 The rivalry between the two increased towards the latter half of the 1870s . In 1877 , Marsh received a letter from Arthur Lakes , a schoolteacher in Golden , Colorado . Lakes had been hiking in the mountains near the town of Morrison with his friend , H. C. Beckwith , looking for fossilized leaves in the Dakota sandstone . Instead , the pair found large bones embedded in the rock . Lakes wrote that the bones were " apparently a vertebra and a humerus bone of some gigantic saurian . " While Lakes sent Marsh some 1 @,@ 500 pounds of bone , he also sent Cope some of the specimens . Marsh published his finds first , and having been paid $ 100 for the finds Lakes wrote to Cope that the samples should be forwarded to Marsh . Cope was offended by the slight . Meanwhile , Cope received bones from school superintendent O.W. Lucas in March 1877 from Canon City ; the remains were of a dinosaur even bigger than Lakes ' that Marsh had described . 
