While in college in the summers of 1919 and 1920 Pope went to the New York Zoological Society's Tropical Research Station at Katabo Point British Guiana, maintained by William Beebe.
Starting in 1921, after graduating from the University of Virginia, he spent many years in China as part of the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History, accompanying Roy Chapman Andrews on the expedition to the Gobi Desert that first discovered fossilized dinosaur eggs.
[1] In China he gave scientific names to the Kuatun horned toad, Hyla sanchiangensis, Amolops chunganensis, Rana fukienensis, and others.
This distinction was given to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys...".
The other eighteen who were awarded this distinction were: Roy Chapman Andrews; Robert Bartlett; Frederick Russell Burnham; Richard E. Byrd; George Kruck Cherrie; James L. Clark; Merian C. Cooper; Lincoln Ellsworth; Louis Agassiz Fuertes; George Bird Grinnell; Charles A. Lindbergh; Donald B. MacMillan; George Palmer Putnam; Kermit Roosevelt; Carl Rungius; Stewart Edward White; Orville Wright.