The Evolution Debate for the Birds

The image on the slab of Bavarian lithography stone quarried in 1861 was more detailed than any artist could have sketched in wax crayon. Archaeopteryx was either, as dinosaur godfather Richard Owen preferred, a very early bird with claws on its wings and a long tail or, as Darwin's "bulldog," T.H. Huxley, triumphantly declared, an undeniable evolutionary missing link between reptiles and birds.

With the swing of a stonecutter's mallet, two lasting debates were joined: the evolution of species and the kinship of dinosaurs and birds. While biologists wholeheartedly accepted evolution by the First World War, the proposition that the dinosaurs--all of them--were more bird-like than reptilian remains contentious today.

In 1877, the year of a complete Archaeopteryx find with clearly reptilian teeth, "species fiends" of the American Wild West, Edward D. Cope and Othniel C. Marsh, began the consuming fossil feud that eventually left both men financially ruined and equally vilified in the press. Their ruthless race to collect and describe new dinosaurs was also an evolutionary argument: Marsh was pro-Darwin, while Cope sided with the Lamarkian notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. About the only thing they agreed on was that dinosaurs bore an uncanny resemblance to birds.

Marsh and Cope's hired collectors added a new member to the dinosaur family tree every time their picks hit a bone. And when the dust finally settled, Marsh had laid claim to the discovery of more than a thousand fossil vertebrates and Cope heralded his own many finds in some 1,400 published works.

Meanwhile, a French-born engineer-turned-paleontologist named Louis Dollo was fixated on a single species. From the 1880s to the 1920s, he meticulously examined not just one but over thirty complete and fully articulated Iguanodon skeletons from a Belgian coal mine. Unlike Richard Owen's Crystal Palace model, Dollo's Iguanodon stood up like a kangaroo. Furthermore, what Owen had thought was a nose horn really belonged in place of a thumb. Iguanodon was certainly no rhino, but neither was it a mere lizard.