EXCLUSIVE: After recently co-starring together in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Steve Carell and James Gandolfini are reuniting for another comedic movie, this time on TV. Carell and Gandolfini are set to star and executive produce HBO Films‘ Bone Wars. The project, now in development, is based on the real-life Bone Wars (aka the Great Dinosaur Rush) between Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. Set during the post-Civil War birth of American science, the film is a sophisticated comedy about one of history’s most notorious feuds — the great dinosaur fossil race between paleontologists Marsh (Gandolfini) and Cope (Carell) — a decades-long competition that led to the discovery of more than 160 dinosaurs and their mutual downward spiral.

Search is underway for a writer to pen Bone Wars, which is executive produced by former Sopranos star Gandolfini and Alexandra Ryan of Gandolfini’s Attaboy Prods. and The Office alum Carell and Thom Hinkle of Carell’s Carousel Television. Gandolfini and his Attaboy banner have had constant presence at HBO since the end of The Sopranos. He developed a few projects including the original movie Hemingway & Gellhorn, which he executive produced, and starred in the film Cinema Verite and the pilot Criminal Justice. WME-repped Carell is currently filming Anchorman 2, CAA-repped Gandolfini is filming Animal Rescue.