Edward Drinker Cope was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist. He was a founder of the Neo-Lamarckism school of thought. Cope discovered, described, and named more than 1,000vertebrate species, including hundreds of fishes and dozens of dinosaurs. His proposal for the origin of mammalian molars is notable among his theoretical contributions.
About Edward Drinker Cope in brief
Edward Drinker Cope was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist. He was a founder of the Neo-Lamarckism school of thought. Cope discovered, described, and named more than 1,000vertebrate species, including hundreds of fishes and dozens of dinosaurs. His proposal for the origin of mammalian molars is notable among his theoretical contributions. Though Cope’s scientific pursuits nearly bankrupted him, his contributions helped to define the field ofAmerican paleontology. He died on April 12, 1897, in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He is buried at the Cope Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two children. His son, Alfred Cope, was a Quaker who was a philanthropist who gave money to the Society of Friends, the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens, and the Institute for Colored Youth. Edward Cope died of lung cancer on April 11, 1901, at the age of 69. He had a son, James, who was born in 1852 and died in 1903. He also had a daughter, Mary, who died in 1904 at age 80. He wrote 1,400 papers over his lifetime, although his rivals debated the accuracy of his rapidly published works. He published his first scientific paper at age 19. His father tried to raise Cope as a gentleman farmer, but he eventually acquiesced to his son’s scientific aspirations. 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 paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh led to a period of intense fossil-finding competition now known as the Bone Wars. He married his cousin and had one child; the family moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey, although Cope would maintain a residence and museum in Philadelphia in his later years. His letters home requesting a larger allowance show he was able to manipulate his father, and he was according to author and Cope biographer Jane Davidson, “a bit a spoiled brat”. His letters suggest he was lonely at the school—it was the first time he had been away for an extended period of time from his home. While at school, he frequently visited the Academy of Natural Sciences, where he obtained bad marks due to quarreling and bad conduct due to his chafing and bad letters to his father. In 1855, Edward returned to Westtown in Pennsylvania, accompanied by two sisters, to study natural history and he studied natural history texts in his spare time. At age 12, Edward was sent to the Friends’ Boarding School at Westtown, near West Chester, Pennsylvania. He studied algebra, chemistry, scripture, physiology, grammar, astronomy, and Latin. In his first year, Edward studied algebra and scripture, and in his second year, he had consistently had “less than perfect marks for his conduct from his teachers, not quite satisfactory from his hard work”
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