Edward Drinker Cope
Encyclopedia
Edward Drinker Cope was an American paleontologist
and comparative anatomist
, as well as a noted herpetologist
and ichthyologist
. 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 nineteen. 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
. 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 unidentified causes 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 would debate 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 proposals on the origin of mammalian molars and for the gradual enlargement of mammalian species over geologic time ("Cope's rule
") are notable among his theoretical contributions.
or Quakers, operated a lucrative shipping business started by his father, Thomas P. Cope, in 1821. He was a philanthropist who gave money to the Society of Friends, the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens and the Institute for Colored Youth
.
Edward was born and raised in a large stone house called "Fairfield" in what is now suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
. The 8 acres (3.2 ha) of pristine and exotic gardens of the house offered a landscape that Edward was able to explore. The Copes began teaching their children to read and write at a very young age, and took Edward on trips across New England and to museums, zoos, and gardens. Cope's interest in animals became apparent at a young age, as did his natural artistic ability.
Alfred intended to give his son the same education that he himself had received. At age nine, Edward was sent to a day school in Philadelphia and in 1853 at the age of twelve, Edward was sent to the Friends' Boarding School or Westtown, near West Chester, Pennsylvania. The school was founded in 1799 with fundraising by members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), and provided much of the Cope family's education. The prestigious school was expensive, costing Alfred $500 in tuition each year, and in his first year Edward studied algebra, chemistry, scripture, physiology, grammar, astronomy, and Latin. Edward's letters home requesting a larger allowance show he was able to manipulate his father, and that he was, according to author and Cope biographer Jane Davidson, "a bit of a spoiled brat". His letters suggest that he was lonely at the school—it was the first time he had been away from his home for an extended period. Otherwise, Edward's studies progressed much like a typical boy—he consistently had "less than perfect" or "not quite satisfactory" marks for conduct from his teachers, and did not work hard on his penmanship lessons, which may have contributed to his often illegible handwriting as an adult.
Edward returned to Westtown in 1855, accompanied by two of his sisters. Biology began to interest him more that year, and he studied natural history texts in his spare time. While at the school he frequently visited the Academy of Natural Sciences
. Edward often obtained bad marks due to quarreling and bad conduct. His letters to his father show that he chafed at farm work and betrayed flashes of the temper for which he would later become well known. After sending Edward back to the farm for summer break in 1854 and 1855, Alfred did not return Edward to school after spring 1856. Instead Alfred attempted to turn his son into a gentleman farmer, which he considered a wholesome profession that would yield enough profit to lead a comfortable life, and improve the undersized Edward's health. Until 1863, Cope's letters to his father continually expressed his yearning for a more professional scientific career than that of a farmer, which he called "dreadfully boring".
While working on farms, Edward continued his education on his own. In 1858 he began working part-time at the Academy of Natural Sciences, reclassifying and cataloguing specimens, and published his first series of research results in January 1859. Cope began taking French and German classes with a former Westtown teacher. Though Alfred resisted his son's pursuit of a science career, he paid for his son's private studies. Instead of working the farm his father bought for him, Edward rented out the land and used the income to further his scientific endeavors.
Alfred finally gave in to Edward's wishes and paid for university classes. Cope attended the University of Pennsylvania
in the 1861 and/or 1862 academic years, studying comparative anatomy under Joseph Leidy
, one of the most influential anatomists and paleontologists at the time. Cope asked his father to pay for a tutor in both German and French, "not so much for their own sake," wrote Edward, "but as for their value in enabling me to read their books of a literary or scientific character." During this period he had a job recataloging the herpetological collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences
, which he became a member of at Leidy's urging. Cope's job lasted two years and he visited the Smithsonian Institution
on occasion, where he became acquainted with Spencer Baird, who was an expert in the fields of ornithology
and ichthyology. In 1861 he published his first paper on Salamandridae
classification; over the next five years he published primarily on reptiles and amphibians. Cope's membership in the Academy of Natural Sciences and American Philosophical Society
gave him outlets to publish and announce his work; many of his early paleontological works were published by the Philosophical Society.
, Edward traveled through Europe, taking the opportunity to visit the most esteemed museums and societies of the time. Initially, Edward seemed interested in helping out at a field hospital, but in letters to his father later on in the war this aspiration seemed to disappear; instead Edward considered working in the American South to assist freed African-Americans. Davidson suggests that Edward's correspondence with Leidy and Ferdinand Hayden, who worked as field surgeons during the war, might have informed Edward of the horrors of the occupation. Edward was involved in a love affair; his father did not approve. Whether Edward or the unnamed woman (whom he at one point intended to marry) broke off the relationship is unknown, but he took the breakup poorly. Biographer and paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn
attributed Edward's sudden departure for Europe as a method of keeping him from being drafted into the Civil War. Cope did write to his father from London on February 11, 1864, that, "I shall get home in time to catch and be caught by the new draft. I shall not be sorry for this, as I know certain persons who would be mean enough to say that I have gone to Europe to avoid the war." Eventually Cope took the pragmatic approach and waited out the conflict. He may have suffered from mild depression during this period, and often complained of boredom.
Despite his torpor, Edward proceeded with his tour of Europe, and met with some of the most highly esteemed scientists of the world during his travels through France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Italy, and Eastern Europe, most likely with introductory letters from Leidy and Spencer Baird. In the winter of 1863, Edward met Othniel Charles Marsh
while in Berlin. Marsh, age thirty-two, was attending the University of Berlin. He held two university degrees in comparison to Edward's lack of formal schooling past sixteen, but Edward had written 37 scientific papers in comparison to Marsh's two published works. While they would later become rivals, on meeting the two men appeared to take a liking to each other. Marsh led Edward on a tour of the city, and they stayed together for days. After Edward left Berlin the two maintained correspondence, exchanging manuscripts, fossils, and photographs. Edward burned many of his journals and letters from Europe upon his return to the United States. Friends intervened and stopped Cope from destroying some of his drawings and notes, in what author Url Lanham deemed a "partial suicide".
, a small Quaker school where the family had philanthropic ties. The college awarded him an honorary master's degree so he could have the position. Cope even began to think about marriage and consulted his father in the matter, telling him of the girl he would like to marry: "an amiable woman, not over sensitive, with considerable energy, and especially one inclined to be serious and not inclined to frivolity and display—the more truly Christian of course the better—seems to be the most practically the most suitable for me, though intellect and accomplishments have more charm." Cope thought of Annie Pim, a member of the Society of Friends, as less a lover than companion, declaring that "her amiability and domestic qualities generally, her capability of taking care of a house, etc., as well as her steady seriousness weigh far more with me than any of the traits which form the theme of poets!" Cope's family approved of his choice, and the marriage took place in July 1865 at Pim's farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The two had a single daughter, Julia Biddle Cope, born June 10, 1866. Cope's return to the United States also marked an expansion of his scientific studies; in 1864 he described several fishes, a whale, and the amphibian Amphibamus grandiceps
(his first paleontological contribution.)
During the period between 1866 and 1867 Cope went on trips to western parts of the country. Cope related to his father his scientific experiences; to his daughter he sent descriptions of animal life as part of her education. Cope found educating his students at Haverford "a pleasure" but wrote to his father that he "could not get any work done." He resigned from his position at Haverford and moved his family to Haddonfield
, in part to be closer to the fossil beds of western New Jersey. Due to the time-consuming nature of his Haverford position Cope had not had time to attend to his farm and had let it out to others, but eventually found he was in need of more money to fuel his scientific habits. Pleading with his father for money to pursue his career, he finally sold the farm in 1869. Alfred apparently did not press his son to continue farming, and Edward focused on his scientific career. He continued his continental travels, including trips to Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. He visited caves across the region. He stopped these cave explorations after an 1871 trip to the Wyandotte Caves
in Indiana, but remained interested in the subject. Cope had visited Haddonfield many times in the 1860s, paying periodical visits to the marl pits. The fossils he found in these pits became the focus of several papers, including a description in 1868 of Elasmosaurus platyurus
and Laelaps. Marsh accompanied him on one of these excursions. Cope's proximity to the beds after moving to Haddonfield made more frequent trips possible. The Copes lived comfortably in a frame house backed by an apple orchard. Two maids tended the estate, which entertained a number of guests. Cope's only concern was for more money to spend on his scientific work.
The 1870s were the golden years of Cope's career, marked by his most prominent discoveries and rapid flow of publications. Among his descriptions were the therapsid Lystrosaurus
(1870), the archosauromorph Champsosaurus
(1876), and the sauropod Amphicoelias
(1878), possibly the largest dinosaur ever discovered. In the period of one year, from 1879 to 1880, Cope published 76 papers based on his travels through New Mexico and Colorado, and on the findings of his collectors in Texas, Kansas Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. During the peak years, Cope published around 25 reports and preliminary observations each year. The hurried publications led to errors in interpretation and naming—many of his scientific names were later canceled or withdrawn. In comparison, Marsh wrote and published less frequently and more succinctly—his work's appearance in the widespread American Journal of Science
led to faster reception abroad, and subsequently Marsh's reputations grew faster than Cope.
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In autumn 1871 Cope began prospecting farther west to the fossil fields of Kansas. Leidy and Marsh had been to the region earlier, and Cope employed one of Marsh's guides, Benjamin Mudge, who was in want of a job. Cope's companion Charles Sternberg
described the lack of water and good food available to Cope and his helpers on these expeditions. Cope would suffer from a "severe attack of nightmare" in which "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." Nevertheless Cope continued to lead the party from sunrise to sunset, sending letters to his wife and child describing his finds. The severe desert conditions and Cope's habit of overworking himself till he was bedridden caught up with him and in 1872 he broke down from exhaustion. Cope maintained a regular pattern of summers spent prospecting and winters writing up his findings from 1871 to 1879.
Throughout the decade Cope traveled across the West, exploring rocks of the Eocene
in 1872 and the Titanothere Beds of Colorado in 1873. In 1874 Cope was employed with the Wheeler Survey
, a group of surveys led by George Montague Wheeler that mapped parts of the United States west of the 100th meridian
. The survey traveled through New Mexico, whose Puerco formations, he wrote to his father, provided "the most important find in geology I have ever made". The New Mexico bluffs contained millions of years of formation and subsequent deformation, and were in an area which had not been visited by Leidy or Marsh. Being part of the survey had other advantages; Cope was able to draw on fort commissaries and defray publishing costs. While there was no salary, his findings would be published in the annual reports that the surveys printed. Cope brought Annie and Julia along on one such survey and rented a house for them at Fort Bridger
, but he spent more of his own money on these survey trips than he would have liked.
Alfred died December 4, 1875, and left Edward with an inheritance of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Alfred's death was a blow to Cope; his father was a constant confidant. The same year marked a suspension of much of Cope's field work and a new emphasis on writing up discoveries of the previous years. His chief publication of the time, The Vertebrata of the Cretaceous Formations of the West, was a collection of 303 pages and 54 illustration plates. The memoir summarized his experiences prospecting in New Jersey and Kansas. Cope now had the finances to hire multiple teams to search for fossils for him year-round and he advised the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition
on their fossil displays. Cope's studies of marine reptiles of Kansas closed in 1876, opening a new focus on terrestrial reptiles. The same year, Cope moved from Haddonfield to 2100 and 2102 Pine Street in Philadelphia. He converted one of the two houses into a museum where he stored his growing collection of fossils. Cope's expeditions took him across Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana. Cope's initial journey into the Clarendon Beds of Upper Miocene and Lower Pliocene of Texas led to an affiliation with the Geological Survey of Texas. Cope's papers on the region constitute some of his most important paleontological contributions. In 1877 he purchased half the rights to the American Naturalist
to publish the papers he produced at a rate so high that Marsh questioned their dating.
Cope returned to Europe in August 1878 in response to an invitation to join the British Association for the Advancement of Science
's Dublin meeting. He was warmly welcomed in England and France and met with the distinguished paleontologists and archeologists of the period. Marsh's attempts to sully Cope's reputation had made little impact on anyone save paleontologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who according to Osborn "alone treated [Cope] with coolness". Following the Dublin meeting, Cope spent two days with the French Association for the Advancement of Science. At each gathering Cope exhibited dinosaur restorations by Philadelphia colleague John A. Ryder and various charts and plates from geological surveys of the 1870s led by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden
. He returned to London on October 12, meeting with anatomist Richard Owen
, ichthyologist Hermann Gunther and paleontologist H. G. Seeley. While in Europe Cope purchased a great collection of fossils from Argentina. Cope never found time to describe the collection and many of the boxes remained unopened until Cope's death.
Cope's relations with Marsh turned into a competition for fossils between the two, known today as the Bone Wars
. The conflict's seeds began upon the men's return to the United States in the 1860s. Cope introduced his colleague to the marl pit owner Albert Vorhees when the two visited the site. Marsh went 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. When Marsh was at Haddonfield examining one of Cope's fossil finds—a complete skeleton of a large aquatic plesiosaur
, Elasmosaurus, that had four flippers and a long neck—he commented that the fossil's head was on the wrong end, evidently stating that Cope had put the skull at the end of the vertebra of the tail. Cope was outraged and the two argued for some time until they agreed to have Leidy examine the bones and determine who was right. Leidy came, picked up the head of the fossil and put it on the other end. Cope was horrified since he had already published a paper on the fossil with the error at the American Philosophical Society. He immediately tried to buy back the copies, but some remained with their buyers (Marsh and Leidy kept theirs). The whole ordeal might have passed easily enough had Leidy not exposed the cover-up at the next society meeting, not to alienate Cope but only in response to Cope's brief statement where he never admitted he was wrong. Cope and Marsh would never talk to each other amicably again, and by 1873 open hostility had broken out between them.
The rivalry between the two increased towards the latter half of the 1870s. In 1877, Marsh received a letter from Arthur Lakes
, a schoolteacher in Golden, Colorado. Lakes had been hiking in the mountains near the town of Morrison with his friend, H. C. Beckwith, looking for fossilized leaves in the Dakota sandstone. Instead the pair found large bones embedded in the rock. Lakes wrote that the bones were "apparently a vertebra and a humerus bone of some gigantic saurian." While Lakes sent Marsh some 1,500 pounds of bone, he also sent Cope some of the specimens. Marsh published his finds first, and having been paid $100 for the finds Lakes wrote to Cope that the samples should be forwarded to Marsh. Cope was offended by the slight. Meanwhile Cope received bones from school superintendent O.W. Lucas in March 1877 from Canon City; the remains were of a dinosaur even bigger than Lakes' that Marsh had described.
Word that Lakes had notified Cope of his finds galvanized Marsh into action. When Marsh heard from Union Pacific Railroad workers W.E. Carlin and W.H. Reed about a vast boneyard northwest of Laramie in Como Bluff
, Marsh sent his agent, Samuel Wendell Williston
, to take charge of the digging. Cope, in response, learned of Carlin and Reed's discoveries and sent his own men to find bones in the area. The two scientists attempted to sabotage each other's progress. Cope was described as a genius and what Marsh lacked in intelligence, he easily made up for in connections—Marsh's uncle was George Peabody
, a rich banker who supported Marsh with money, and a secure position at the Peabody Museum. Marsh lobbied John Wesley Powell
to act against Cope and attempted to persuade Hayden to "muzzle" Cope's publishing. Both men tried to spy on the other's whereabouts and attempted to offer their collectors more money in the hopes of recruiting them to their own side. Cope was able to recruit David Baldwin in New Mexico and Frank Williston in Wyoming from Marsh. Cope and Marsh were extremely secretive as to the source of their fossils. When Osborn, at the time a student at Princeton, visited Cope to ask where to travel to look for fossils in the West, Cope politely refused to answer.
When Cope arrived back in the United States after his tour of Europe in 1878, he had nearly two years of fossil findings from Lucas. Among these dinosaurs was Camarasaurus
, one of the most recognizable dinosaur recreations of the time. The summer of 1879 took Cope to Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and north to Oregon, where he was amazed at the rich flora and the blueness of the Pacific Ocean. In 1879 the United States Congress consolidated the various government survey teams into the United States Geological Survey with Clarence King
as its leader. This was discouraging to Cope because King named Marsh, an old college friend, as the chief paleontologist. The period of Cope's and Marsh's paleontological digs in the American West spanned from 1877 to 1892, by which time both men exhausted much of their financial resources.
for publication. Cope had his interest in the Naturalist, but it drained him of funds. After Hayden was removed from the Survey, Cope lost his source of government funding. His fortune was not enough to support his rivalry, so Cope invested in mining. Most of his properties were silver mines in New Mexico; one mine yielded an ore vein worth $3 million in silver chloride
. Cope visited the mines each summer from 1881 to 1885, taking the opportunity to supervise or collect other minerals. For a while he made good money, but the mines stopped producing and by 1886 he had to give up his now-worthless stocks. The same year he received a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania. He continued to travel west, but realized he would not be able to best Marsh in cornering the market for bones; he had to release the collectors he had hired and sell his collections. During this period he published 40 to 75 papers each year. With the failure of his mines, Cope began searching for a job, but was turned down at the Smithsonian and American Museum of Natural History
. He turned to giving lectures for hire and writing magazine articles. Each year he lobbied Congress for an appropriation with which to finish his work on "Cope's Bible", a volume on Tertiary vertebrates, but was continually turned down. Rather than work with Powell and the Survey, Cope tried to inflame sentiment against them.
At Marsh's urging, Powell pushed for Cope to return specimens he had unearthed during his employment under the government surveys. This was an outrage to Cope, who had used his own money while working as a volunteer. In response, Cope went to the editor of the New York Herald
and promised a scandalous headline. Since 1885, Cope had kept an elaborate journal of mistakes and misdeeds that both Marsh and Powell had committed over the years. From scientific errors to publishing mistakes, he had them written down in a journal that he kept in the bottom drawer of his Pine Street desk. Cope sought out Marsh's assistants, who complained of being denied access and credit by their employer and of being chronically underpaid. Reporter William Hosea Ballou ran the first article on January 12, 1890, in what would become a series of newspaper debates between Marsh, Powell and Cope. Cope attacked Marsh for plagiarism and financial mismanagement, and attacked Powell for his geological classification errors and misspending of government-allocated funds. Marsh and Powell published their own side of the story and, in the end, little changed. No congressional hearing was created to investigate Powell's alleged misallocation of funds, while Cope and Marsh were not held responsible for any mistakes. Indirectly, however, the attacks may have been influential in Marsh's fall from power in the Survey. Due to pressure from Powell over bad press, Marsh was removed from his position for the government surveys. Cope's relations with the president of the University of Pennsylvania soured, and the entire funding for paleontology in the government surveys was pulled.
