Carrying the title “Dinosaur Wars“, tonight’s episode of the PBS series American Experience sounds like yet another dino vs. dino bloodbath. In the fashion of Jurassic Fight Club, Clash of the Dinosaurs, and the forthcoming Prehistoric Assassins, the title might suggest yet another hour of badly-rendered cgi monsters goring each other to death ad nauseam. Mercifully, that is not the case. The war was not between the dinosaurs themselves, but between two ornery naturalists who, through their rivalry, opened up the vast fossil boneyards of the American west.

Paleontology arrived late to North America. Fossils formed