The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Cope, Edward Drinker
1840–97, American paleontologist and comparative anatomist, b. Philadelphia, studied at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and at the Smithsonian Institution. His large collection of fossil mammals is now at the American Museum of Natural History. His many published works include The Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West (1883), a report on the F. V. Hayden survey in which he served as geologist and paleontologist. Cope believed that evolution arose from an organism’s inner urge to attain a higher state of being.
