i have one thing to say about the wacky MsScribe situation, and it is this:

[fox]

quoted, almost without comment and without even seeking permission, from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

[Richard] Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament.  A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyes -- a face to frighten babies.  In manner he was cold and imperious, and he was without scruple in the furtherance of his ambitions.  He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate.  Even Owen's own son (who soon after killed himself) referred to his father's 'lamentable coldness of heart'.

His undoubted gifts as an anatomist allowed him to get away with the most barefaced dishonesties.  In 1857, the naturalist T.H. Huxley was leafing through a new edition of Churchill's Medical Directory when he noticed that Owen was listed as Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Government School of Mines, which rather surprised Huxley as that was the position he held.  Upon enquiring how Churchill's had made such an elemental error, he was told that the information had been provided to them by Dr Owen himself.  A fellow naturalist named Hugh Falconer, meanwhile, caught Owen taking credit for one of his discoveries.  Others accused him of borrowing specimens, then denying he had done so.  Owen even fell into a bitter dispute with the Queen's dentist over the credit for a theory concerning the physiology of teeth.

He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked.  Early in his career Owen used his influence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant, whose only crime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. [...]

But no-one suffered more from Owen's unkindly attentions than the hapless and increasingly tragic Gideon Mantell.  After losing his wife, his children, his medical practice and most of his fossil collection, Mantell moved to London.  There, in 1841 [... he] was involved in a terrible accident[..., which] left him bent, crippled and in chronic pain, with a spine damaged beyond repair.

Capitalizing on Mantell's enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging his contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself.  Mantell continued to try to do original research, but Owen used his influence at the Royal Society to ensure that most of his papers were rejected. [...]

[...] Soon after Mantell's death, an arrestingly uncharitable obituary appeared in the Literary Gazette.  In it Mantell was characterized as a mediocre anatomist whose modest contributions to palaeontology were limited by a 'want of exact knowledge'.  The obituary even removed the discovery of the iguanodon from him and credited it to [Georges] Cuvier and Owen, among others.  Though the piece carried no byline, the style was Owen's and no-one in the world of the natural sciences doubted the authorship. 

By this stage, however, Owen's transgressions were beginning to catch up with him.  His undoing began when a committee of the Royal Society -- a committee of which he happened to be chairman -- decided to award him its highest honour, the Royal Medal, for a paper he had written on an extinct mollusc called the belemnite.  'However,' as Deborah Cadbury notes in her excellent history of the period, Terrible Lizard, 'this piece of work was not quote as original as it appeared.'  The belemnite, it turned out, had been discovered four years earlier by an amateur naturalist named Chaning Pearce, and the discovery had been fully reported at a meeting of the Geological Society.  Owen had been at that meeting, but failed to mention that when he presented a report of his own to the Royal Society -- at which, not incidentally, he rechristened the creature Belemnites owenii in his own honour.  Although Owen was allowed to keep the Royal Medal, the episode left a permanent tarnish on his reputation, even among his few remaining supporters. 

[...]

It would be reasonable to suppose that Richard Owen's petty rivalries marked the low point of nineteenth-century palaeontology, but in fact worse was to come, this time from overseas.  In America in the closing decades of the century there arose a rivalry even more spectacularly venomous, if not quite as destructive.  It was between two strange and ruthless men, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

They had much in common.  Both were spoiled, driven, self-centred, quarrelsome, jealous, mistrustful and ever unhappy.  Between them they changed the world of palaeontology.

They began as friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other, and spent a pleasant week together in 1868.  However, something then went wrong between them -- nobody is quite sure what -- and by the following year they had developed an enmity that would grow into consuming hatred over the next three decades.  It is probably safe to say that no two people in the natural sciences have ever despised each other more.

[...]

For a decade or so, Marsh and Cope's mutual dislike primarily took the form of quiet sniping, but in 1877 it erupted into grandiose dimensions.  In that year a Colorado schoolteacher named Arthur Lakes found bones near Morrison while out hiking with a friend.  Recognizing the bones as coming from a 'giant saurian', Lakes thoughtfully dispatched some samples to both Marsh and Cope.  A delighted Cope sent Lakes $100 for his trouble and asked him not to tell anyone of his discovery, particularly Marsh.  Confused, Lakes now asked Marsh to pass the bones on to Cope.  Marsh did so, but it was an affront that he would never forget.

It also marked the start of a war between the two that became increasingly bitter, underhand and often ridiculous.  It sometimes stooped to one team's diggers throwing rocks at the other team's.  Cope was caught at one point prising open crates that belonged to Marsh.  They insulted each other in print and poured scorn on each other's results.

(c) Bryson, Bill, A Short History of Nearly Everything.  London: Doubleday, 2003.  pp. 120-126.  All emphasis added.

It's not (and never has been) just us.