Edward Drinker Cope is name that may be unfamiliar to most people. I myself have only just recently learned about him. This man was a paleontologist from a very wealthy family in the Americas who has spent most of his time focusing on the reptilians in North America specifically. Cope also dabbled in ichthyology and comparative anatomy where he made a name for himself after publishing over 1500 pieces of literature and scientific journals. It was in my very own Comparative Anatomy class that I learned about the workings of Cope and he was truly a remarkable scientist. It was said that he had a photographic memory and would often observe procedures of fellow herpetologists, run back to his lab, and draw the whole organism from memory and publish his work to beat out the competition and take credit for it. Cope’s most famous competitor was a man by the name of Othniel Charles Marsh. Now these two men worked out of different labs. Cope was based at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia where as Marsh was based out of Yale. These two paleontologists were rumored to steal each other’s fossils and findings and use it for their own good. The best story my professor told me was of a whale carcass that drifted ashore off Cape Cod. Now, being that it is the 1800’s, they only method of rapid transportation was train and so Marsh was at an advantage. In fact, Marsh did get to the whale first, broke it down and boxed the remains for shipping to Yale. When Cope finally arrived, all be it a little too late, he switched the shipping labels on the box and so the remains of the whale were sent to his lab instead! Say what you will about Cope but he was a tenacious man who would do anything to be the best. Unfortunately, he died in his fifties and had his remains stored away that the Academy in Philadelphia for scientific purposes.
This isn’t the end of Cope’s story though. Every species on earth, but one, has a type organism that is the baseline for comparison in order to classify and define new organisms. The one and only species without a type organism is us, Homo sapiens. That changed for about four years when Edward Drinker Cope himself, now dead for hundreds of years, was named the type organism for humans. Unfortunately, this was overturned shortly after the work was published as it was found in a European science journal that it was impossible to have a type organism for humans as we are all so different and unique to begin with thus ending the reign of Cope once and for all. As you can see, Edward Cope was an extremely capable scientist. He published more records than anyone else in his time, he classified all the reptilians and amphibians in North America, and he was a renowned paleontologist. He lived on even after his death and redefined the way we look at the fields of herpetology and ichthyology.
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