Rocky Road: Sir Richard Owen

Sir Richard Owen

From Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy

Sir Richard Owen's boyhood tutor once described him as "lazy and impudent" and predicted he would "come to a bad end." He obviously outgrew his laziness, but "impudent" was likely correct. According to some accounts, when his contemporaries described him as the English Cuvier, Owen was not exactly flattered; he considered himself superior to Cuvier. Owen combined exceptional brilliance with an exceptionally difficult temperament. On one occasion he suggested — partly because the institution was headed by an intellectual adversary — that the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew undertake experiments in "turning urban sewage into fodder."

Owen started out as a physician and studied at London's Royal College of Surgeons. Early on, he impressed his anatomy teacher, who offered him a position at the Hunterian Museum. Owen began teaching at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1836. For 20 years he delivered three lectures a week without ever repeating a lecture. He continued publishing until the age of 85, writing a mind-boggling total of more than 600 scientific papers. Owen's expertise in vertebrate paleontology knew no peers (except Cuvier himself). He was the person to see for interpretations of puzzling fossils. By examining a single femur fragment of a New Zealand Moa, for instance, Owen deduced that it belonged to a giant flightless bird, and later discoveries proved him right. (He was stingy in acknowledging, however, that the individual who brought him the bone fragment had suggested the same thing, and he was initially skeptical.)

His exceptional ability enabled Owen to expose the occasional fraud, such as Albert Koch's "sea monster" really pieced together from fossil whales. Yet he had his own blunders. In 1868, evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley pointed out a series of embarrassing errors Owen had made in his description of Archaeopteryx, and used Owen's mistakes to overthrow his interpretation that the fossil belong to a bird, not a transitional form between birds and reptiles.

Owen's best known contribution to science, however, was likely his combination of two Greek words: deinos ("terrible") and sauros ("lizard") in the early 1840s. Politically, it was a brilliant move. For the past two decades, the name associated with the great reptiles had been Gideon Mantell's. Now the name was Owen's, even though he had not really discovered anything new. In fact, Owen's famous dinosaur classification linked two lineages of reptiles that were later argued to have no important relation to each other: saurischians and ornithischians.

Mantell, the original discoverer of the Iguanodon dinosaur, was a long-suffering target of Owen's. Though his own work with Iguanodon was based on Mantell's, Owen refused to acknowledge as much, instead implying in his publications on the fossil that Mantell was incompetent. Owen did the same thing with another fossil find. In the early 19th century Mantell purchased some delicate fossil bones from quarry workers and described the bones as avian. Owen initially supported the interpretation, then later identified them — accurately but very publicly — as pterodactylian, without any advance warning to Mantell. After Mantell's death — even after a portion of Mantell's badly injured spine was in Owen's museum to exhibit "the severest degree of deformity" — local geologists universally attributed an anonymous obituary deriding Mantell to Owen.

Owen cared no more for evolutionists than he did for Mantell. Impressed by how well-designed organisms were for their environments, Owen believed that they changed over time, but did not believe in the evolutionary theories of his day — Lamarck's transmutation or Darwin's natural selection. Ironically, Owen and Charles Darwin had been friends while young, and in examining South American fossils at the Hunterian Museum, Darwin accumulated evidence for his theory of natural selection. Likewise, Owen developed a hypotheses of archetypes, or homologies, in which animals were all variations on an Ideal Type. In finding these similarities, he unwittingly found evidence for evolution. Yet instead of accepting evolution, Owen maintained that the dominant life forms in earth's history had arisen through special creation, without ancestors. When depicting dominant life forms of the Mesozoic, he used distinctly mammalian articulations, to demonstrate their closer affinity with the dominant life forms of the Age of Mammals rather than the lowly reptiles of today. The mammalian articulation was eventually overthrown by both Mantell and Louis Dollo, who found more extensive Iguanodon fossils.

A friend of the British royal family (when it was more powerful than it is today), Owen got to oversee the construction of prehistoric life at Crystal Palace Park, pass his final days in a lodge given to him by Queen Victoria, and party in the belly of a reconstructed Iguanodon. By lobbying the royal family, he played a crucial role in the establishment of the British Museum (Natural History) — now known as the Natural History Museum of London — in South Kensington.

Owen outlived most of his colleagues, including his nemesis Darwin. But longevity has its drawbacks; Owen also outlived his wife by almost 20 years and his only son, who committed suicide. And his final years saw growing acceptance of Darwin's theory. Sir William Flower, who succeeded Owen as director of the Natural History Museum, was an ardent evolutionist; Charles Darwin was commemorated with a statue in the museum 11 years before Owen received a similar honor. After his death, an Oxford professor described Owen in terms even less flattering than his boyhood tutor, namely as "a damned liar. He lied for God and for malice."

For more information:
The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould
The Dragon Seekers by Christopher McGowan
Terrible Lizard by Deborah Cadbury
Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs by Dennis R. Dean
Taking Wing by Pat Shipman
Nature's Treasurehouse by John Thackray and Bob Press
The Meaning of Fossils by Martin J.S. Rudwick
The Reign of the Dinosaurs by Jean-Guy Michard
Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
The Dinosaur Papers edited by Weishampel and White
Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place by Janet Browne
To See the Fellows Fight by John Thackray
Moa by Richard Wolfe
Dry Store Room No. 1 by Richard Fortey
Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos
Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick
Nature's Government by Richard Drayton
Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
The Great Naturalists edited by Robert Huxley
The Pterosaurs from Deep Time by David Unwin
From Private to Public edited by Marco Beretta
Charles Darwin, Geologist by Sandra Herbert
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Great Feuds in Science by Hal Hellman
Evolution by Linda Gamlin
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer