Othniel Charles Marsh

Hello there. My name is Othniel Charles Marsh, but you can call me O.C. I was born on a farm in New York on October 29th, 1831. When I was a boy, I loved walking around outside and collecting interesting things. My favorite things to find were special rocks. These rocks had mysterious shapes of shells and bones pressed right into them. I later learned that these were called fossils, and they were clues to a world from long, long ago.

When I grew up, I wanted to learn more about the amazing fossils I found. My kind and wealthy uncle, George Peabody, helped me go to a big school called Yale University in 1856. There, I studied science and learned all about ancient life. My studies paid off. In 1866, I became the very first professor of paleontology in America. Paleontology is the special name for the study of ancient life. I even convinced my uncle to help build a brand-new museum, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, so I would have a place to keep all the incredible bones I hoped to find one day.

Starting in 1870, I began to travel to the American West. It was like a giant treasure chest filled with dinosaur bones just waiting to be discovered. It was a very exciting time. I was in a big competition with another scientist named Edward Drinker Cope. We called it the 'Bone Wars.' It was like a race to see who could discover and name the most new dinosaurs first. My team and I worked very hard, and we found some of the most famous dinosaurs you know today. In 1877, we found the Stegosaurus with its big plates, and in 1889, we discovered the amazing Triceratops with its three horns.

Every time we found huge bones, we carefully packed them up in crates and sent them all the way back to my museum at Yale. My team worked very hard to clean the fossils. Then, they put all the pieces together like giant puzzles. It was amazing work. For the very first time, people could walk into a museum and stand next to the towering skeletons of real dinosaurs. They could see just how big these incredible animals once were.

I lived to be 67 years old. My discoveries helped everyone imagine the amazing world of dinosaurs and what Earth was like millions of years ago. The fossils I collected are still in the Peabody Museum today, helping kids just like you learn about the incredible animals that once lived on our planet.