i897. EDWARD DRINKER COPE. 379 



It is impossible to enter into the details of Cope's life-work on the 

 extinct Vertebrata ; it must suffice to note a few of the salient points. 

 Of the lowest ancestral Vertebrata, he had practically no examples to 

 study ; but he closely followed the descriptions of others, and it is 

 mainly due to his initiative that we now regard the strange Pteras- 

 pidae, Cephalaspidae, and Asterolepidse (Ostracodermi or Ostraco- 

 phori, as Cope termed them), of the Upper Silurian and Devonian 

 rocks, as the armoured extinct allies of the modern lampreys 

 (Marsipobranchii). The suggestion had been made before ; but 

 Cope's " wild guess " that Bothviolepis and Ptevichthys might be com- 

 pared with the modern armoured tunicate, Chelyosoma, excited 

 renewed interest and drew closer attention to the subject. As new 

 facts accumulated he gradually veered round to the now generally- 

 accepted view, that these strange armoured creatures were to be placed 

 a little higher in the scale than he at first supposed. Among the 

 lowest fishes Cope was the first to recognise the primitive Palaeozoic 

 order of sharks, termed by him Ichthyotomi. This he claimed for 

 some time to be ancestral both to sharks, and to all other fishes ; but 

 as soon as Cladoselache was described by Dean from the Upper 

 Devonian he at once gave precedence to the latter. He also seems to 

 have been the first to suggest that the double ventral series of spines 

 between the paired fins of certain Lower Devonian Acanthodian 

 sharks (e.g., Climatius) are remnants of the two continuous lateral folds 

 in which the paired fins had their origin. His most important 

 generalization concerning the so-called " Ganoids," which of course 

 he did not accept as a definable group, was his clear enunciation of 

 the stages m the evolution of the fins and their primary importance 

 in classification — a result partly anticipated by Huxley and Traquair. 

 Among bony fishes, he began to instil order into the chaos which he 

 found in published writings on the fish-remains from the Chalk ; and 

 he described many fine specimens from Kansas. He also added 

 enormously to our knowledge of the Tertiary bony fishes of North 

 America. 



Turning to the extinct Amphibia, he made known a great series 

 of Labyrinthodontia (Stegocephala, as he termed them) from the Coal 

 Measures of Ohio and the Permian of Texas. The anomodont 

 reptiles (which he termed Theromorpha or Theromora) also interested 

 him deeply, and he described a great number of forms from the 

 Permian of Texas and other regions. He followed the lead of Owen, 

 and declared these reptiles to be the ancestors of the Mammalia. 

 Many of the remains described, however, were so fragmentary that 

 there is still much uncertainty as to their true nature. Among higher 

 reptiles, Cope paid much attention to dinosaurs, though most of his 

 specimens were very fragmentary, and he only distinguished in a 

 vague way many features which later discoveries by contemporaries 

 revealed clearly. He shares with Leidy, Huxley, and Phillips, the 

 credit of first recognising the true character of the pelvis in the 



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