Othniel Charles Marsh (October 29, 1831 - March 18, 1899) was one of the pre-eminent paleontologists of the 19th century, who discovered and named many fossils found in the American West. Among other things, Marsh is credited with identifying the first Triceratops fossils as dinosaurs, although between 1887 and 1888, he was quite convinced that the fossils were a bison species.
Throughout the closing decades of the 19th Century, Marsh was engaged in a bitter rivalry with fellow paleontologist, Edward Drinker Cope, which produced a series of expeditions to the Western United States that came to be called the "Bone Wars".
In 1890, while on a dig in Wyoming for Othniel Charles Marsh, John Bell Hatcher discovered a new species of dinosaur: Torosaurus. Ironically, Hatcher unwittingly ate a Torosaurus which had somehow been brought to the present, and then killed by hunters in Hatcher's employ, who mistook the dinosaur for some sort of diseased buffalo.[1]
