Edward Drinker Cope notebooks

Edward Drinker Cope, a scientist known for his fossil research, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Alfred and Hanna Cope on July 28, 1840. His parents were wealthy and valued education, sending him to the Westtown Boarding School beginning in 1853, where Cope became interested in biology and other natural sciences. After leaving school, he began research at the Academy of Natural Sciences, where he published his first papers. He attended the University of Pennsylvania to study paleontology, anatomy, and herpetology in 1861 and 1862, where he published research on salamanders.

In the following years, Cope traveled to Europe to meet other researchers and visit scientific museums. After his return in 1863, he began to teach zoology at Haverford College and also got married to Annie Pim, with whom he had a daughter, Julia Biddle Cope, in 1866. During this period, he left Haverford and moved to Haddonfield, New Jersey, to pursue more research, selling his farm for the money. In New Jersey, he conducted field research on the fossil pits of the area, discovering and describing many different species of ancient reptiles and dinosaurs. He also visited the western United States on fossil searches, with his research in the areas of Kansas and Colorado continuing at rapid pace throughout the 1870s. He also engaged in a conflict over the discovery of fossils with colleague Othniel Charles Marsh called the “Bone Wars,” in which the two attempted to gain greater notoriety than the other for the discovery and description of species. During this time, Cope lived primarily in Philadelphia and sold his collected fossils to the American Museum of Natural History in 1895. He is known as a member of the Neo-Lamarckian school of evolutionary thought, publishing responses to Charles Darwin’s theories. He believed that individuals could pass on inherited traits to their offspring and that free will was impetus for evolution. He died in April 1897.