Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 28, 2025
Edward Drinker Cope (July 28, 1840 – April 12, 1897) was an American zoologist, paleontologist, comparative anatomist, herpetologist, and ichthyologist. Born to a Quaker family, he published his first scientific paper at age 19. He made regular trips to the American West, prospecting in the 1870s and 1880s. A feud between Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh led to an intense fossil-finding competition called the Bone Wars. Cope's financial fortunes soured after failed mining ventures in the 1880s, forcing him to sell much of his fossil collection. His contributions helped to define the field of American paleontology and wrote more than 1,400 published papers, although 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. (Full article...)