Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards (2005)

Author Jim Ottaviani, who specializes in brainy comic histories about scientific notables, excavates the story of Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, 19th-century paleontology's most bitter rivals. Ottaviani and his Big Time Attic art team ably convey the anything-goes nature of this emerging field with, say, scenes of fossils being unscrupulously planted. But you'll wish more fiction were woven in with the science in Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder, if only to make the pair's clash juicier.