Edward Cope
(July 28, 1840–April 12, 1897)
Born in Philadelphia, Edward Cope was an aggressive and impatient man whose famous feud with Othniel Marsh is now stuff of legend. From an early age Cope became interested in natural history and became affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania Cope worked with the Academy of Natural Sciences for around 8 years until 1873 and held a proffesorial position at Haverford College for a short while before moving to the department of geology at the University of Pennsylvania.
His rivalry with Marsh however dominated his life, frequently falling fowl of Marsh's slander and critisism, it was a war that never ended. Hiring an army of workers, him and Marsh discovered over 130 species of dinosaur between them, producing material that could have lasted for decades of research. Instead, just like Marsh, Cope flitted from one project to the next, making incredible mistakes and churning out papers by the dozen each year. The main difference between two men, is that Cope was truly an outdoor, field palaeontologist, developing a keen eye for fossils. Like Marsh, Cope had a wealthy father, so both men had the resources to buy fossils from private collectors and keep the workers they employed happy.Cope developed the idea that lineages of plants and animals can get larger over time late in the 19th century, now referred to as Cope's Rule. This and other contributions to palaeontology can be attributed to Cope, but by far the biggest impact he had, was turning out such a vast quantity of dinosaur material for generations of budding palaeontologists to admire. Over 1,400 papers about 1,200 new vertebrates, an astonishing achievement, even if the quality of those papers left a lot to be desired.
Edward Cope died in Philadelphia in 1897, a few weeks before his 57th birthday.
See also - American Bone RushOthniel Marsh
References and Further Reading
URLs
http://www.strangescience.net/cope.htm
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/cope.html
http://www.niagaramuseum.com/cope_article.htm
Edward Cope