★A book about adventures, politics, colonialism... but mostly about dinosaurs.

The history of science is also a history of antagonisms and rivalries – Edison versus Tesla, Darwin versus Wallace, Newton versus Hooke. None, however, has ever touched the peaks of absurdity of the 30-year clash between Cope and Marsh, who challenged each other in the (relatively) wastelands of the American frontier to determine which of the two was the better paleontologist and bone collector. A relationship that began as friendship, then became cordial but cold collaboration, finally degenerating into open warfare that came to involve their respective families, several esteemed American and European colleagues, important academic institutions, and even the U.S. Congress. A war, however, that also gave a decisive impetus to our understanding of the history of life on Earth and, indirectly, to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection; that created paleontology as an academic discipline and has left us (literally) tons of bones that tell millions of years of our planet’s history; and that consumed its two protagonists until the last day of their existence.

Gabriele Ferrari is a paleontologist by training and a journalist by profession: he writes about movies, science, hi-tech and video games for several newspapers, including “Oggi” and “Focus.”