Researching Edward Cope

Cope had little formal scientific training, and he eschewed a teaching position for field work. He made regular trips to the American West, prospecting in the 1870s and 1880s, often as a member of United States Geological Survey teams. A personal feud between Cope and paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh led to a period of intense fossil-finding competition now known as the Bone Wars. Cope's financial fortunes soured after failed mining ventures in the 1880s, forcing him to sell off much of his fossil collection. He experienced a resurgence in his career toward the end of his life before dying on April 12, 1897.

Though Cope's scientific pursuits nearly bankrupted him, his contributions helped to define the field of American paleontology. He was a prodigious writer, with 1,400 papers published over his lifetime, although his rivals debated the accuracy of his rapidly published works. He discovered, described, and named more than 1,000 vertebrate species, including hundreds of fishes and dozens of dinosaurs. His proposal for the origin of mammalian molars is notable among his theoretical contributions. "Cope's rule", however, the hypothesis that mammalian lineages gradually grow larger over geologic time, while named after him, is "neither explicit nor implicit" in his work.

He was educated at Ludlow College and then Shrewsbury. He then went onto Trinity College, Cambridge, of which society he was elected fellow in 1842, having taken his degree in 1841 as senior classic. He was for many years lecturer at Trinity, his favorite subjects being the Greek tragedians, Plato and Aristotle.

When the professorship of Greek became vacant, the votes were equally divided between Cope and BH Kennedy, and the latter was appointed by the chancellor. It is said that the keenness of Cope's disappointment was partly responsible for the mental affliction by which he was attacked in 1869, and from which he never recovered.

As his published works show, Cope was a thoroughly sound scholar, with perhaps a tendency to over-minuteness. He was the author of An Introduction to Aristotle's Rhetoric (1867), a standard work; The Rhetoric of Aristotle, with a commentary, revised and edited by JE Sandys (1877); translations of Plato's Gorgias (2nd ed., 1884) and Phaedo (revised by H Jackson, 1875). Mention may also be made of his criticism of Grote's account of the Sophists, in the Cambridge Journal of Classical Philology, vols. i., ii., iii. (1854–1857).