This is Throwback Thursday #322. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! email:esconi.info@gmail.com.

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While speaking with a Field Museum visitor at the recent “Dinopalooza 2026”, I learned about an extraordinary book discovery made at a Salvation Army store in Delaware a few years ago. The visitor shared in a 2025 post he made on the Reddit community r/rarebooks. The book is a signed copy of On the Origin of Species that once belonged to Othniel Charles Marsh. It is a first-edition, second-state American printing, published by Appleton and Company in 1860.

This book was found in Delaware at a Salvation Army. There were other cool books like some first edition Chas Addams books (Addams Family creator). It was such a lucky haul. If my memory serves me right they had either received a donation after an estate sale or it was donated by a junk removal company that cleaned out someone’s library. It’s incredible to me that this book might have ended up in a land fill in Delaware somewhere.

Such a nice find!

The best part are the two O.C. Marsh signatures. The first in 1860. Marsh was an American professor of paleontology at Yale College and a prolific fossil collector.

Marsh along with Edward Drinker Cope are infamous for their roles in the “Bone Wars” of the late 1800’s. Marsh and Cope were bitter rivals in the search for dinosaur bones. From Wikipedia…

The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush,^[1] was a period of intense and ruthlessly competitive fossil hunting and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between  Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History  at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to outdo the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and the destruction of bones. Each scientist also sought to ruin his rival’s reputation and cut off his funding, using attacks in scientific publications.

Their search for fossils led them west to rich bone beds  in  Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. From 1877 to 1892, both paleontologists used their wealth and influence to finance their own expeditions and to procure services and dinosaur bones from fossil hunters. By the end of the Bone Wars, both men had exhausted their funds in the pursuit of paleontological supremacy.

Cope and Marsh were financially and socially ruined by their attempts to outcompete and disgrace each other, but they made important contributions to science and paleontology and provided substantial material for further work—both scientists left behind many unopened boxes of fossils after their deaths. The efforts of the two men led to 142 new species of dinosaurs being discovered and described. The products of the Bone Wars resulted in an increase in knowledge of prehistoric life, and sparked the public’s interest in dinosaurs, leading to continued fossil excavation in North America in the decades to follow. Many historical books and fictional adaptations have been published about this period of intense fossil-hunting activity.

Marsh signed it again, when he gifted the book to Samuel Ward Loper (S. W. Lofer, Esq.). Loper (1834-1910) was an instructor of geology and biology at both Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He later worked at the USGS on various geological expeditions. He served as Curator of the museum at Wesleyan University from 1894 until his death in 1910. Additionally, he was a life-long fossil collector, primarily of Triassic plants and animals.