Purpose

In this section of the Hooper Museum I will examine several papers which defend Cope’s rule and several which dismiss it. Those in support of Cope’s claim are a study of size increase and its effects on longevity in Jurassic bivalves and ammonites (Hallam, 1975) and a more recent study which looked at trends in characteristic traits for vertebrates, invertebrates and plants (Kingsolver and Pfennig, 2004, Hone and Benton, 2005). Several papers have also been written in

opposition to Cope’s Rule which include a study performed on planktonic Foraminifera which takes into account size-related biases (Arnold et al., 1995) as well as a study on Cretaceous molluscs which compares net body size increase to increases in size range among species and decreases in net body size (Jablonski, 1997).