Edward Drinker Cope named over 1,000 vertebrate species and nearly went broke
Cope published 1,400 papers and described more than a thousand backboned animals, including dozens of dinosaurs. His feud with Othniel Charles Marsh set off the fossil race known as the Bone Wars. His father wanted him to be a gentleman farmer; Cope rented out the farm and spent the rent on science.
Cope was born on July 28, 1840, eldest son of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker whose family ran a profitable shipping line. His mother died when he was three, and he recalled nothing of her. He grew up at Fairfield, a stone house with eight acres of gardens, touring museums and zoos and showing early talent for drawing animals. At the expensive Westtown boarding school he did well in class but earned poor conduct marks, and his biographer Jane Davidson calls him a bit of a spoiled brat who wheedled extra allowance from his father.
After 1856 his father kept him home to farm, hoping the work would build up the undersized boy. Cope found it dreadfully boring and kept studying on his own. From 1858 he catalogued specimens part-time at the Academy of Natural Sciences, publishing his first research in January 1859. His father relented, paying for anatomy classes under Joseph Leidy at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1861 Cope published his first paper on salamander classification. He spent 1863 and 1864 touring Europe's great museums, a trip one biographer suspected was meant to keep him out of the Civil War draft.
Largely self-taught, he preferred fieldwork to teaching, prospecting across the American West in the 1870s and 1880s, often with US Geological Survey teams. The two had met in Berlin in the winter of 1863 and at first got on well, trading fossils and photographs by post. Their later rivalry fuelled a frantic competition to find and name fossils. Rivals questioned the accuracy of his rapid-fire publications, yet his work helped define American paleontology.
Failed mining investments in the 1880s wrecked his finances and forced him to sell much of his collection, though his career revived near the end. He died on April 12, 1897.
Source: Edward Drinker Cope