Cope took his sinking fortunes in stride. In writing to Osborn about the articles, he laughed at the outcome, saying, "It will now rest largely with you whether or not I am supposed to be a liar and am actuated by jealousy and disappointment. I think Marsh is impaled on the horns of Monoclonius sphenocerus
." Cope was well aware of his enemies and was carefree enough to name a species after a combination of "Cope" and "hater", Anisonchus cophater. Through his years of financial hardship he was able to continue publishing papers—his most productive years were 1884 and 1885, with 79 and 62 papers published, respectively. The 1880s marked the publication of two of the best-known fossil taxa described by Cope: the pelycosaur
Edaphosaurus
in 1882 and the early dinosaur Coelophysis
in 1889. In 1889 he succeeded Leidy, who had died the previous year, as professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. The small yearly stipend was enough for Cope's family to move back into one of the townhouses he had been forced to relinquish earlier.
In 1892, Cope (then 52 years old) was granted expense money for field work from the Texas Geological Survey. With his finances improved, he was able to publish a massive work on the Batrachians of North America, which was the most detailed analysis and organization of the continent's frogs and amphibians ever mastered, and the 1,115-page The Crocodilians Lizards and Snakes of North America. In the 1890s his publication rate increased to an average of 43 articles a year. His final expedition to the West took place in 1894, when he prospected for dinosaurs in South Dakota and visited sights in Texas and Oklahoma. The same year, Julia was married to William H. Collins, a Haverford astronomy professor. The couple's ages—Julia was 28 and the groom 35—were past the conventions of Victorian marriage. After their European honeymoon, the couple returned to Haverford. While Annie moved to Haverford as well, Cope did not. His official reason was the long commute and late lectures he gave in Philadelphia. In private correspondence, however, Osborn wrote that the two had essentially separated, though they remained on amiable terms.
Cope sold his collections to the American Museum of Natural History in 1895; his set of 10,000 American fossil mammals sold for $32,000, lower than Cope's asking price of $50,000. The purchase was financed by the donations from New York's high society. Cope sold three other collections for $29,000. While his collection contained more than 13,000 specimens, Cope's fossil hoard was still much smaller than Marsh's collection, valued at over a million dollars. The University of Pennsylvania bought part of Cope's ethnological artifact collection for $5,500. The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia's foremost museum, did not bid on any of Cope's sales due to bad blood between Cope and the museum's leaders; as a result, many of Cope's major finds left the city. Cope's proceeds from the sales allowed him to rehire Sternberg to prospect for fossils on his behalf.
, belladonna, and formalin, a substance based on formaldehyde used to preserve specimens. Osborn was horrified by Cope's actions and made arrangements for surgery, but the plans were put on hold after a temporary improvement in Cope's health. Cope went to Virginia looking for fossils, became ill again, and returned to his home very weak. Osborn visited Cope on April 5, inquiring about Cope's health, but the sick paleontologist pressed his friend for his views on the origin of mammals. Word of Cope's illness spread, and he was visited by friends and colleagues; even in a feverish condition Cope delivered lectures from his bed. Cope died on April 12, 1897, sixteen weeks short of his 57th birthday.
Sternberg, still prospecting for Cope that spring, was woken by a liveryman who relayed word from Annie that Cope had died three days earlier. Sternberg wrote in his memoirs that "I had lost friends before, and I had known what it was to bury my own dead, even my firstborn son, but I had never sorrowed more deeply than I did over the news." Cope's Quaker funeral consisted of six men: Osborn, his fellow colleague William Berryman Scott
, Cope's friend Persifor Frazer, son-in-law Collins, Horatio Wood and Harrison Allen
. The six sat around Cope's coffin among the fossils and Cope's pets, a tortoise and a gila monster
, for what Osborn called "a perfect Quaker silence ... an interminable length of time." Anticipating the quiet, Osborn had brought along a Bible and read an excerpt from the Book of Job
, ending by saying, "These are the problems to which our friend devoted his life."
The coffin was loaded on a hearse and carried to a gathering at Fairfield; much of the gathering was spent in silence. After the coffin was removed, the assembled began talking. Frazer recalled that each person remembered Cope differently, and that "Few men succeeded so well in concealing from anyone ... all the sides of his multiform character." Osborn, intending to follow the coffin to the graveyard, was instead pulled aside by Collins and taken to the reading of Cope's will—Osborn and Cope's brother-in-law John Garrett were named executors. Cope gave his family a choice of his books, with the remainder to be sold or donated to the University of Pennsylvania. After debts were handled, Cope left small bequests to friends and family—Anna Brown and Julia received $5000 each, while the remainder went to Annie. Cope's estate was valued at $75,327, not including additional revenue raised by sales of fossils to the American Museum of Natural History, for a total of $84,600. Some specimens preserved in alcohol made their way to the Academy of Natural Sciences, including a few gordian worms
.
Cope insisted through his will that there be no graveside service or burial; he had donated his body to science. He issued a final challenge to Marsh at his death: he had his skull donated to science so that his brain could be measured, hoping that his brain would be larger than that of his adversary; at the time, it was thought that brain size
was the true measure of intelligence. Marsh never accepted the challenge, and Cope's skull is reportedly still preserved at the University of Pennsylvania. His ashes were placed at the institute with those of his Leidy, while his bones were extracted and kept in a locked drawer to be studied by anatomy students.
Osborn listed Cope's cause of death as uremic poisoning, combined with a large prostate, but the true cause of death is unknown. Many believed that Cope had died of syphilis contracted from the women with whom he fraternized during his travels. In 1995 Davidson gained permission to have the skeleton examined by a medical doctor at the university. Dr. Morrie Kricun, a professor of radiology, concluded that there was no evidence of bony syphilis on Cope's skeleton.
Public mentions of Cope's passing were relatively slight. The Naturalist ran four photographs, a six-page obituary by editor J.S. Kingsley, and a two-page remembrance by Frazer. The National Academy of Sciences' official memoir was submitted years later and written by Osborn. The American Journal of Science devoted six paragraphs to Cope's passing, and incorrectly gave his age as 46. Cope was survived by his rival Marsh, who was suffering poor health.
, a former friend called, "Cope's mouth the filthiest, from hearsay that in [Cope's] heyday no woman was safe within five miles of him." As Julia was the major financier behind The Master Naturalist, she wanted to keep her father's name in good standing and refused to comment on any misdeeds her father may have committed.
Cope was described by zoologist Henry Weed Fowler
as "a man of medium height and build, but always impressive with his great energy and activity". To him, Fowler wrote, "[Cope] was both genial and always interesting, easily approachable, and both kindly and helpful." His self-taught nature, however, meant that he was largely hostile to bureaucracy and politics. He had a famous temper; one friend called Cope a "militant paleontologist". Despite his faults, he was generally well liked by his contemporaries. American paleontologist Alfred Romer
wrote that, "[Cope's] little slips from virtue were those we might make ourselves, were we bolder".
Cope was raised as a Quaker, and was taught that the Bible was literal truth. Although he never confronted his family about their religious views, Osborn writes that Cope was at least aware of the conflict between his scientific career and his religion. Osborn writes: "If Edward harbored intellectual doubts about the literalness of the Bible ... he did not express them in his letters to his family but there can be little question ... that he shared the intellectual unrest of the period." Lanham writes that Cope's religious fervor (which seems to have subsided after his father's death) was embarrassing to even his devout Quaker associates. Biographer Jane Davidson believes that Osborn overstated Cope's internal religious conflicts. She ascribes Cope's deference to his father's beliefs as an act of respect or a measure to retain his father's financial support. Frazer's reminiscences about his friend suggest that Cope often told people what they wanted to hear, rather than Cope's true views.
Cope's views on human evolution would today be considered racist, but his beliefs were used by scientists of the time as an excuse for imperialism
. He believed that if, "a race was not white then it was inherently more ape-like". He was not opposed to blacks because of the color of their skin but their "degrading vices," believing that the "inferior Negro should go back to Africa." He did not blame blacks for their perceived "poor virtue", but wrote that, "A vulture will always eat carrion when surrounded on all hands by every kind of cleaner food. It is the nature of the bird." Cope was against the modern view of women's rights
, believing in the husband's role as protector; he was opposed to women's suffrage as he felt they would be unduly influenced by their husbands.
