each other than to describe the boxes and boxes and boxes of remains they pulled from the extraordinarily rich fossil beds of the American West.
