 Alfred died December 4 , 1875 , and left Edward with an inheritance of nearly a quarter of a million dollars . Alfred 's 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 . Cope 's expeditions took him across Kansas , Colorado , New Mexico , Wyoming , and Montana . His 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 , Marsh questioned their dating . 
