Erasmus Coot was an anthropomorphic coot.
Description[]
Erasmus Coot was, according to one account, the brother of Cornelius Coot. There apparently exists a stone statue of Erasmus, depicting him leaning on a shotgun as if it were a walking stick — a pose also used in the mid-1950's by Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck when carving a snow statue of Cornelius Coot. Erasmus must have had at least one child, as Scrooge's maternal grandfather Duckson O'Drake was descended from him in some fashion.
Behind the scenes[]
Erasmus Coot is featured in Johannes A. Grote's Duck Family Tree.
His existence is the result of a translation mix-up in the German versions of Carl Barks's stories featuring Cornelius Coot: while most call him “Emil Erpel”, that of The Snowman Contest instead referred to him as “Erasmus Erpel”. Working off these inconsistent translations, Grote thus came to the curious conclusion that Erasmus and Emil were separate characters, whose similar names and appearances led him to consider brothers. The image of Erasmus seen in the tree is thus a version of Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck's snow statue of Cornelius in the Barks story, recolored gray to make it appear as though it is a stone statue.