As a young man, Cope read Charles Darwin
's Voyage of a Naturalist
, which had little effect on him. The only comment about Darwin's book recorded by Cope was that Darwin discussed "too much geology" from the account of his voyage. Due to his background in taxonomy and paleontology, Cope focused on evolution in terms of changing structure, rather than emphasizing geography and variation within populations as Darwin had. Over his lifetime Cope's views on evolution shifted. His original view, described in the paper "On the Origin of Genera" (1868), held that while Darwin's natural selection
may affect the preservation of superficial characteristics in organisms, natural selection alone could not explain the formation of genera. Cope's suggested mechanism for this action was a "steady progressive development of organization" through what Cope termed "a continual crowding backward of the successive steps of individual development". In Cope's view, during embryological development an organism could complete their growth with a new stage of development beyond its parents, taking it to a higher level of organization. Later individuals would inherit this new level of development—thus evolution was a continuous advance of organization, sometimes slowly and other times suddenly; this view is known as the law of acceleration. Cope's beliefs later evolved to one with an increased emphasis on continual and utilitarian evolution with less involvement of a Creator. He became one of the founders of the Neo-Lamarckism
school of thought, which holds that individuals can pass on traits acquired in its lifetime to offspring. Although the view has been shown incorrect, it was the prevalent theory among paleontologists in Cope's time. In 1887, Cope published his own "Origin of the Fittest: Essays in Evolution", detailing his views on the subject. 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. The giraffe, for example, stretched its neck to reach taller trees and passed this acquired characteristic to its offspring in the new developmental phase that is added on to the fetus in the womb. This new stage of sharing of genetics would be added on after all gestation is completed and the offspring is ready to be conceived.
In fewer than 40 years as a scientist Cope published over 1,400 scientific papers, a record that stands to this day. These include three major volumes: On the Origin of Genera (1867), The Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West (1884) and "Essays in Evolution". He discovered a total of 56 new dinosaur species during the Bone Wars compared to Marsh's 80. Although Cope is today known as a herpetologist and paleontologist, his contributions extended to ichthyology, in which he catalogued 300 species of fishes over three decades. In total he discovered and described over 1,000 species of fossil vertebrates and published 600 separate titles.
The salamander Dicamptodon copei (Nussbaum, 1970), the dinosaur Drinker nisti
(Bakker et al., 1990), the lizard Gambelia wislizenii copeii (H. C. Yarrow
, and the Splash tetra Copella arnoldi (Regan, 1912) are among the many species named for Cope. There are currently 21 fish species named copei distributed among 11 families. Copeia
, Copeia
is the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH), founded in 1913 by John Treadwell Nichols. Cope's Pine Street home
is recognized as a national landmark.
Paleontology
Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...
and comparative anatomist
Comparative anatomy
Comparative anatomy is the study of similarities and differences in the anatomy of organisms. It is closely related to evolutionary biology and phylogeny .-Description:...
, as well as a noted herpetologist
Herpetology
Herpetology is the branch of zoology concerned with the study of amphibians and reptiles...
and ichthyologist
Ichthyology
Ichthyology is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish. This includes skeletal fish , cartilaginous fish , and jawless fish...
. 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 nineteen. 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
Haddonfield, New Jersey
Haddonfield is a borough located in Camden County, New Jersey. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough had a total population of 11,593....
, 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
United States Geological Survey
The United States Geological Survey is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it. The organization has four major science disciplines, concerning biology,...
teams. A personal feud between Cope and paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh
Othniel Charles Marsh
Othniel Charles Marsh was an American paleontologist. Marsh was one of the preeminent scientists in the field; the discovery or description of dozens of news species and theories on the origins of birds are among his legacies.Born into a modest family, Marsh was able to afford higher education...
led to a period of intense fossil-finding competition now known as the Bone Wars
Bone Wars
The Bone Wars, also known as the "Great Dinosaur Rush", refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh...
. 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 unidentified causes 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 would debate 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 proposals on the origin of mammalian molars and for the gradual enlargement of mammalian species over geologic time ("Cope's rule
Cope's rule
Cope's rule states that population lineages tend to increase in body size over evolutionary time. While the rule has been demonstrated in many instances, it does not hold true at all taxonomic levels, or in all clades...
") are notable among his theoretical contributions.
Early life
Edward Drinker Cope was born on July 28, 1840, the eldest son of Alfred and Hanna Cope. The death of his mother when he was three years old seemed to have had little effect on young Edward, as he mentioned in his letters that he had no recollection of her. His stepmother, Rebecca Biddle, filled the maternal role; Cope referred to her warmly, as well as his younger stepbrother, James Biddle Cope. Alfred, an orthodox member of the Religious Society of FriendsReligious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
or Quakers, operated a lucrative shipping business started by his father, Thomas P. Cope, in 1821. He was a philanthropist who gave money to the Society of Friends, the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens and the Institute for Colored Youth
Cheyney University of Pennsylvania
Cheyney University of Pennsylvania is a public, co-educational historically black university that is a part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. Cheyney University has a campus that is located in the Cheyney community within Thornbury Township, Chester County and Thornbury...
.
Edward was born and raised in a large stone house called "Fairfield" in what is now suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
. The 8 acres (3.2 ha) of pristine and exotic gardens of the house offered a landscape that Edward was able to explore. The Copes began teaching their children to read and write at a very young age, and took Edward on trips across New England and to museums, zoos, and gardens. Cope's interest in animals became apparent at a young age, as did his natural artistic ability.
Alfred intended to give his son the same education that he himself had received. At age nine, Edward was sent to a day school in Philadelphia and in 1853 at the age of twelve, Edward was sent to the Friends' Boarding School or Westtown, near West Chester, Pennsylvania. The school was founded in 1799 with fundraising by members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), and provided much of the Cope family's education. The prestigious school was expensive, costing Alfred $500 in tuition each year, and in his first year Edward studied algebra, chemistry, scripture, physiology, grammar, astronomy, and Latin. Edward's letters home requesting a larger allowance show he was able to manipulate his father, and that he was, according to author and Cope biographer Jane Davidson, "a bit of a spoiled brat". His letters suggest that he was lonely at the school—it was the first time he had been away from his home for an extended period. Otherwise, Edward's studies progressed much like a typical boy—he consistently had "less than perfect" or "not quite satisfactory" marks for conduct from his teachers, and did not work hard on his penmanship lessons, which may have contributed to his often illegible handwriting as an adult.
Edward returned to Westtown in 1855, accompanied by two of his sisters. Biology began to interest him more that year, and he studied natural history texts in his spare time. While at the school he frequently visited the Academy of Natural Sciences
Academy of Natural Sciences
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, formerly Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, is the oldest natural science research institution and museum in the New World...
. Edward often obtained bad marks due to quarreling and bad conduct. His letters to his father show that he chafed at farm work and betrayed flashes of the temper for which he would later become well known. After sending Edward back to the farm for summer break in 1854 and 1855, Alfred did not return Edward to school after spring 1856. Instead Alfred attempted to turn his son into a gentleman farmer, which he considered a wholesome profession that would yield enough profit to lead a comfortable life, and improve the undersized Edward's health. Until 1863, Cope's letters to his father continually expressed his yearning for a more professional scientific career than that of a farmer, which he called "dreadfully boring".
While working on farms, Edward continued his education on his own. In 1858 he began working part-time at the Academy of Natural Sciences, reclassifying and cataloguing specimens, and published his first series of research results in January 1859. Cope began taking French and German classes with a former Westtown teacher. Though Alfred resisted his son's pursuit of a science career, he paid for his son's private studies. Instead of working the farm his father bought for him, Edward rented out the land and used the income to further his scientific endeavors.
Alfred finally gave in to Edward's wishes and paid for university classes. Cope attended the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
in the 1861 and/or 1862 academic years, studying comparative anatomy under Joseph Leidy
Joseph Leidy
Joseph Leidy was an American paleontologist.Leidy was professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and later was a professor of natural history at Swarthmore College. His book Extinct Fauna of Dakota and Nebraska contained many species not previously described and many previously...
, one of the most influential anatomists and paleontologists at the time. Cope asked his father to pay for a tutor in both German and French, "not so much for their own sake," wrote Edward, "but as for their value in enabling me to read their books of a literary or scientific character." During this period he had a job recataloging the herpetological collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences
Academy of Natural Sciences
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, formerly Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, is the oldest natural science research institution and museum in the New World...
, which he became a member of at Leidy's urging. Cope's job lasted two years and he visited the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
on occasion, where he became acquainted with Spencer Baird, who was an expert in the fields of ornithology
Ornithology
Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the study of birds. Several aspects of ornithology differ from related disciplines, due partly to the high visibility and the aesthetic appeal of birds...
and ichthyology. In 1861 he published his first paper on Salamandridae
Salamandridae
Salamandridae is a family of salamanders consisting of true salamanders and newts. Currently, 74 species have been identified in the northern hemisphere - Europe, Asia, the northern tip of Africa and North America...
classification; over the next five years he published primarily on reptiles and amphibians. Cope's membership in the Academy of Natural Sciences and American Philosophical Society
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...
gave him outlets to publish and announce his work; many of his early paleontological works were published by the Philosophical Society.
European travels
In 1863–1864 during the American Civil WarAmerican Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, Edward traveled through Europe, taking the opportunity to visit the most esteemed museums and societies of the time. Initially, Edward seemed interested in helping out at a field hospital, but in letters to his father later on in the war this aspiration seemed to disappear; instead Edward considered working in the American South to assist freed African-Americans. Davidson suggests that Edward's correspondence with Leidy and Ferdinand Hayden, who worked as field surgeons during the war, might have informed Edward of the horrors of the occupation. Edward was involved in a love affair; his father did not approve. Whether Edward or the unnamed woman (whom he at one point intended to marry) broke off the relationship is unknown, but he took the breakup poorly. Biographer and paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. ForMemRS was an American geologist, paleontologist, and eugenicist.-Early life and career:...
attributed Edward's sudden departure for Europe as a method of keeping him from being drafted into the Civil War. Cope did write to his father from London on February 11, 1864, that, "I shall get home in time to catch and be caught by the new draft. I shall not be sorry for this, as I know certain persons who would be mean enough to say that I have gone to Europe to avoid the war." Eventually Cope took the pragmatic approach and waited out the conflict. He may have suffered from mild depression during this period, and often complained of boredom.
Despite his torpor, Edward proceeded with his tour of Europe, and met with some of the most highly esteemed scientists of the world during his travels through France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Italy, and Eastern Europe, most likely with introductory letters from Leidy and Spencer Baird. In the winter of 1863, Edward met Othniel Charles Marsh
Othniel Charles Marsh
Othniel Charles Marsh was an American paleontologist. Marsh was one of the preeminent scientists in the field; the discovery or description of dozens of news species and theories on the origins of birds are among his legacies.Born into a modest family, Marsh was able to afford higher education...
while in Berlin. Marsh, age thirty-two, was attending the University of Berlin. He held two university degrees in comparison to Edward's lack of formal schooling past sixteen, but Edward had written 37 scientific papers in comparison to Marsh's two published works. While they would later become rivals, on meeting the two men appeared to take a liking to each other. Marsh led Edward on a tour of the city, and they stayed together for days. After Edward left Berlin the two maintained correspondence, exchanging manuscripts, fossils, and photographs. Edward burned many of his journals and letters from Europe upon his return to the United States. Friends intervened and stopped Cope from destroying some of his drawings and notes, in what author Url Lanham deemed a "partial suicide".
Family and early career
Upon returning to Philadelphia in 1864 the Cope family made every effort to secure Edward a teaching post as the Professor of Zoology at Haverford CollegeHaverford College
Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...
, a small Quaker school where the family had philanthropic ties. The college awarded him an honorary master's degree so he could have the position. Cope even began to think about marriage and consulted his father in the matter, telling him of the girl he would like to marry: "an amiable woman, not over sensitive, with considerable energy, and especially one inclined to be serious and not inclined to frivolity and display—the more truly Christian of course the better—seems to be the most practically the most suitable for me, though intellect and accomplishments have more charm." Cope thought of Annie Pim, a member of the Society of Friends, as less a lover than companion, declaring that "her amiability and domestic qualities generally, her capability of taking care of a house, etc., as well as her steady seriousness weigh far more with me than any of the traits which form the theme of poets!" Cope's family approved of his choice, and the marriage took place in July 1865 at Pim's farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The two had a single daughter, Julia Biddle Cope, born June 10, 1866. Cope's return to the United States also marked an expansion of his scientific studies; in 1864 he described several fishes, a whale, and the amphibian Amphibamus grandiceps
Amphibamus
Amphibamus is a genus of amphibamid temnospondyl amphibian from the Carboniferous of Europe and North America....
(his first paleontological contribution.)
During the period between 1866 and 1867 Cope went on trips to western parts of the country. Cope related to his father his scientific experiences; to his daughter he sent descriptions of animal life as part of her education. Cope found educating his students at Haverford "a pleasure" but wrote to his father that he "could not get any work done." He resigned from his position at Haverford and moved his family to Haddonfield
Haddonfield, New Jersey
Haddonfield is a borough located in Camden County, New Jersey. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough had a total population of 11,593....
, in part to be closer to the fossil beds of western New Jersey. Due to the time-consuming nature of his Haverford position Cope had not had time to attend to his farm and had let it out to others, but eventually found he was in need of more money to fuel his scientific habits. Pleading with his father for money to pursue his career, he finally sold the farm in 1869. Alfred apparently did not press his son to continue farming, and Edward focused on his scientific career. He continued his continental travels, including trips to Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. He visited caves across the region. He stopped these cave explorations after an 1871 trip to the Wyandotte Caves
Wyandotte Caves
Wyandotte Caves, a pair of limestone caves located on the Ohio River in Harrison-Crawford State Forest in Crawford County, five miles north-east of Leavenworth and 12 miles from Corydon in southern Indiana, is a popular tourist attraction. Wyandotte Caves were designated a National Natural...
in Indiana, but remained interested in the subject. Cope had visited Haddonfield many times in the 1860s, paying periodical visits to the marl pits. The fossils he found in these pits became the focus of several papers, including a description in 1868 of Elasmosaurus platyurus
Elasmosaurus
Elasmosaurus + σαυρος sauros 'lizard') is a genus of plesiosaur with an extremely long neck that lived in the Late Cretaceous period , 80.5 million years ago.-Description:...
and Laelaps. Marsh accompanied him on one of these excursions. Cope's proximity to the beds after moving to Haddonfield made more frequent trips possible. The Copes lived comfortably in a frame house backed by an apple orchard. Two maids tended the estate, which entertained a number of guests. Cope's only concern was for more money to spend on his scientific work.
The 1870s were the golden years of Cope's career, marked by his most prominent discoveries and rapid flow of publications. Among his descriptions were the therapsid Lystrosaurus
Lystrosaurus
Lystrosaurus was a genus of Late Permian and Early Triassic Period dicynodont therapsids, which lived around 250 million years ago in what is now Antarctica, India, and South Africa...
(1870), the archosauromorph Champsosaurus
Champsosaurus
Champsosaurus is an extinct genus of diapsid reptile belonging to the order Choristodera. It grew to about 1.50 m long....
(1876), and the sauropod Amphicoelias
Amphicoelias
Amphicoelias is a genus of herbivorous sauropod dinosaur that includes what may be the largest dinosaur ever discovered, A. fragillimus. Based on surviving descriptions of a single fossil bone, A. fragillimus may have been the longest known vertebrate at in length, and may have had a mass of up...
(1878), possibly the largest dinosaur ever discovered. In the period of one year, from 1879 to 1880, Cope published 76 papers based on his travels through New Mexico and Colorado, and on the findings of his collectors in Texas, Kansas Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. During the peak years, Cope published around 25 reports and preliminary observations each year. The hurried publications led to errors in interpretation and naming—many of his scientific names were later canceled or withdrawn. In comparison, Marsh wrote and published less frequently and more succinctly—his work's appearance in the widespread American Journal of Science
American Journal of Science
The American Journal of Science is the United States of America's longest-running scientific journal, having been published continuously since its conception in 1818 by Professor Benjamin Silliman, who edited and financed it himself...
led to faster reception abroad, and subsequently Marsh's reputations grew faster than Cope.
Charles Hazelius Sternberg
Charles Hazelius Sternberg , was an American fossil collector and amateur paleontologist. His older brother, Dr. George M. Sternberg was a military surgeon assigned to Fort Harker near Ellsworth, Kansas and brought the rest of Sternberg family to Kansas to live on his ranch about 1868...
described the lack of water and good food available to Cope and his helpers on these expeditions. Cope would suffer from a "severe attack of nightmare" in which "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." Nevertheless Cope continued to lead the party from sunrise to sunset, sending letters to his wife and child describing his finds. The severe desert conditions and Cope's habit of overworking himself till he was bedridden caught up with him and in 1872 he broke down from exhaustion. Cope maintained a regular pattern of summers spent prospecting and winters writing up his findings from 1871 to 1879.
Throughout the decade Cope traveled across the West, exploring rocks of the Eocene
Eocene
The Eocene Epoch, lasting from about 56 to 34 million years ago , is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Palaeocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the...
in 1872 and the Titanothere Beds of Colorado in 1873. In 1874 Cope was employed with the Wheeler Survey
Wheeler Survey
The Wheeler Survey was a survey of a portion of the United States lying west of the 100th meridian. It comprised multiple expeditions, and was supervised by First Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler....
, a group of surveys led by George Montague Wheeler that mapped parts of the United States west of the 100th meridian
100th meridian west
The meridian 100° west of Greenwich is a line of longitude that extends from the North Pole across the Arctic Ocean, North America, the Pacific Ocean, the Southern Ocean, and Antarctica to the South Pole....
. The survey traveled through New Mexico, whose Puerco formations, he wrote to his father, provided "the most important find in geology I have ever made". The New Mexico bluffs contained millions of years of formation and subsequent deformation, and were in an area which had not been visited by Leidy or Marsh. Being part of the survey had other advantages; Cope was able to draw on fort commissaries and defray publishing costs. While there was no salary, his findings would be published in the annual reports that the surveys printed. Cope brought Annie and Julia along on one such survey and rented a house for them at Fort Bridger
Fort Bridger
Fort Bridger was originally a 19th century fur trading outpost established in 1842 on Blacks Fork of the Green River and later a vital resupply point for wagon trains on the Oregon Trail, California Trail and Mormon Trail. The Army established a military post here in 1858 during the Utah War until...
, but he spent more of his own money on these survey trips than he would have liked.
