Edward Drinker Cope

Edward Drinker Cope 1840-97, American paleontologist and comparative anatomist, b. Philadelphia, studied at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and at the Smithsonian Institution. His large collection of fossil mammals is now at the American Museum of Natural History. His many published works include The Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West (1883), a report on the F. V. Hayden survey in which he served as geologist and paleontologist. Cope believed that evolution arose from an organism's inner urge to attain a higher state of being.

Bibliography: See D. R. Wallace, The Bonehunters' Revenge (1999).

Cope, Edward Drinker (1840–97) One of the last great zoologist-explorers of America, E. D. Cope was also one of the most prolific of its scientific authors and editors. Of Quaker origins, he developed a keen interest in fossils and natural history in his early youth, graduated from college, and spent the Civil War years studying in Europe. There he visited all the major natural history collections that he could, supported by family wealth. His return at the age of 24 was to a college professorship in zoology in Philadelphia. Cope gave that up to go fossil collecting in the western territories.

In Kansas he made spectacular discoveries of Cretaceous marine reptiles, toothed birds, and fish and of early Cenozoic bizarre giant mammals. Cope became a leading authority on the Cenozoic strata and vertebrates throughout the world. His private collections of vertebrate material became enormous.

Cope was continually publishing descriptions and discussions of his (and others') discoveries and was editor of the American Naturalist. Some of his more than 1200 publications were large lavishly illustrated monographs, and his reputation as a comparative anatomist was international. His views on Lamarck's evolutionary ideas—‘Neolamarckism’—did not, however, find favour. Cope's capacity for controversy was great and was at its apogee in his bitter rivalry with O. C. Marsh in collecting dinosaurs from the West. This so consumed his better judgement that it became a national scandal. Despite this, he was one of the most profound and prolific of America's palaeontologists in the nineteenth century.

D. L. Dineley