Edward
Drinker Cope was perhaps the brashest, most creative, and
quixotic paleontologist of the 19th Century.
The author of "Cope's Law" - stating that over time species
tend to become larger - and of the Triassic class Archosauria,
he was a brilliant taxonomist and evolutionary theoretician.
But he did not simply inhabit the ivory tower. In expeditions
across the sprawling and sometimes violent American West,
Cope discovered the dinosaurs Camarasaurus and Coelophysis
and proved himself a consummate fossil hunter. Between
his theoretical writing and fieldwork Cope was one of the
most prolific researchers ever. Even today he holds the
record for scientific publication with more than 1,200 published
papers.
But
what truly assured Cope's place in the history of paleontology
and even eclipsed his science was his bitter feud with Yale
University paleontologist O.C. Marsh. What began as a friendly
rivalry in the late 1860s, broke out into all out war in
1872 and then raged on until Cope's death in 1897. Both
Cope and Marsh were recipients of family fortunes and they
used their wealth to discover new fossils and to reconstruct
ancient life. This scramble literally propelled American
science into the forefront of paleontology.
Why
did Cope and Marsh fight so? In part it was a question
of ego. Each man was brilliant in his own way and each
craved the limelight. In part, it was because they disagreed
intellectually on several key concepts. Marsh was a Darwinian
and much of his work was focused on proving the thesis of
Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, which had been published
in 1859. Marsh's reconstruction of the evolution of the
horse over sixty million years is widely credited as the
first substantial fossil proof of evolution.
Cope
- who was raised as a devout Quaker - could not accept the
absence of divine design in nature. He became a leading
exponent of the "Neo-Lamarckian" school of evolution - which
tried to show order and design in the growing fossil record.
In the late 1800s, Neo-Lamarckian evolution was more popular
in American than Darwin's ideas. But perhaps most of all
Cope and Marsh fought, feuded and fumed at one another because
their backgrounds and personalities just seemed to go together
like nitro and glycerin, and in the small world of Gilded
Age American science the mixing was unavoidable.
Marsh
came from a modest farming background and was saved from
a life as a country schoolteacher or carpenter by the intervention
of a rich uncle - the mercantile millionaire George Peabody
- who paid Marsh's expenses at Philips Exeter Academy and
Yale University. Marsh also studied at the great German
universities in Berlin and Breslau, with his uncle's support,
before returning to Yale to become the nation's first professor
of paleontology.
Cold,
calculating and methodical, Marsh was one of the new breed
of university trained scientists that was supplanting the
gentleman scientist of an earlier epoch. Marsh was interested
not only in science, but also in building scientific institutions.
He was curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History
at Yale (built with a grant from Uncle George) and he served
as president of the National Academy of Sciences. Marsh
traveled in the Gilded Age's most rarified society conferring
with President Ulysses grant and lunching with the Rothschilds.
Along the way he became a friend of Buffalo Bill and Chief
Red Cloud.
Cope
- often considered the more brilliant of the two - was a
self-made scientist. Born in 1840, he had grown up in a
wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family and even, as a boy had
been a keen observer of nature. On a voyage to Boston,
the seven-year-old Cope noted the citing of whales in his
journal: "They are large black fish and they blow water
out of a hole in their heads. Some of them have white spots
on their sides. One came along side the vessel."
Cope's
father, however, wanted him to become a farmer and the young
man's formal schooling stopped at the age of sixteen. Cope
would not be deterred. He took the famous anatomy class
at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School of Joseph
Leidy, and reorganized the reptile collections at the Philadelphia
Academy of Sciences. At the age of eighteen, Cope delivered
his first scientific paper before the Academy on the reclassification
of salamanders. It was the beginning of a distinguished
career.
But
Cope was a scientist by self-study and personal nature -
he held no degrees except honorary ones from Haverford College
and, late in life, from the University of Munich. He was
mostly hostile in institutions, bureaucracy and politics
and very much the loner. Cope also had a hot temper and
a hair trigger that invariably got him in trouble with his
contemporaries. One of his friends called Cope a "militant
paleontologist" whose mottoe might have been "war at whatever
cost."
The
first great fight between Cope and Marsh came in 1869 when
Marsh discovered a serious error in a Cope restoration of
a thirty-five-foot-long sea going Cretaceous reptile called
a plesiosaur. Cope had put the skull on the wrong end of
the snake-like creature. In the years that followed, the
errors - on both sides - piled up as Cope and Marsh rushed
into print to best each other.
Despite
making a career of highlighting Cope's mistakes, it was
Marsh who produced perhaps the biggest blunder in the history
of paleontology - the Brontosaurus. Marsh's Wyoming collectors
had produced for him a near perfect specimen of a sauropod
dinosaur except for a skull. To complete the restoration
Marsh used a skull from a quarry about three miles away.
What Marsh did was put a Camarasaurus skull on an Apatosaurus
body. (Ironically, the Apatosaurus was also one of Marsh's
dinosaurs.)
While
the battle raged on over the fossil record and the Western
discoveries, Cope also spent much time studying and writing
on the natural history of reptiles and amphibians. In two
monumental works Bactrachian of North America and The Crocodilians
and Snakes of North America, Cope established the foundation
for the study of these animals in America. Today, the foremost
scientific journal in the field is named in his honour -
Copeia.
When
Cope died in 1897 - just a few weeks shy of his 57th
birthday - he showed himself a scientist in the end, by
willing his body and brain to the Anthropometric Society
so that his skeleton and brain could be preserved for further
study.
From
The
Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C.
Marsh and the Rise of American Science by Mark Jaffe
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