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About Edward Drinker Cope:
One of the most celebrated paleontologists of all time, Edward Drinker Cope's output was enormous: he published over 600 scientific papers and was responsible for naming over 1,000 vertebrate species, many (but not all) of them dinosaurs and ancient reptiles. Independently wealthy, but with no college education, Cope led numerous fossil-hunting expeditions to the American midwest and southwest in the 1860's and 1870's, and he always had teams of workers digging in one place or another at any given time of year.
Today, Cope is best known for his role in the "Bone Wars," his ongoing feud with fellow paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh. This famous falling-out started when Marsh observed that Cope had mistakenly placed the skull of an Elasmosaurus on its tail, rather than its neck, and soon blossomed into an all-out rivalry in which the equally wealthy Cope and Marsh scoured the American plains for new dinosaurs. In a way, their bitter enmity was good for science, as their mutual loathing fueled an endless stream of new discoveries. (In 1990, the paleontologist Robert Bakker named the dinosaur Drinker in Cope's honor.)
