Edward Drinker Cope was born in Philadelphia in 1840. In order to keep him out of the Civil War, his parents, Alfred and Hannah (Edge) Cope, sent him to study in Europe. When he returned, he became a professor at Haverford College from 1864 to 1867.
In 1884 he became the curator of the National Museum in Washington DC. In 1891, he taught geology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a very prolific author of scientific articles, publishing about 1,400 of them and describing over 1,200 vertebrate species! Today, Cope's collection of fossils is housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, PA.
Cope is probably most famous for being one of the adversaries in the "Great Bone Wars," as his rivalry with Othniel Marsh is often described (see my article about Marsh). The two of them actually started out as friends and collected fossils together in the eastern United States. Legend says that their well-known rivalry began when Marsh paid some of Cope's fossil diggers to send fossils to him instead. There were other altercations between the two. In 1870, Cope published a description of Elasmosaurus (a pleisiosaur), and Marsh pointed out that Cope had placed the animal's skull on the wrong end, on its tail!
Their intense rivalry did, however, benefit the science of paleontology. When they started their competition, only eighteen species of dinosaurs were known from all of North America, and many of those were only known from isolated teeth or vertebrae. Between the two of them, they identified 136 new species of dinosaurs, although many of those were actually duplications (such as the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus duplication by Marsh) that resulted from their race to be the first to describe a new species. (For information on that, see my article " Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus".) (See my article "Biological Nomenclature" for more information about how biologists divide animals into groups.)
Their rivalry did not end with death, either. Cope willed his body to science, asking that the volume of his brain be measured and compared with that of his rival, Marsh. Marsh did not comply, but it has been established now that brain volume does not indicate intelligence. Cope also asked that his body be used as the type specimen for Homo sapiens.
In addition to a name and a description, a new species requires what we call a "type specimen" that is used to compare other members of the species against. Carl Linnaeus, the famous naturalist who named thousands of species, never designated a type specimen for Homo sapiens, saying only "Nosce te ipsum" (Latin for "Know thyself"). I have read reports, but have not been able to confirm yet, that paleontologist Robert Bakker re-described Homo sapiens, using E. D. Cope's body as the type specimen. As I said, I have not been able to confirm this story at this time.
 |
 |
Go To Page: 1 2
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Beverly Eschberger's Paleontology topic, please visit the Discussions page.