Edward Drinker Cope

Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897) was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist who described many fossil vertebrates and competed with Othniel Charles Marsh in the Bone Wars.

Othniel Charles Marsh: An American paleontologist who competed with Edward Drinker Cope in collecting and naming fossil vertebrates. Their rivalry over fossil discoveries became the defining episode of Cope’s career.
Elasmosaurus: A long-necked Cretaceous marine reptile in the plesiosaur group. Cope’s mistaken placement of its head and tail became a notorious episode in the Bone Wars.
Comparative anatomy: The study of similarities and differences in the anatomy of different organisms. Cope used anatomical comparisons to identify and classify fossil vertebrates.
Bone Wars: A fierce late nineteenth-century rivalry between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. The competition brought Cope’s discoveries and disputes with Marsh into public view.
Joseph Leidy: An American anatomist and paleontologist who advanced the study of fossil vertebrates. Leidy mentored Cope and helped establish the comparative anatomy tradition he pursued.
Eohippus: An early Eocene mammal historically treated as a primitive horse. Cope described this fossil genus during the period when evolutionary history of horses drew attention.
Vertebrate paleontology: The study of fossil animals with backbones and their evolutionary history. This field contains the fossil discoveries and classifications that defined Cope’s work.
American paleontology: The study of fossils in the United States, including the development of its institutions and research traditions. Cope helped establish the scale and prominence of fossil research in the American West.
Charles Darwin: An English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection transformed biology. Cope embraced evolution and developed views on how organisms changed through time.
Camarasaurus: A genus of large, long-necked sauropod dinosaurs from the Late Jurassic of North America. Cope named this sauropod from fossils collected in the American West.

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