author
E. D. (Edward Drinker) Cope
1840–1897
A brilliant and fiercely competitive 19th-century scientist, he helped turn fossil hunting into front-page news. Best known for his role in the "Bone Wars," he described huge numbers of extinct animals and left a lasting mark on American paleontology.
1 Audiobook
Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays
by Thomas Henry Huxley, George F. (George Frederick) Barker, E. D. (Edward Drinker) Cope, James Hutchison Stirling, John Tyndall
About the author
Born in Philadelphia on July 28, 1840, Edward Drinker Cope grew into one of the most energetic naturalists of his era. He worked across zoology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, herpetology, and ichthyology, and sources describe him as a prodigy who published scientific work while still very young.
Cope is especially remembered for discovering and naming large numbers of fossil vertebrates in the United States. Britannica notes that he described roughly a thousand species of extinct vertebrates, while other reliable accounts emphasize the sheer scale of his output and the range of animals he studied.
He is also famous for his bitter rivalry with Othniel Charles Marsh, the feud later known as the Bone Wars. That competition helped fuel public excitement about dinosaurs and fossils, even as it damaged both men personally and professionally. Cope died in Philadelphia on April 12, 1897.