Edward Drinker Cope

**Edward Drinker Cope** (July 28, 1840 – April 12, 1897) was an American biologist. He was notable for his work on fossil animals of North America. Cope was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Cope was a paleontologist, comparative anatomist, herpetologist and ichthyologist. He wrote many papers. His parents were rich Quakers.

His father wanted him to be a farmer, but he became a scientist. He married his cousin. Later, they owned a museum in Philadelphia.

Mostly, he read books on his own to learn science and found things out himself. He was not a teacher. He did field work, and wrote a lot. In the 1870s and 1880s, went to the American West to report what the land was like to the government. He was often on a mapping team sent by the United States Geological Survey.

For a while he and Othniel Charles Marsh were competing to find dinosaurs. This fight between them is called the Bone Wars. Sometimes being a scientist cost him more money than he could afford. In the 1880s, Cope lost so much money in his silver mines that he had to sell a lot of his fossil collection in 1886. In the 1890s, he was no longer poor, but he died when he was only 57.

1,400 of his articles were published in science journals. He found over 1,000 species of extinct animals. He wrote about hundreds of kinds of ancient fish. He found dozens of dinosaurs. He wrote about the evolution of mammalian  molars teeth, and produced two huge works on the amphibia and reptiles of North America.

Cope showed that horses evolved to be larger as they moved from woodland onto grassland. The fact that the fossils show the mammals getting bigger over time is called Cope's rule.

## Early life 
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. 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.

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.p835 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.p151/8 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. 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. 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.]]

### Independence 
 of Colorado and Utah. It is the most common sauropod fossil found in North America]]
When Cope was 35, his father died, leaving him a quarter of a million dollars.]]

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.p35

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. Cope did not want to give the fossils to the Survey because when he found them he was a volunteer paying his own way. So, he spoke to the *New York Herald*. and said some of what Marsh wrote was really written by others. Also, he said Powell was spending tax money wrong and had made mistakes in classifying fossils.p206 As a result of the articles, the Survey lost its funding for fossil-finding. Marsh got fired from the Survey. And, Cope almost got fired from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1886, Professor Cope fired his fossil diggers and started selling some of his large fossil collection to museums. He also wrote forty more scientific reports about their findings that year.

Cope sold three other collections for $29,000. Although his collection still contained more than 13,000&nbsp;specimens, Cope's fossil hoard was much smaller than Marsh's collection, which was valued at over a million&nbsp;dollars.]]
In 1896, Cope got sick, and he died on April 12, 1897. His friends told of how they remembered him. They then held the reading of his will. The *American Journal of Science* had an obituary about Cope. The *Naturalist* had a longer one. And, the National Academy of Sciences' journal had one years later.

## Cope's ideas and character 
 may affect the preservation of superficial characteristics in organisms, natural selection alone could not explain the formation of genera.

Cope's beliefs became one with an increased emphasis on continual and utilitarian evolution with less involvement of a Creator. Although the view has been shown to be incorrect, it was common among paleontologists in Cope's time. He was a strong believer in the law of use and disuse—that an individual will slowly, over time, favor an anatomical part of its body so much that it will become stronger and larger as time progresses down the generations. This theory fails because use and disuse does not affect the genetic code of the gametes, something which became clear in the generations after his death.

## References
* Alroy, John 1999. *Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897)* National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. University of California, Santa Barbara URL: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/%7Ealroy/lefa/Cope.html  Retrieved, 2008-11-17.
* Bowler, Peter 1977. Edward Drinker Cope and the changing structure of evolutionary theory. *Isis*, **68**, #2, pp.&nbsp;249–265 University of Chicago URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/230073 Retrieved, 2009-12-05 
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* Fowler, Henry W. 1963. Special Anniversary Features: Cope in retrospect *Copeia*, vol. 1963, no. 1, pp.&nbsp;195–198 URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1441319 Retrieved, 2009-12-04 American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists 
* Gill, Theodore 1987. Edward Drinker Cope, Naturalist - a chapter in the history of science. *The American Naturalist*, **31**, 370, pp.&nbsp;831–886. Chicago, IL :University of Chicago Press. 
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* Osborn, Henry Fairfield 1931. *Cope: master naturalist: life and letters of Edward Drinker Cope, with a bibliography of his writings.* Manchester, New Hampshire: Ayer Company Publishing.  Google Books No preview
* Penick, James. 1971. Professor Cope vs. Professor Marsh. *American Heritage*, **22**, iss. 5. URL: http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1971/5/1971_5_4.shtml 
* Romer, Alfred S. 1964. Cope versus Marsh. *Systematic Zoology*, **13**, #4, 201–207. Taylor & Francis. URL: http://jstor.org/stable/2411780  
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* The Academy of Natural Sciences *Bone Wars: the Cope-Marsh rivalry*. URL: http://www.ansp.org/museum/leidy/paleo/bone_wars.php  Retrieved, 2009-11-08
* Haverford College. * Quaker and Special Collections: Edward Drinker Cope papers * URL: http://www.haverford.edu/library/special/aids/edcope/  Retrieved, 2009-11-10

## Other websites
* Dinosaurs named by Cope, at DinoData
* Profile of Edward Drinker Cope  at the Niagara Falls Museum Collection
* Edward Drinker Cope obituary, 1897 archived via JSTOR