Edward Drinker Cope

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Edward Drinker Cope (July 28, 1840 – April 12, 1897) was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist, as well as a noted herpetologist and ichthyologist. He was a founder of the Neo-Lamarckism school of thought. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, Cope distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science; he published his first scientific paper at the age of 19. Though his father tried to raise Cope as a gentleman farmer, he eventually acquiesced to his son's scientific aspirations. Cope married his cousin and had one child; the family moved from Philadelphia to Haddonfield, New Jersey, although Cope would maintain a residence and museum in Philadelphia in his later years.

Cope had little formal scientific training, and he eschewed a teaching position for field work. He made regular trips to the American West, prospecting in the 1870s and 1880s, often as a member of United States Geological Survey teams. A personal feud between Cope and paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh led to a period of intense fossil-finding competition now known as the Bone Wars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars

Cope's financial fortunes soured after failed mining ventures in the 1880s, forcing him to sell off much of his fossil collection. He experienced a resurgence in his career toward the end of his life before dying of kidney disease on April 12, 1897.

Though Cope's scientific pursuits nearly bankrupted him, his contributions helped to define the field of American paleontology. He was a prodigious writer, with 1,400 papers published over his lifetime, although his rivals debated the accuracy of his rapidly published works. He discovered, described, and named more than 1,000 vertebrate species, including hundreds of fishes and dozens of dinosaurs. His proposal for the origin of mammalian molars is notable among his theoretical contributions. "Cope's rule", however, the hypothesis that mammalian lineages gradually grow larger over geologic time, while named after him, is "neither explicit nor implicit" in his work.

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Edward Drinker Cope, naturalist, the son of Alfred and Hannah Cope, was born on July 28, 1840, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied at Westtown Academy, 1849–53, the University of Pennsylvania, 1860–63, and the Smithsonion Institution. On August 14, 1865, while teaching at Haverford College (1864–67), he married Annie Pym; they had a daughter. Cope made field studies of fossil vertebrates in the East and became an authority on paleontology and zoology. He was for a time employed by the Hayden and Wheeler surveys (the former was later known as the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories).

When Cope made his first trip to Texas in the summer of 1877, he was in competition with fellow paleontologists to be the first to identify the fossils of the West; therefore, when he employed Jacob Boll to collect for him, it was in secret. On this journey Cope first recognized the existence of Permian amphibians, which represented a late geologic age before unknown in America. His published papers on his findings included "Descriptions of Extinct Batrachia and Reptilia from the Permian Formation of Texas" in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1877–78) and "On the Zoological Position of Texas" in the Bulletin of the United States National Museum (1880).

In recognition of his work on Texas geology and fossil vertebrates, Cope was employed by the Geological Survey of Texas during the summer of 1892 With William F. Cummins, state geologist, Cope went to the Panhandle, where he discovered the fossil fields that came to be known as the Clarendon Beds of the Upper Miocene and Lower Pliocene age and the Blanco Beds of the late Pliocene; these contained fossils of mammalian quadrupeds that had come from South America and giant mastodons from Southern Africa. Cope also worked in Palo Duro Canyon. The mammal fossils collected on the trip were sent to the Museum of the Texas Geological Survey.

The findings of Cope's two journeys to Texas were published in at least thirty separate articles, including a series of five entitled "Contribution to the History of the Vertebrata of the Permian Formation of Texas" in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1881–85). Published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Science, Philadelphia (1892), was "A Contribution to a Knowledge of the Blanco Beds of Texas," and in the American Naturalist (1885–92) were "Pliocene Horses of Southwestern Texas," "Glyptodon from Texas," "On a Skull of the Equus excelsus Leidy from the Equus Beds of Texas," and "The Age of the Staked Plains." Cope's work made possible the identification of mammalian life that marked the close of the Pliocene age in America.

Cope was an assiduous collector and prolific writer. He named about one-third of the fossil vertebrates then known, published more than 600 articles and editorials, and owned and edited the American Naturalist for nineteen years. He was a member of national and foreign geological, philosophical, and scientific societies, and collected extensively in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. From 1889 until his death on April 12, 1897, he was professor at the University of Pennsylvania.