Alfred died December 4, 1875, and left Edward with an inheritance of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Alfred's death was a blow to Cope; his father was a constant confidant. The same year marked a suspension of much of Cope's field work and a new emphasis on writing up discoveries of the previous years. His chief publication of the time, The Vertebrata of the Cretaceous Formations of the West, was a collection of 303 pages and 54 illustration plates. The memoir summarized his experiences prospecting in New Jersey and Kansas. Cope now had the finances to hire multiple teams to search for fossils for him year-round and he advised the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition
Centennial Exposition
The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, the first official World's Fair in the United States, was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 10 to November 10, 1876, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. It was officially...
on their fossil displays. Cope's studies of marine reptiles of Kansas closed in 1876, opening a new focus on terrestrial reptiles. The same year, Cope moved from Haddonfield to 2100 and 2102 Pine Street in Philadelphia. He converted one of the two houses into a museum where he stored his growing collection of fossils. Cope's expeditions took him across Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana. Cope's initial journey into the Clarendon Beds of Upper Miocene and Lower Pliocene of Texas led to an affiliation with the Geological Survey of Texas. Cope's papers on the region constitute some of his most important paleontological contributions. In 1877 he purchased half the rights to the American Naturalist
American Naturalist
The American Naturalist is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 1867. It is published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Society of Naturalists. The journal covers research in ecology, evolutionary biology, population, and integrative biology....
to publish the papers he produced at a rate so high that Marsh questioned their dating.
Cope returned to Europe in August 1878 in response to an invitation to join the British Association for the Advancement of Science
British Association for the Advancement of Science
frame|right|"The BA" logoThe British Association for the Advancement of Science or the British Science Association, formerly known as the BA, is a learned society with the object of promoting science, directing general attention to scientific matters, and facilitating interaction between...
's Dublin meeting. He was warmly welcomed in England and France and met with the distinguished paleontologists and archeologists of the period. Marsh's attempts to sully Cope's reputation had made little impact on anyone save paleontologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who according to Osborn "alone treated [Cope] with coolness". Following the Dublin meeting, Cope spent two days with the French Association for the Advancement of Science. At each gathering Cope exhibited dinosaur restorations by Philadelphia colleague John A. Ryder and various charts and plates from geological surveys of the 1870s led by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden
Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden
Dr. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden was an American geologist noted for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century. He was also a physician who served with the Union Army during the Civil War.-Early life:Ferdinand Hayden was born in Westfield, Massachusetts...
. He returned to London on October 12, meeting with anatomist Richard Owen
Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen, FRS KCB was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist.Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
, ichthyologist Hermann Gunther and paleontologist H. G. Seeley. While in Europe Cope purchased a great collection of fossils from Argentina. Cope never found time to describe the collection and many of the boxes remained unopened until Cope's death.
Bone Wars
Bone Wars
The Bone Wars, also known as the "Great Dinosaur Rush", refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh...
. The conflict's seeds began upon the men's return to the United States in the 1860s. Cope introduced his colleague to the marl pit owner Albert Vorhees when the two visited the site. Marsh went 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. When Marsh was at Haddonfield examining one of Cope's fossil finds—a complete skeleton of a large aquatic plesiosaur
Plesiosaur
Plesiosauroidea is an extinct clade of carnivorous plesiosaur marine reptiles. Plesiosauroids, are known from the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods...
, Elasmosaurus, that had four flippers and a long neck—he commented that the fossil's head was on the wrong end, evidently stating that Cope had put the skull at the end of the vertebra of the tail. Cope was outraged and the two argued for some time until they agreed to have Leidy examine the bones and determine who was right. Leidy came, picked up the head of the fossil and put it on the other end. Cope was horrified since he had already published a paper on the fossil with the error at the American Philosophical Society. He immediately tried to buy back the copies, but some remained with their buyers (Marsh and Leidy kept theirs). The whole ordeal might have passed easily enough had Leidy not exposed the cover-up at the next society meeting, not to alienate Cope but only in response to Cope's brief statement where he never admitted he was wrong. Cope and Marsh would never talk to each other amicably again, and by 1873 open hostility had broken out between them.
The rivalry between the two increased towards the latter half of the 1870s. In 1877, Marsh received a letter from Arthur Lakes
Arthur Lakes
Arthur Lakes was a notable geologist, artist, writer, teacher and minister. He captured much of his geological and palaeontological field work in sketches and watercolours...
, a schoolteacher in Golden, Colorado. Lakes had been hiking in the mountains near the town of Morrison with his friend, H. C. Beckwith, looking for fossilized leaves in the Dakota sandstone. Instead the pair found large bones embedded in the rock. Lakes wrote that the bones were "apparently a vertebra and a humerus bone of some gigantic saurian." While Lakes sent Marsh some 1,500 pounds of bone, he also sent Cope some of the specimens. Marsh published his finds first, and having been paid $100 for the finds Lakes wrote to Cope that the samples should be forwarded to Marsh. Cope was offended by the slight. Meanwhile Cope received bones from school superintendent O.W. Lucas in March 1877 from Canon City; the remains were of a dinosaur even bigger than Lakes' that Marsh had described.
Word that Lakes had notified Cope of his finds galvanized Marsh into action. When Marsh heard from Union Pacific Railroad workers W.E. Carlin and W.H. Reed about a vast boneyard northwest of Laramie in Como Bluff
Como Bluff
Como Bluff is a long ridge extending east-west, located between the towns of Rock River and Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The ridge is an anticline, formed as a result of compressional geological folding. Three geological formations, the Sundance, the Morrison, and the Cloverly Formations, containing...
, Marsh sent his agent, Samuel Wendell Williston
Samuel Wendell Williston
Samuel Wendell Williston was an American educator and paleontologist who was the first to propose that birds developed flight cursorially , rather than arboreally . He was also an entomologist, specialising in Diptera.-Early life:Williston was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Samuel Williston and...
, to take charge of the digging. Cope, in response, learned of Carlin and Reed's discoveries and sent his own men to find bones in the area. The two scientists attempted to sabotage each other's progress. Cope was described as a genius and what Marsh lacked in intelligence, he easily made up for in connections—Marsh's uncle was George Peabody
George Peabody
George Peabody was an American-British entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded the Peabody Trust in Britain and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, and was responsible for many other charitable initiatives.-Biography:...
, a rich banker who supported Marsh with money, and a secure position at the Peabody Museum. Marsh lobbied John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell was a U.S. soldier, geologist, explorer of the American West, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions...
to act against Cope and attempted to persuade Hayden to "muzzle" Cope's publishing. Both men tried to spy on the other's whereabouts and attempted to offer their collectors more money in the hopes of recruiting them to their own side. Cope was able to recruit David Baldwin in New Mexico and Frank Williston in Wyoming from Marsh. Cope and Marsh were extremely secretive as to the source of their fossils. When Osborn, at the time a student at Princeton, visited Cope to ask where to travel to look for fossils in the West, Cope politely refused to answer.
When Cope arrived back in the United States after his tour of Europe in 1878, he had nearly two years of fossil findings from Lucas. Among these dinosaurs was Camarasaurus
Camarasaurus
Camarasaurus meaning 'chambered lizard', referring to the hollow chambers in its vertebrae was a genus of quadrupedal, herbivorous dinosaurs. It was the most common of the giant sauropods to be found in North America...
, one of the most recognizable dinosaur recreations of the time. The summer of 1879 took Cope to Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and north to Oregon, where he was amazed at the rich flora and the blueness of the Pacific Ocean. In 1879 the United States Congress consolidated the various government survey teams into the United States Geological Survey with Clarence King
Clarence King
Clarence R. King was an American geologist, mountaineer, and art critic. First director of the United States Geological Survey, from 1879 to 1881, King was noted for his exploration of the Sierra Nevada. He was born in Newport, Rhode Island.-Career:...
as its leader. This was discouraging to Cope because King named Marsh, an old college friend, as the chief paleontologist. The period of Cope's and Marsh's paleontological digs in the American West spanned from 1877 to 1892, by which time both men exhausted much of their financial resources.
Later years
The 1880s proved disastrous for Cope. Marsh's close association with the Geological Survey gave him the resources to employ 54 staff members over the course of ten years. His teaching position at Yale meant he had guaranteed access to the American Journal of ScienceAmerican Journal of Science
The American Journal of Science is the United States of America's longest-running scientific journal, having been published continuously since its conception in 1818 by Professor Benjamin Silliman, who edited and financed it himself...
for publication. Cope had his interest in the Naturalist, but it drained him of funds. After Hayden was removed from the Survey, Cope lost his source of government funding. His fortune was not enough to support his rivalry, so Cope invested in mining. Most of his properties were silver mines in New Mexico; one mine yielded an ore vein worth $3 million in silver chloride
Silver chloride
Silver chloride is a chemical compound with the chemical formula AgCl. This white crystalline solid is well known for its low solubility in water . Upon illumination or heating, silver chloride converts to silver , which is signalled by greyish or purplish coloration to some samples...
