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Cope's Rule revisited: a monkey Rensch in the works
Letters in the latest issue of _Science_ (October 2, 1998: 50-51) point out
not only that Cope's Rule is reasonably well documented in a number of groups
(by John Alroy at the Smithsonian, among others), but also that Cope himself
was not responsible for it and wrote rather little on body size increase over
time. Rather, the term "Cope's Rule" was coined by a naturalist named B.
Rensch in 1948 in referring to the work of Cope and others on progressive size
increase in phyletic lineages. This eponym was copied and propagated through
the scientific literature by subsequent workers, and now everyone calls it
that.