Edward Drinker Cope

Edward Drinker Cope was an American paleontologist, comparative anatomist, herpetologist and ichthyologist who over his career discovered, described and formally named more than 1,000 species of vertebrate animals, both living and fossil, and published more than 1,400 scientific papers. From 1877 to 1892 Cope competed intensely with fellow paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh in a rivalry of rushed fossil-hunting expeditions across the American West that became known as the Bone Wars; Cope personally described 56 new dinosaur species during this period, compared with 80 described by Marsh. Cope's dinosaur and fossil reptile discoveries and descriptions included Camarasaurus, Coelophysis, and Amphicoelias, among many others, and beyond dinosaurs he catalogued around 300 species of fossil and living fishes and described more than 300 species of reptiles over the course of his career. Cope's major publications included On the Origin of Genera in 1867, and his extensive fossil collecting, especially in the American West, contributed substantially to the developing science of vertebrate paleontology in the nineteenth century.