. Cope visited the mines each summer from 1881 to 1885, taking the opportunity to supervise or collect other minerals. For a while he made good money, but the mines stopped producing and by 1886 he had to give up his now-worthless stocks. The same year he received a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania. He continued to travel west, but realized he would not be able to best Marsh in cornering the market for bones; he had to release the collectors he had hired and sell his collections. During this period he published 40 to 75 papers each year. With the failure of his mines, Cope began searching for a job, but was turned down at the Smithsonian and American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
. He turned to giving lectures for hire and writing magazine articles. Each year he lobbied Congress for an appropriation with which to finish his work on "Cope's Bible", a volume on Tertiary vertebrates, but was continually turned down. Rather than work with Powell and the Survey, Cope tried to inflame sentiment against them.
At Marsh's urging, Powell pushed for Cope to return specimens he had unearthed during his employment under the government surveys. This was an outrage to Cope, who had used his own money while working as a volunteer. In response, Cope went to the editor of the New York Herald
New York Herald
The New York Herald was a large distribution newspaper based in New York City that existed between May 6, 1835, and 1924.-History:The first issue of the paper was published by James Gordon Bennett, Sr., on May 6, 1835. By 1845 it was the most popular and profitable daily newspaper in the UnitedStates...
and promised a scandalous headline. Since 1885, Cope had kept an elaborate journal of mistakes and misdeeds that both Marsh and Powell had committed over the years. From scientific errors to publishing mistakes, he had them written down in a journal that he kept in the bottom drawer of his Pine Street desk. Cope sought out Marsh's assistants, who complained of being denied access and credit by their employer and of being chronically underpaid. Reporter William Hosea Ballou ran the first article on January 12, 1890, in what would become a series of newspaper debates between Marsh, Powell and Cope. Cope attacked Marsh for plagiarism and financial mismanagement, and attacked Powell for his geological classification errors and misspending of government-allocated funds. Marsh and Powell published their own side of the story and, in the end, little changed. No congressional hearing was created to investigate Powell's alleged misallocation of funds, while Cope and Marsh were not held responsible for any mistakes. Indirectly, however, the attacks may have been influential in Marsh's fall from power in the Survey. Due to pressure from Powell over bad press, Marsh was removed from his position for the government surveys. Cope's relations with the president of the University of Pennsylvania soured, and the entire funding for paleontology in the government surveys was pulled.
Cope took his sinking fortunes in stride. In writing to Osborn about the articles, he laughed at the outcome, saying, "It will now rest largely with you whether or not I am supposed to be a liar and am actuated by jealousy and disappointment. I think Marsh is impaled on the horns of Monoclonius sphenocerus
Monoclonius
Monoclonius was a ceratopsian dinosaur from the Judith River Formation of Late Cretaceous Montana and Canada. It is often confused with Centrosaurus, a similar genus of ceratopsian . Monoclonius was described by Edward Drinker Cope in 1876...
." Cope was well aware of his enemies and was carefree enough to name a species after a combination of "Cope" and "hater", Anisonchus cophater. Through his years of financial hardship he was able to continue publishing papers—his most productive years were 1884 and 1885, with 79 and 62 papers published, respectively. The 1880s marked the publication of two of the best-known fossil taxa described by Cope: the pelycosaur
Pelycosaur
The pelycosaurs are an informal grouping composed of basal or primitive Late Paleozoic synapsid amniotes. Some species were quite large and could grow up to 3 meters or more, although most species were much smaller...
Edaphosaurus
Edaphosaurus
Edaphosaurus is a genus of prehistoric synapsid which lived around 303 to 265 million years ago, during the late Carboniferous to early Permian periods. The name Edaphosaurus means "ground lizard" and is derived from the Greek edaphos/εδαφος and σαυρος/sauros...
in 1882 and the early dinosaur Coelophysis
Coelophysis
Coelophysis , meaning "hollow form" in reference to its hollow bones , is one of the earliest known genera of dinosaur...
in 1889. In 1889 he succeeded Leidy, who had died the previous year, as professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. The small yearly stipend was enough for Cope's family to move back into one of the townhouses he had been forced to relinquish earlier.
In 1892, Cope (then 52 years old) was granted expense money for field work from the Texas Geological Survey. With his finances improved, he was able to publish a massive work on the Batrachians of North America, which was the most detailed analysis and organization of the continent's frogs and amphibians ever mastered, and the 1,115-page The Crocodilians Lizards and Snakes of North America. In the 1890s his publication rate increased to an average of 43 articles a year. His final expedition to the West took place in 1894, when he prospected for dinosaurs in South Dakota and visited sights in Texas and Oklahoma. The same year, Julia was married to William H. Collins, a Haverford astronomy professor. The couple's ages—Julia was 28 and the groom 35—were past the conventions of Victorian marriage. After their European honeymoon, the couple returned to Haverford. While Annie moved to Haverford as well, Cope did not. His official reason was the long commute and late lectures he gave in Philadelphia. In private correspondence, however, Osborn wrote that the two had essentially separated, though they remained on amiable terms.
Cope sold his collections to the American Museum of Natural History in 1895; his set of 10,000 American fossil mammals sold for $32,000, lower than Cope's asking price of $50,000. The purchase was financed by the donations from New York's high society. Cope sold three other collections for $29,000. While his collection contained more than 13,000 specimens, Cope's fossil hoard was still much smaller than Marsh's collection, valued at over a million dollars. The University of Pennsylvania bought part of Cope's ethnological artifact collection for $5,500. The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia's foremost museum, did not bid on any of Cope's sales due to bad blood between Cope and the museum's leaders; as a result, many of Cope's major finds left the city. Cope's proceeds from the sales allowed him to rehire Sternberg to prospect for fossils on his behalf.
Death
In 1896 Cope began suffering from a gastrointestinal illness he said was cystitis. His wife cared for him in Philadelphia when she was able; at other times, Cope's university secretary, Anna Brown, tended to him. Cope at this time lived in his Pine Street museum and rested on a cot surrounded by his fossil finds. Cope often prescribed himself medications, including large amounts of morphineMorphine
Morphine is a potent opiate analgesic medication and is considered to be the prototypical opioid. It was first isolated in 1804 by Friedrich Sertürner, first distributed by same in 1817, and first commercially sold by Merck in 1827, which at the time was a single small chemists' shop. It was more...
, belladonna, and formalin, a substance based on formaldehyde used to preserve specimens. Osborn was horrified by Cope's actions and made arrangements for surgery, but the plans were put on hold after a temporary improvement in Cope's health. Cope went to Virginia looking for fossils, became ill again, and returned to his home very weak. Osborn visited Cope on April 5, inquiring about Cope's health, but the sick paleontologist pressed his friend for his views on the origin of mammals. Word of Cope's illness spread, and he was visited by friends and colleagues; even in a feverish condition Cope delivered lectures from his bed. Cope died on April 12, 1897, sixteen weeks short of his 57th birthday.
Sternberg, still prospecting for Cope that spring, was woken by a liveryman who relayed word from Annie that Cope had died three days earlier. Sternberg wrote in his memoirs that "I had lost friends before, and I had known what it was to bury my own dead, even my firstborn son, but I had never sorrowed more deeply than I did over the news." Cope's Quaker funeral consisted of six men: Osborn, his fellow colleague William Berryman Scott
William Berryman Scott
William Berryman Scott was an American vertebrate paleontologist, authority on mammals, and principal author of the White River Oligocene monographs. He was a professor of geology and paleontology at Princeton University....
, Cope's friend Persifor Frazer, son-in-law Collins, Horatio Wood and Harrison Allen
Harrison Allen
Harrison Allen was an American physician and anatomist, born in Philadelphia. He graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1861, and in 1862 became a surgeon in the United States Army and served until the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865...
. The six sat around Cope's coffin among the fossils and Cope's pets, a tortoise and a gila monster
Gila monster
The Gila monster is a species of venomous lizard native to the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexican state of Sonora...
, for what Osborn called "a perfect Quaker silence ... an interminable length of time." Anticipating the quiet, Osborn had brought along a Bible and read an excerpt from the Book of Job
Book of Job
The Book of Job , commonly referred to simply as Job, is one of the books of the Hebrew Bible. It relates the story of Job, his trials at the hands of Satan, his discussions with friends on the origins and nature of his suffering, his challenge to God, and finally a response from God. The book is a...
, ending by saying, "These are the problems to which our friend devoted his life."
The coffin was loaded on a hearse and carried to a gathering at Fairfield; much of the gathering was spent in silence. After the coffin was removed, the assembled began talking. Frazer recalled that each person remembered Cope differently, and that "Few men succeeded so well in concealing from anyone ... all the sides of his multiform character." Osborn, intending to follow the coffin to the graveyard, was instead pulled aside by Collins and taken to the reading of Cope's will—Osborn and Cope's brother-in-law John Garrett were named executors. Cope gave his family a choice of his books, with the remainder to be sold or donated to the University of Pennsylvania. After debts were handled, Cope left small bequests to friends and family—Anna Brown and Julia received $5000 each, while the remainder went to Annie. Cope's estate was valued at $75,327, not including additional revenue raised by sales of fossils to the American Museum of Natural History, for a total of $84,600. Some specimens preserved in alcohol made their way to the Academy of Natural Sciences, including a few gordian worms
Nematomorpha
Nematomorpha is a phylum of parasitic animals that are superficially morphologically similar to nematode worms, hence the name. They range in size in most species from long and can reach in extreme cases up to 2 metres, and in diameter...
