Gold Rush

Reading about Cope and Marsh's caddy competitions over dinosaur bones in the name of science reminded me of the carelessly adventuring orchid collectors fighting to the death to be the first to bring back the rarest breed. The importance in the scientific field that is placed on the inventor or the discoverer of a certain specimen adds a lot of unprofessional behavior in the field. The difference between the orchid collectors and the dinosaur fossil collectors though is that the orchid men were risking their lives far from home and had a lot more at stake than the paleontologists in Wyoming and Colorado. Therefore I give them more slack for their perilous missions warranted violent self defense. (Which is actually funny because the things they were looking for seem the opposite... dinos=scary, flowers=not so much). I'm glad to hear of successful scientists who didn't spend so much time bitching abut their peers and focused on their work indifferently like, Barnum Brown. He succeeded in discovering so many things without the distracting feuding of his immature contemporaries. 

(This is written by Meredith Shank. I didn't set up a blog account. Very sorry.)