Ottaviani's interest in Knight eventually led to his company G.T. Labs publishing Knight's autobiography, with notes by Ottaviani and forewords by Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen. Other character relationships were fictionalized as well: editor James Gordon Bennet, Jr. never lobbied with Cope, and never exposed Marsh's will. Cope's bones also never made it to New York. Some conversations, due to their private nature, were fictionalized; Ottaviani makes up Marsh's lobby to Congress and what happened during his meeting with President Grant, and P.T. Barnum never told off Marsh the way he did in the novel. Ottaviani wove the story Marsh tells about the Mastodon from several different versions of the legend. A key plot point is fabricated for the purposes of dramatic irony: in the book, Marsh has his agent Sam Smith leave a "Camarasaurus" skull for Cope to find and mistakenly put on the wrong dinosaur. Instead, Hatcher finds it; Smith tries to keep an unwitting Marsh from getting it, but due to Marsh's obnoxious manner he lets him after all. As a result, Marsh mistakenly classifies the (non-existent) "Brontosaurus". Ottaviani wholly invented this scene, as "The literary tradition of hoisting someone up by his own petard was too good to pass up."