Cope was the first son of Alfred and Hanna Cope. His father was a serious Quaker and ran the shipping business started by his father, Thomas P. Cope. The business was started in 1821. His parents took him to gardens, museums, and zoos. They taught him to read and write and draw.
He started going to school when he was 9 years old. When he was 12, his parents sent him away to a Quaker boarding school. At 15 years old he studied biology (natural history) and often visited the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. They had a Natural history museum.
His letters home show he felt farm work was not for him. Cope’s father made him get a summer job on a farm when he was 14 and 15. When he was 16 he was not sent to the boarding school any more because his father wanted him to be a farmer. His father wanted him to get more exercise, so he bought him a farm. Cope rented out the land to farmers and worked on farms.
When he was 18 years old he, began working at the Academy of Natural Sciences part-time. He took classes. His father paid for them. Still, his father said he should farm. Until he was 23, his letters to his father kept saying he did not want to be a farmer and that he wanted to be a scientist.
He worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences for two years, and became a member. He sometimes had to visit the Smithsonian Institution where he met Spencer Baird, who knew all about fish and birds. He also joined the American Philosophical Society. The Academy and the Society published journals, and they accepted his articles.
In 1861 when he was 21 years old, he wrote about classifying salamanders. A salamander is an amphibian. He then took a comparative anatomy class from a famous teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. Cope then asked his father if he could learn German and French so he could read science books and novels in German and French.
At the beginning of the American Civil War Cope tried to get a job helping in a field hospital. Then, when he was 22, he wanted to somehow help out the freed blacks. That year, 1863, he and his fiancée broke up and he was sad. He went to Ireland, England and Europe. During his trip, he met famous scientists.
While in Germany, he first met his rival, scientist Othniel Charles Marsh. On February 11, 1864, he wrote to his father, “I shall get home in time to . . . be caught by the new draft. I shall not be sorry for this . . . certain persons . . . would be mean enough to say that I have gone to Europe to avoid the war".
Cope’s return home to Philadelphia was before the end of the Civil War. He married a Quaker girl he knew, Annie Pim. She lived on a farm and the wedding was held at her house.
Cope wrote papers on fish, whales, and one on a fossil frog with a tail. Cope’s father gave money to a small Quaker college called Haverford College. The college gave Cope an honorary master's degree and hired him to teach Zoology.
Cope went on scientific trips to the American west and wrote letters to his parents and to his wife and daughter while on those trips. He told his father that teaching took up too much of his time for him to make scientific discoveries. He quit his job at the college. He and his wife and daughter then moved to Haddonfield to be closer to the fossil beds in western New Jersey.
In Haddonfield, New Jersey were marlpits, where a dinosaur skeleton was discovered in 1858 by William Foulke and named "Hadrosaurus foulkii" by Dr. Leidy of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences. Cope found more fossils in the marlpits there. For example, he described "Elasmosaurus platyurus" and "Laelaps" in 1868. Edward Cope also went on expeditions to caves; the last cave he visited was the Wyandotte Caves in Indiana in 1871.
In his 30s the Quaker wrote a lot of scientific papers that were published. Charles Sternberg said that in the fossil fields of Kansas Cope had a "severe attack of nightmare . . . every animal of which we had found trace during the day played with him at night . . . sometimes he would lose half the night in this exhausting slumber".
Cope also looked for fossils in the west of the United States. In 1872 he explored Eocene rocks. The rocks were 55 to 38 million years old. That year, he worked too much and had a breakdown. In 1873 he studied the "Titanothere" beds (strata) of northeastern Colorado. "Titanothere" was a large extinct herbivore.
In 1874 Cope volunteered for the Wheeler Survey. These geological mapping trips were led by George Montague Wheeler. They mapped parts of the United States west of the 100th meridian. The 100th meridian west is the boundary between the dry West and the rainy East of the United States.
In 1874 Cope discovered the Puerco formation in New Mexico during the Wheeler Survey. The Puerco formation was a layer of soft rock 500 feet thick along the upper Puerco River near Cuba, New Mexico. It was green and black marl (that contained chemicals used in making fertilizer). Fossils were later found by someone at a similar formation west of there in a different county. Cope said it was like those fossils came from his Puerco formation, which he discovered. His cliff may have been dug by the river over a long time and it looked like it had been there a long time. It was something the scientists he knew had not seen before him. As part of the Wheeler Survey, he was able to shop at commissaries. He was able to get his finding in the reports the survey published. He brought his wife and daughter along on one trip of the survey, renting a house for them. As a volunteer, he paid his own way.
When Cope was 35, his father died, leaving him a quarter of a million dollars. The next year, 1876, Cope moved his wife and daughter from their house by the apple orchard in Haddonfield, New Jersey back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – this time to a row house in the City. He bought two units and used the one next door as a paleo-lab for his fossil collection. He stopped doing field work to catch up on his writing. He hired teams to look for fossils for him. And, he helped the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition set up their fossil displays. In 1877 he was able to buy half of the "American Naturalist."
He published papers so fast his rival, Professor Marsh, had doubts about when Cope’s fossils were found. In August 1878 when he was 38, Cope sailed to the British Isles to attend a scientific convention in Dublin Ireland. He then sailed to France to go to a two-day scientific convention there. At one of the conventions he decided to buy some boxes of Argentine fossils, maybe for the museum in Philadelphia.
When Cope came back, two years-worth of collecting by his man Lucas awaited him. This included a "Camarasaurus", a sauropod.
Cope introduced his (then) friend Marsh to the marl pit owner, Albert Vorhees, when the two visited the site. Later he discovered that Marsh had gone—behind Cope's back and made a private agreement with Vorhees: any fossils that Vorhees's men found were sent back to Marsh at New Haven.
In 1868 Professor Marsh said Cope put the skull of dinosaur at the tail end. It was "Elasmosaurus", a long-necked plesiosaur. It turned out Marsh was right, and Cope was humiliated.
The feud lasted for the rest of Cope’s life. Both became less wealthy trying to keep the other’s men from digging for fossils. Each criticized the other’s work in the New York Herald. Another time Marsh tried to keep Cope from getting his articles and books published, so Cope hired two fossil-finders away from Marsh.