.
Cope insisted through his will that there be no graveside service or burial; he had donated his body to science. He issued a final challenge to Marsh at his death: he had his skull donated to science so that his brain could be measured, hoping that his brain would be larger than that of his adversary; at the time, it was thought that brain size
Brain size
Brain size is one aspect of animal anatomy and evolution. Both overall brain size and the size of substructures have been analysed, and the question of links between size and functioning - particularly intelligence - has often proved controversial...
was the true measure of intelligence. Marsh never accepted the challenge, and Cope's skull is reportedly still preserved at the University of Pennsylvania. His ashes were placed at the institute with those of his Leidy, while his bones were extracted and kept in a locked drawer to be studied by anatomy students.
Osborn listed Cope's cause of death as uremic poisoning, combined with a large prostate, but the true cause of death is unknown. Many believed that Cope had died of syphilis contracted from the women with whom he fraternized during his travels. In 1995 Davidson gained permission to have the skeleton examined by a medical doctor at the university. Dr. Morrie Kricun, a professor of radiology, concluded that there was no evidence of bony syphilis on Cope's skeleton.
Public mentions of Cope's passing were relatively slight. The Naturalist ran four photographs, a six-page obituary by editor J.S. Kingsley, and a two-page remembrance by Frazer. The National Academy of Sciences' official memoir was submitted years later and written by Osborn. The American Journal of Science devoted six paragraphs to Cope's passing, and incorrectly gave his age as 46. Cope was survived by his rival Marsh, who was suffering poor health.
Personality and legacy
Julia assisted Osborn in writing a biography of her father, titled Cope: Master Naturalist. She would not comment on the name of the woman with whom her father had had an affair with prior to his first European travel. It is believed that Julia burned any of the scandalous letters and journals that Cope had kept but many of his friends were able to give their recollections of the scandalous nature of some of Cope's unpublished routines. Charles R. KnightCharles R. Knight
Charles Robert Knight was an American artist best known for his influential paintings of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals...
, a former friend called, "Cope's mouth the filthiest, from hearsay that in [Cope's] heyday no woman was safe within five miles of him." As Julia was the major financier behind The Master Naturalist, she wanted to keep her father's name in good standing and refused to comment on any misdeeds her father may have committed.
Cope was described by zoologist Henry Weed Fowler
Henry Weed Fowler
Henry Weed Fowler was an American zoologist born in Holmesburg, Pennsylvania.He studied at Stanford University under David Starr Jordan...
as "a man of medium height and build, but always impressive with his great energy and activity". To him, Fowler wrote, "[Cope] was both genial and always interesting, easily approachable, and both kindly and helpful." His self-taught nature, however, meant that he was largely hostile to bureaucracy and politics. He had a famous temper; one friend called Cope a "militant paleontologist". Despite his faults, he was generally well liked by his contemporaries. American paleontologist Alfred Romer
Alfred Romer
Alfred Sherwood Romer was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist and a specialist in vertebrate evolution.-Biography:...
wrote that, "[Cope's] little slips from virtue were those we might make ourselves, were we bolder".
Cope was raised as a Quaker, and was taught that the Bible was literal truth. Although he never confronted his family about their religious views, Osborn writes that Cope was at least aware of the conflict between his scientific career and his religion. Osborn writes: "If Edward harbored intellectual doubts about the literalness of the Bible ... he did not express them in his letters to his family but there can be little question ... that he shared the intellectual unrest of the period." Lanham writes that Cope's religious fervor (which seems to have subsided after his father's death) was embarrassing to even his devout Quaker associates. Biographer Jane Davidson believes that Osborn overstated Cope's internal religious conflicts. She ascribes Cope's deference to his father's beliefs as an act of respect or a measure to retain his father's financial support. Frazer's reminiscences about his friend suggest that Cope often told people what they wanted to hear, rather than Cope's true views.
Cope's views on human evolution would today be considered racist, but his beliefs were used by scientists of the time as an excuse for imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
. He believed that if, "a race was not white then it was inherently more ape-like". He was not opposed to blacks because of the color of their skin but their "degrading vices," believing that the "inferior Negro should go back to Africa." He did not blame blacks for their perceived "poor virtue", but wrote that, "A vulture will always eat carrion when surrounded on all hands by every kind of cleaner food. It is the nature of the bird." Cope was against the modern view of women's rights
Women's rights
Women's rights are entitlements and freedoms claimed for women and girls of all ages in many societies.In some places these rights are institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behaviour, whereas in others they may be ignored or suppressed...
, believing in the husband's role as protector; he was opposed to women's suffrage as he felt they would be unduly influenced by their husbands.
As a young man, Cope read Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
's Voyage of a Naturalist
The Voyage of the Beagle
The Voyage of the Beagle is a title commonly given to the book written by Charles Darwin and published in 1839 as his Journal and Remarks, bringing him considerable fame and respect...
, which had little effect on him. The only comment about Darwin's book recorded by Cope was that Darwin discussed "too much geology" from the account of his voyage. Due to his background in taxonomy and paleontology, Cope focused on evolution in terms of changing structure, rather than emphasizing geography and variation within populations as Darwin had. Over his lifetime Cope's views on evolution shifted. His original view, described in the paper "On the Origin of Genera" (1868), held that while Darwin's natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
may affect the preservation of superficial characteristics in organisms, natural selection alone could not explain the formation of genera. Cope's suggested mechanism for this action was a "steady progressive development of organization" through what Cope termed "a continual crowding backward of the successive steps of individual development". In Cope's view, during embryological development an organism could complete their growth with a new stage of development beyond its parents, taking it to a higher level of organization. Later individuals would inherit this new level of development—thus evolution was a continuous advance of organization, sometimes slowly and other times suddenly; this view is known as the law of acceleration. Cope's beliefs later evolved to one with an increased emphasis on continual and utilitarian evolution with less involvement of a Creator. He became one of the founders of the Neo-Lamarckism
Lamarckism
Lamarckism is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring . It is named after the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck , who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories...
school of thought, which holds that individuals can pass on traits acquired in its lifetime to offspring. Although the view has been shown incorrect, it was the prevalent theory among paleontologists in Cope's time. In 1887, Cope published his own "Origin of the Fittest: Essays in Evolution", detailing his views on the subject. 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. The giraffe, for example, stretched its neck to reach taller trees and passed this acquired characteristic to its offspring in the new developmental phase that is added on to the fetus in the womb. This new stage of sharing of genetics would be added on after all gestation is completed and the offspring is ready to be conceived.
In fewer than 40 years as a scientist Cope published over 1,400 scientific papers, a record that stands to this day. These include three major volumes: On the Origin of Genera (1867), The Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West (1884) and "Essays in Evolution". He discovered a total of 56 new dinosaur species during the Bone Wars compared to Marsh's 80. Although Cope is today known as a herpetologist and paleontologist, his contributions extended to ichthyology, in which he catalogued 300 species of fishes over three decades. In total he discovered and described over 1,000 species of fossil vertebrates and published 600 separate titles.
The salamander Dicamptodon copei (Nussbaum, 1970), the dinosaur Drinker nisti
Drinker
Drinker was a genus of hypsilophodont dinosaur from the late Jurassic period of North America. Although based on good remains, it remains obscure due to a lack of post-naming publications.-Description:...
(Bakker et al., 1990), the lizard Gambelia wislizenii copeii (H. C. Yarrow
H. C. Yarrow
Henry Crecy Yarrow was an American ornithologist, herpetologist, naturalist and surgeon.Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, studied in Pennsylvania and Geneva, Switzerland; earned his M.D. in 1861. From 1861 to 1862, he was the Asst. Surgeon, 5th PA Cavalry. Served in Virginia, then appointed...
, and the Splash tetra Copella arnoldi (Regan, 1912) are among the many species named for Cope. There are currently 21 fish species named copei distributed among 11 families. Copeia
Copeia
Copeia is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in ichthyology and herpetology that was named after Edward Drinker Cope, a prominent American researcher in these fields. It is the official journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists...
, Copeia
Copeia
Copeia is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in ichthyology and herpetology that was named after Edward Drinker Cope, a prominent American researcher in these fields. It is the official journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists...
is the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH), founded in 1913 by John Treadwell Nichols. Cope's Pine Street home
Edward Drinker Cope House
Edward Drinker Cope House, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a home of Edward Drinker Cope, a prolific geologist and paleontologist and noted herpetologist.It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1975.-References:...
is recognized as a national landmark.
Selected works
- On The Origin of Genera; From the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Oct. 1868 (Merrihew & Son, 1869)
- The Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West (Government Printing Office, 1884).
- "The Origin of the Fittest: Essays on Evolution" (NatureNature (journal)Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
, 1887). Google Books / Archive.org - The Crocodilians, Lizards and Snakes of North America (Government Printing Office, 1900).
External links
- Dinosaurs named by Cope, at DinoData
- Profile of Edward Drinker Cope at the Niagara Falls Museum Collection
- Edward Drinker Cope obituary, 1897 archived via JSTORJSTORJSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...