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Dinosaun Ridge Morrison Colorado ABOVE: Dinosaur tracker Martin Lockley with the Professor in his backyard near Golden, Colorado. BELOW: Breakfast with champions: Living legend Bob Bakker dines with Professor Cope at a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado. S However, as we visited paleontologist artifacts for the Bone Wars photograph someone would get around to asking box?" Upon our introducing the conter spread through the museum that the I sor Cope was in their midst. Whol would come giddily over to meet him was a legend and a personal hero tor had never realized that bringing Pro group of paleontologists was like carti to a Veterans of Foreign Wars conv wanted to meet and be photographe in his present condition. Quite to our back seat to specimen 4989, and in a seemed to be escorting us, not the ot SHOW AND TELL AT A BOU One of the most famous bone times is Bob Bakker, known the wo fly of paleontology. His heretical i behavior cast him as the bad boy i our dinosaur coverage I sought Bc sel. We met for breakfast at the N Shop in Colorado. Unbeknownst to Bob, as we saurs, the legendary Professor Co box sitting on a chair between us I ask Bakker what kind of photo for the dinosaur story. "Your pictures have to be advises. "Never give people wh them what they don't know." "For instance?" I ask. "People think that all dinosa "There were some that were s could eat were insects." "What kind of dinosaur wa intrigued. "Where can I find it? Bob tips his white straw cov into his red flannel shirt pocket corked test tube of tiny black b he says, handing me the vial acr Bob is known for bestowi unusual names, but not withou looking at the little tube of jum While Ed was at Yale, a few strange events occurred that gave us all a little pause. We photo- graphed the still life in the middle of the night in the basement of the museum. About three o'clock in the morning our Polaroids, used for lighting checks, started disappearing, and later we learned all of our 4" x 5" film was mysteriously loaded backward, ren- dering all our work useless. On graduation day at Yale, when we photo- graphed Cope with an oil painting of Marsh done from a live sitting, almost all of our photographs have a weird unaccountable blue glow around Professor Cope's skull. Then while we were photographing Pro- fessor Ostrom in the main hall of the museum, a light next to Cope's bone box exploded into flames. Cope, however, seemed to be smiling through it all. COPE RECEIVES HIS DEATH WISH A year after I introduced Professor Cope to Dr. Bob Bakker, I was back at the same restaurant with Bob when he mentioned some of his new research. H--- sapiens, he said, one of the best-known primates, quite surprisingly still lacked a type specimen. It seemed that Carolus L innaeus the father of modern taxonomy a permission slip like the one you fill out when you check out a library book. That done, the guard uncer- emoniously slid two small cardboard boxes across his desk and bid us farewell. The boxed professor didn't weigh very much. He was frail in life, and what was left of him now weighed no more than a few pounds. We whisked the celebrated scientist to our van, eager to make his acquaintance. We opened the flaps of the first box to find a card affirming that we were being introduced to specimen 4989, better known in life as Professor Edward Drinker Cope. Below the card lay a jumble of bones we took to be the professor's. The other box had a shipping label from Herbach and Rademan, a company that we later found out is still in business selling electrical parts. We pulled back the unsealed flaps of the cardboard box and found the skull of Professor Cope loosely wrapped in the want ads of an old Philadelphia Inquirer. It was disconcerting to see the great professor's illustrious career come to this, but he seemed to be smiling, as skeletons do. So Professor Edward Drinker Cope, one of the world's most celebrated bone hunters, veteran of the infamous Bone Wars, became our constant traveling companion for the next three years as we assembled objects for our photograph. Through our journeys we were laden with forty-two cases. All of it was pretty much replaceable, except for Ed. What would happen if we lost him? Or if he was stolen or kidnapped? Our next stop was Manhattan, den of thieves. From a phone booth on Interstate 95, I called magazine head- quarters to insure the artifacts we had just collected. Over the drone of cars whizzing by, I recited to com- pany lawyers the list of relics and their value. At the end of my list was our newly acquired specimen 4989, which didn't have a price-it hadn't occurred to me to ask the museum what Professor Cope was worth. To insure him legally, our lawyers advised, I simply had to put a value on the item. For a few awkward moments I thought about this. I remembered a junior high school chemistry class where the teacher said the market value of the elements in the human body was slightly over a dollar. But that was the entire body. These were just bones, calcium phosphate, whose price on the open market fluctuates more or less along with the price of fertilizer. What if, for some horrible reason, the boxes of bones, weighing about seven pounds (3 kg), were lost? I couldn't see myself shipping the museum a ten-pound (4.5 kg) bag of fertilizer with a note saying, "Sorry about Ed, keep the change." Even in his reduced state, he was certainly worth more than plant food. I thought about calling up the museum to see what they valued him at but thought better of it; I didn't want them to reconsider the loan. We decided to leave a price tag off the professor and not insure him. Even if his past handlers kept him in a cardboard box stuffed with old newspapers, to us he was priceless. But what about his security as we traveled? We decided that while Professor Cope remained in our care it was essential that he didn't leave our side. We found that the boxes fit nicely between the two front seats of the van, and by keep- ing him beside us we remembered to take them with us wherever we went. While we ate at restaurants he sat quietly in his boxes on a chair next to us. At the hotels at night, while we read books chronicling the professor's legendary exploits, he was tucked cozily between our beds on the night table, still smiling as if he was enjoying the ride. The question we asked each other when we left anywhere was "Do you have Ed?" BONE HUNTERS MEET THE BONES OF THE GREAT BONE HUNTER After several weeks, transporting the professor became second nature, like remembering to take the car keys. At a remote dig site in Utah, Jim Kirkland, paleontologist for Dinamation, mentioned that Professor Cope was one of his heroes. "Really," I said. "Would you like to meet him? He's in the van." 21 THE EARLY BONE HUNTERS ALL Prawie ftrisik Pow ی Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) Type Specimen for H--- sapiens Described by Robert T. Bakker. 1993

The story of Edward drinker copes skull


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