Marsh (back row and center), surrounded by armed assistants for his 1872 expedition. He spent little time in the field himself, generally delegating these tasks to his agents. Othniel Charles Marsh (October 29, 1831 - March 18, 1899) was an American paleontologist. He was one of the preeminent scientists in the field; the discovery or description of dozens of new species and theories on the origins of birds are among his legacies. Marsh and his many fossil hunters were able to uncover about 500 new species of fossil animals which were all named later by Marsh himself. From the 1870s to 1890s he competed with rival paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope in a period of frenzied Western American expeditions known as the Bone Wars. The rivalry may have started when Marsh said Cope placed the skull of a dinosaur on the wrong end, the tail. Marsh eventually won the Bone Wars by finding 80 new species of dinosaur, while Cope found 56. Cope did not take this lightly, and the two fought within scientific journals for many years to come, rumored to be at the expense of recognized scientific method. He died in 1899 at the age of 67. The dinosaur Othnielia was named in 1977 by P. Galton as a tribute to Marsh, as was Marshosaurus bicentesmus (Madsen, 1976).