Edward Drinker Cope
Legacy

In fewer than 40 years as a scientist, Cope published over 1,400 scientific papers, a record that is rivaled by few other scientists. His major works include three volumes: On the Origin of Genera (1867), The Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West (1884) and "Essays in Evolution". He discovered a total of 56 new dinosaur species during the Bone Wars compared to Marsh's 80. Although Cope is today known as a herpetologist and paleontologist, his contributions extended to ichthyology, in which he cataloged 300 species of fishes and described over 300 species of reptiles over three decades. In total, he discovered and described over 1,000 species of fossil vertebrates and published 600 separate titles. One species of Caribbean snake, Liophis juliae, he named in honor of his daughter Julia.

The salamander Dicamptodon copei Nussbaum, 1970, the dinosaur Drinker nisti Bakker et al., 1990, the lizards Alopoglossus copii Boulenger, 1885, Gambelia copeii (Yarrow, 1882), Plestiodon copei (Taylor, 1933), Sepsina copei Bocage, 1873, Sphaerodactylus copei Steindachner, 1867, the snakes Thamnophis copei Dugès, 1879, Aspidura copei Günther, 1864, Cemophora coccinea copei Jan, 1863, Coniophanes imperialis copei Hartweg & J. Oliver, 1938, Dipsas copei Günther, 1872, Cope's gray treefrog Hyla chrysoscelis Cope, 1880, and the splash tetra genus Copella G.S. Myers, 1956 are among the many taxa named in honor of Cope. Currently, 21 fish species named copei are distributed among 11 families. Cope lent his name to the Journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (nee Copeia) from 1913 to 2020. Cope's Pine Street home is recognized as a national landmark.

Cope's remains are still kept as scientific specimens. His brain was donated to the American Anthropometric Society and is still preserved in alcohol at the Wistar Institute. His skull is at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. His ashes were placed at the institute with those of Leidy, while his bones were extracted and kept in a locked drawer to be studied by anatomy students. In 1907, Edward Anthony Spitzka published a paper of his analysis of six brains at the American Anthropometric Society, including Cope's with additional analysis of Cope's skull. In 1993, the American photographer Louie Psihoyos loaned Cope's skull and prominently incorporated it into his book Hunting Dinosaurs (1994). Psihoyos and his assistant, John Knoebber, traveled around America with Cope's skull, taking pictures of the skull in different places on the "adventure" and showing it to various modern paleontologists. Among the notable incidents during the journey was Robert T. Bakker pouring pasta into the skull to measure Cope's brain size.
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