Edward Drinker Cope

Edward Drinker Cope is one of the most famous American paleontologist and evolutionist.  He was born to a wealthy Quaker family.  His interest for natural history was sparked when he was just six years old.  At that time, his father took him to see an exhibition of skeletons and fossils mounted by Dr. Albert Koch.  Koch had excavated in Alabama, in 1845, the remains of at least five different individuals of two different genera of fossil whales.  Instead of separating the different pieces according to each individual, he put all the bones together and 'reconstructed' a single specimen that happened to be 114 feet long (about 30 feet longer than the Blue Whale, the largest animal believed to have ever lived on earth).  He claimed that such a skeleton belonged to a 'sea serpent.'  This bizarre piece of reconstruction was exhibited in several American cities, including Philadelphia.  A few days later Cope wrote a letter to his grandmother telling her how impressed he was with this 'great skeleton of a serpent.'  He had seen the light. He was to become a naturalist.

He did not start going to school until the age of nine and continued intermittently until he was 19, being frequently taught by private tutors.  His father wanted him to become a farmer.  He was sent to the farms of relatives during the summer months, an experience that would actually further his interest in natural history, to the point that in 1858 he began working for free at the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia.  He published his first paper when he was 18.  He attended Westtown School and by the time he entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1860 he had published 30 papers.

It was between 1860 and 1861 that he had his only formal university education.  He decided to enter the University of Pennsylvania to take just one class: comparative anatomy taught by Dr. Joseph Leidy (1823-1891), the founder of American paleontology.

To keep him out of the Civil War, Cope's father (a sincere Quaker with pacifist and abolitionist leanings) sent him to study in Europe in 1863.  There he studied the natural history collections of the most important museums in Berlin, Leyden, Munich, Vienna, Paris, and London.

On his return to the U.S. in 1864, Cope became Professor of Comparative Zoology and Botany in Haverford College, a position he kept until 1867 when he resigned due to poor health. 

In July 1865 he married his distant cousin Annie Pim (1844-1933) .  They had a daughter, Julia Cope Collins (1866-1959).  In the summer of 1867 he took his family, including his one year old Julia, to Virginia and explored caves.

His great interest in fossils led him to begin field work in the West in 1871.  His wealth had helped him plan and execute his expeditions until 1880.  Cope was one of the last zoologists to explore and collect specimens under the threat of hostile Indians (and whites).  He often traveled escorted by U.S. soldiers.  Yet, he even took his wife and daughter to one of these trips.  He once camped in Sioux territory in 1876 within a day’s ride of the major encampment of Sitting Bull shortly after the Battle of Little Big Horn.

He lost part of his inheritance, $250,000, in a mining hoax in Colorado and New Mexico.  To be able to continue to pay for his expeditions, he became a popular scientific lecturer.  This also forced him to reduce his field work in the western fossil fields and to sell his valuable scientific collection to the American Museum of Natural History in 1894.  In 1884 he became the curator of the National Museum in Washington, D.C.  Fortunately, the University of Pennsylvania appointed him to a teaching position in Geology and Mineralogy in 1889 and in 1896 he was promoted to the position of Chair of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, a post he retained until his death.  In 1896 became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Cope also had an interesting personal life.  Wealthy and handsome, he was the center of attraction wherever he went.  He was conversant in German, French, Spanish and, to a limited extent, in some native languages.  He was noted for his wit and his sparkling conversational style.  Because he was a workaholic and a perfectionist, he often expected perfection from others.  Many people thought of him as arrogant.  He had an oddly fiery temperament, being aggressive and abrasive.  He tended to obnoxiously interrupt colleagues while they were presenting papers.  Contemporary observers called him 'churlish', 'pugnacious', and 'quarrelsome.'  He had many enemies even in the circles he frequented the most, like the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.  He even got into fist fights with colleagues like when he got a black eye (and gave one too) in a brawl with Persifor Frazer (1844-1909) in the halls of the American Philosophical Society.

Above: Drawing of the alleged Gronias nigrilabris

Yet, Cope was one of the most prolific American naturalists.  He published about 1400 papers and books and named more than 1,200 vertebrate species, more than 1,000 of them were fossils.  Many of his scientific errors were the product of always being in a hurry to publish his research, which led him to produce things that were not quite right from the scientific point of view.  He also loved speculation.

Thus, Cope was neither a simple character nor had an ordinary life. He would not only make important contributions to speleology, but also would be embroiled in one of the most bitter and public controversies within and outside the scientific community in the nineteenth century.  Even his private life would become the source of gossip and innuendo to this day (Romero and Romero, 1999).

Involvement in Hypogean Fish Research

Cope's contributions to hypogean fish research were two fold: one anecdotal regarding an alleged cave fish he described and the other philosophical as part of the American neo-Lamarckian movement.

Among Cope’s papers, there is one on what he thought to be a new species and genus of troglomorphic fish, ’Gronias nigrilabris,‘ from Pennsylvania (Cope 1864, p. 231).  Although he did not present any evidence that such fish had been captured in the hypogean environment, he was quick to suggest that such fish ‘is supposed to issue from a subterranean stream, said to traverse the Silurian limestone in that part of the Lancaster county, and discharge into the Conestoga’.  Cope was known for his hasty conclusions and the superficiality of some of his work (Romero and Romero 1999).  Further studies have shown that the specimens on which he based this description were specimens of Ictalurus nebulosus that had eyes present which were asymmetrically developed, probably as a result of a teratological condition.  Unfortunately his assertion on this fish continued to be repeated in the literature until recently (see Romero 1999b for full history of this misconception).

Cope introduced the idea that evolution was directed by trends and that ‘The method of evolution has apparently been one of successional increment or decrement of parts along definite lines’ (Cope 1896, p. 143).  He, like other neo-Lamarckians, had little regard for natural selection; thus, these ‘natural’ trends explained how evolution worked overall. That was the foundation of ‘orthogenesis’, i.e., the idea that there is a directionality in evolution.  He thought that when an an organism went too far in a particular direction or adaptively specialized path, like cave organisms, it could not reverse into a new form (Cope 1896, pp. 172-174).