Rocky Road: Edward Drinker Cope

Edward Drinker Cope

Born in 1840 to Quaker parents, Edward Drinker Cope developed an oddly fiery temperament. To keep him out of the Civil War, Cope's father sent him to study in Europe, but Cope spent most of his life in a protracted battle anyway — with his archrival O.C. Marsh.

From Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos

Cope and Marsh started out as friends, meeting in Europe and hunting fossils together in the eastern United States. But when he visited one of Cope's digs in New Jersey, Marsh covertly paid Cope's crew to send future finds to him (Marsh). The already strained relationship turned truly ugly when Marsh pointed out (accurately) that Cope had mounted the skull of a plesiosaur, Elasmosaurus, on the tip of its tail, not its neck. Cope was so mortified at his mistake that he tried to buy up and replace all the printed copies of the publication in which the fossil was described, but Marsh wouldn't let this mistake die. To make matters worse, the corrected publication did not bear a later date, perhaps giving some the impression that Cope was trying to hide — rather than correct — his mistake.

Marsh had a rich uncle, and Cope had a rich daddy, so both men had the resources, at least for a time, to annoy each other. What followed were 20 years of the Great Bone Wars.

When Cope and Marsh began their research in paleontology, only 18 dinosaur species were known to North America. Between the two of them, these men named more than 130 new dinosaur species. Among the valid identifications, unfortunately, were plenty of misinterpretations and multiple namings of the same species. In his attempts to get the better of Marsh, Cope made himself one of the most productive fossil hunters in history, naming more than 1,200 vertebrate species and publishing 1,400 papers. Yet Cope didn't stop there.

Today, paleontologists commonly refer to the tendency of animal and plant lineages to get bigger over time as "Cope's rule" because he established the principle in the 19th century. Initially accepted, the idea came under criticism in the 1970s, and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould later described the rule as a "psychological artifact." More recent studies, however, have confirmed the validity of Cope's rule.

Cope even willed his own body to science, but when his bones were delivered, they were badly decalcified and shelved. His skeleton eventually wound up in the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia where it was retrieved by Louie Psihoyos (a National Geographic photographer researching a dinosaur book) and eventually relayed to paleontologist Bob Bakker. In 1993, Bakker wrote a description of Cope as the type specimen — the example by which the species is measured — for Homo sapiens. (Cope's brain remains in the Wistar Institute, near that of another great 19th-century paleontologist: Joseph Leidy.) Cope's skull (like most) appeared to be grinning, but his life was not always a happy one. Beyond his consuming feud with Marsh, he had trouble with others as well: conflicts with administrators at Haverford College, and arguments with council members of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences from which he eventually resigned or was possibly forced to leave. Financially ruined in his later years, he had to sell his house and move in with his museum collections. Cope spent his final days on a cot surrounded by piles of bones.

For more information:
Great Feuds in Science by Hal Hellman
Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos
The Reign of the Dinosaurs by Jean-Guy Michard
The Dinosaur Papers edited by Weishampel and White
Oceans of Kansas by Michael J. Everhart
Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything by Leonard Warren
Postcards from the Brain Museum by Brian Burrell
"'Bigger is Better' View of Evolution Gains Credence" by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times, December 28, 2004
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson