European travels
In 1863–1864 during the American Civil War, Edward traveled through Europe, taking the opportunity to visit the most esteemed museums and societies of the time. Initially, Edward seemed interested in helping out at a field hospital, but in letters to his father later on in the war this aspiration seemed to disappear; instead Edward considered working in the American South to assist freed African-Americans. Davidson suggests that Edward's correspondence with Leidy and Ferdinand Hayden, who worked as field surgeons during the war, might have informed Edward of the horrors of the occupation.
Edward was involved in a love affair; his father did not approve. Whether Edward or the unnamed woman (whom he at one point intended to marry) broke off the relationship is unknown, but he took the breakup poorly.
Biographer and paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn attributed Edward's sudden departure for Europe as a method of keeping him from being drafted into the Civil War. Cope did write to his father from London on February 11, 1864, that, "I shall get home in time to catch and be caught by the new draft. I shall not be sorry for this, as I know certain persons who would be mean enough to say that I have gone to Europe to avoid the war." Eventually Cope took the pragmatic approach and waited out the conflict.[21] He may have suffered from mild depression during this period, and often complained of boredom.
Despite his torpor, Edward proceeded with his tour of Europe, and met with some of the most highly esteemed scientists of the world during his travels through France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Italy, and Eastern Europe, most likely with introductory letters from Leidy and Spencer Baird. In the winter of 1863, Edward met Othniel Charles Marsh while in Berlin. Marsh, age thirty-two, was attending the University of Berlin. He held two university degrees in comparison to Edward's lack of formal schooling past sixteen, but Edward had written 37 scientific papers in comparison to Marsh's two published works.
While they would later become rivals, on meeting the two men appeared to take a liking to each other. Marsh led Edward on a tour of the city, and they stayed together for days. After Edward left Berlin the two maintained correspondence, exchanging manuscripts, fossils, and photographs. Edward burned many of his journals and letters from Europe upon his return to the United States. Friends intervened and stopped Cope from destroying some of his drawings and notes, in what author Url Lanham deemed a "partial suicide".
Family and early career
Upon returning to Philadelphia in 1864 the Cope family made every effort to secure Edward a teaching post as the Professor of Zoology at Haverford College, a small Quaker school where the family had philanthropic ties.
The college awarded him an honorary master's degree so he could have the position. Cope even began to think about marriage and consulted his father in the matter, telling him of the girl he would like to marry: "an amiable woman, not over sensitive, with considerable energy, and especially one inclined to be serious and not inclined to frivolity and display—the more truly Christian of course the better—seems to be the most practically the most suitable for me, though intellect and accomplishments have more charm."
Cope thought of Annie Pim, a member of the Society of Friends, as less a lover than companion, declaring that "her amiability and domestic qualities generally, her capability of taking care of a house, etc., as well as her steady seriousness weigh far more with me than any of the traits which form the theme of poets!" Cope's family approved of his choice, and the marriage took place in July 1865 at Pim's farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania.[30] The two had a single daughter, Julia Biddle Cope, born June 10, 1866.[31] Cope's return to the United States also marked an expansion of his scientific studies; in 1864 he described several fishes, a whale, and the amphibian Amphibamus grandiceps (his first paleontological contribution.)
During the period between 1866 and 1867 Cope went on trips to western parts of the country. Cope related to his father his scientific experiences; to his daughter he sent descriptions of animal life as part of her education. Cope found educating his students at Haverford "a pleasure" but wrote to his father that he "could not get any work done." He resigned from his position at Haverford and moved his family to Haddonfield, in part to be closer to the fossil beds of western New Jersey. Due to the time-consuming nature of his Haverford position Cope had not had time to attend to his farm and had let it out to others, but eventually found he was in need of more money to fuel his scientific habits.
Pleading with his father for money to pursue his career, he finally sold the farm in 1869. Alfred apparently did not press his son to continue farming, and Edward focused on his scientific career. He continued his continental travels, including trips to Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. He visited caves across the region. He stopped these cave explorations after an 1871 trip to the Wyandotte Caves in Indiana, but remained interested in the subject.
Cope had visited Haddonfield many times in the 1860s, paying periodical visits to the marl pits. The fossils he found in these pits became the focus of several papers, including a description in 1868 of Elasmosaurus platyurus and Laelaps. Marsh accompanied him on one of these excursions. Cope's proximity to the beds after moving to Haddonfield made more frequent trips possible. The Copes lived comfortably in a frame house backed by an apple orchard. Two maids tended the estate, which entertained a number of guests. Cope's only concern was for more money to spend on his scientific work.
The 1870s were the golden years of Cope's career, marked by his most prominent discoveries and rapid flow of publications. Among his descriptions were the therapsid Lystrosaurus (1870), the archosauromorph Champsosaurus (1876), and the sauropod Amphicoelias (1878), possibly the largest dinosaur ever discovered. In the period of one year, from 1879 to 1880, Cope published 76 papers based on his travels through New Mexico and Colorado, and on the findings of his collectors in Texas, Kansas Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.
During the peak years, Cope published around 25 reports and preliminary observations each year. The hurried publications led to errors in interpretation and naming—many of his scientific names were later canceled or withdrawn. In comparison, Marsh wrote and published less frequently and more succinctly—his work's appearance in the widespread American Journal of Science led to faster reception abroad, and subsequently Marsh's reputations grew faster than Cope.
In autumn 1871 Cope began prospecting farther west to the fossil fields of Kansas. Leidy and Marsh had been to the region earlier, and Cope employed one of Marsh's guides, Benjamin Mudge, who was in want of a job.
Cope's companion Charles Sternberg described the lack of water and good food available to Cope and his helpers on these expeditions. Cope would suffer from a "severe attack of nightmare" in which "every animal of which we had found trace during the day played with him at night ... sometimes he would lose half the night in this exhausting slumber." Nevertheless Cope continued to lead the party from sunrise to sunset, sending letters to his wife and child describing his finds.[47] The severe desert conditions and Cope's habit of overworking himself till he was bedridden caught up with him and in 1872 he broke down from exhaustion.[48] Cope maintained a regular pattern of summers spent prospecting and winters writing up his findings from 1871 to 1879.
Throughout the decade Cope traveled across the West, exploring rocks of the Eocene in 1872 and the Titanothere Beds of Colorado in 1873. In 1874 Cope was employed with the Wheeler Survey, a group of surveys led by George Montague Wheeler that mapped parts of the United States west of the 100th meridian. The survey traveled through New Mexico, whose Puerco formations, he wrote to his father, provided "the most important find in geology I have ever made".
The New Mexico bluffs contained millions of years of formation and subsequent deformation, and were in an area which had not been visited by Leidy or Marsh. Being part of the survey had other advantages; Cope was able to draw on fort commissaries and defray publishing costs. While there was no salary, his findings would be published in the annual reports that the surveys printed. Cope brought Annie and Julia along on one such survey and rented a house for them at Fort Bridger, but he spent more of his own money on these survey trips than he would have liked.
Cope's father died December 4, 1875, and left Edward with an inheritance of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. His death was a blow to Cope; his father was a constant confidant. The same year marked a suspension of much of Cope's field work and a new emphasis on writing up discoveries of the previous years. His chief publication of the time, The Vertebrata of the Cretaceous Formations of the West, was a collection of 303 pages and 54 illustration plates. The memoir summarized his experiences prospecting in New Jersey and Kansas. Cope now had the finances to hire multiple teams to search for fossils for him year-round and he advised the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition on their fossil displays. Cope's studies of marine reptiles of Kansas closed in 1876, opening a new focus on terrestrial reptiles.
The same year, Cope moved from Haddonfield to 2100 and 2102 Pine Street in Philadelphia. He converted one of the two houses into a museum where he stored his growing collection of fossils.[49] Cope's expeditions took him across Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana. Cope's initial journey into the Clarendon Beds of Upper Miocene and Lower Pliocene of Texas led to an affiliation with the Geological Survey of Texas. Cope's papers on the region constitute some of his most important paleontological contributions. In 1877 he purchased half the rights to the American Naturalist to publish the papers he produced at a rate so high that Marsh questioned their dating.
Cope returned to Europe in August 1878 in response to an invitation to join the British Association for the Advancement of Science's Dublin meeting. He was warmly welcomed in England and France and met with the distinguished paleontologists and archeologists of the period. Marsh's attempts to sully Cope's reputation had made little impact on anyone save paleontologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who according to Osborn "alone treated [Cope] with coolness".
Following the Dublin meeting, Cope spent two days with the French Association for the Advancement of Science. At each gathering Cope exhibited dinosaur restorations by Philadelphia colleague John A. Ryder and various charts and plates from geological surveys of the 1870s led by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. He returned to London on October 12, meeting with anatomist Richard Owen, ichthyologist Hermann Gunther and paleontologist H. G. Seeley. While in Europe Cope purchased a great collection of fossils from Argentina. Cope never found time to describe the collection and many of the boxes remained unopened until Cope's death.[60]
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