Case, was a prominent American paleontologist in the second generation that succeeded Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
[4] Case began by sorting out some of the taxonomic synonymies and other puzzles created by the "Bone Wars" of the two giants of the age of dinosaur-hunting in the American West, in a series of three monographs dealing with the vertebrates of the Permian or Permo-Carboniferous of North America.
He then turned to his lifelong interest, filling in the fossil record of Permian and Carboniferous vertebrates from the Red Beds of Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
He also made extensive Jurassic collections at Como Bluff, Wyoming, in the Cretaceous deposits in Kansas, and Cenozoic formations of the Green River Basin and the Badlands of South Dakota.
[citation needed] The Ermine Cowles Case Memorial Lecture is given there annually.