Owen, Richard
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Founded London Natural History Museum.
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 20th July 1804, in Lancaster, England.
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 18th December 1892, in Richmond, London, England. Aged 88.
DISCIPLINE: Comparative anatomy, geology.
FIELD: Vertebrate palaeontology.
EDUCATION: Lancaster Grammar School
MAJOR WORK:
LIFE AND TIMES: In 1828, Owen took a job as lecturer in comparative anatomy at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and started to work with the Zoological Society, dissecting animals that had died at the zoo. The famous Paris zoologist and palaeontologist, Cuvier*, visited in 1830 and invited Owen to come back with him to the Paris Jardin des Plantes. Owen admired the bone collection and Cuvier’s system of classification that set exhibits in the context of natural history so, when he came home, he wrote a detailed report.
During the early part of his career, Owen concentrated on extensive anatomical work, which made him one of the leading zoologists in the area of the identification of animals. The subject formed the content of many of his papers at the time (the most notable being concerned with the Pearly Nautilus in 1832). He also wrote about marsupials, the birds of New Zealand, the dodo of Mauritius, the Archaeopteryx discovered in Bavaria and British fossil vertebrates. Over the course of his life, Owen published six hundred papers, mainly on fossil invertebrates and vertebrates.
In 1834, Owen was given the Chair of Comparative Anatomy just been established at St Bartholemew’s and, two years later, became the first Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, allowing his medical practice to lapse. His lectures were popular and drew large audiences made up of students, members of the College and Council and other important visitors, including Carlyle*, Samuel Wilberforce*, Peel* and Prince Albert. Around 1835/6, he became involved in the affairs of the British Museum and was a member of the management Select Committee.
Various major publications appeared over the next years. Throughout the 1840’s he published a number of major books including‘British Fossil Mammals and Birds’, 1846; ‘On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton,’ 1848; ‘On the Nature of Limbs’, 1849; ‘A History of British Fossil Reptiles’, 1849-84; and an influential essay on ‘Parthenogenesis’.
In 1845, Owen began trying to set up a national museum of comparative anatomy, combining the fossil collection of the British Museum with the Hunterian Museum’s bone collection. Owen had a great year in 1851, when he delivered his famous lecture on the Megatherium at the Croonian Lecture, he was appointed to a jury for the Crystal Palace Exhibition and was awarded the Copley medal by the British Royal Society. During 1853, he spent his time constructing prehistoric monsters for the Crystal Palace garden and he presided at the dinner held inside the skeleton of an Iguanodon.
In 1856, he became the first superintendent of the Natural History Departments of the British Museum and he started a campaign to remove the natural history collections of the British Museum to a new dedicated museum. Throughout his campaign, between 1858 and 1862, he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology and Comparative Anatomy at the Royal Institution. The campaign bore fruit and, after approval to move the natural history collections to South Kensington was given in 1861, the collection was eventually moved between 1880 and 1883. Owen became the first Director of the Natural History Museum in 1881.
From the time of his appointment at the British Museum, Owen concentrated on the field of palaeontology, in which he had already made his reputation, with the reconstruction and naming of famous fossils including the giant moa bird, Dinornis, the dinosaur, Iguanodon and the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx. It was Owen in fact who coined the term ‘dinosaur’, Greek for ‘terrible lizard’.
During the next fifteen or so years, Owen produced some significant works including ‘On the Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates’, in three volumes, 1866-68; and ‘On Longevity’, 1872, an attack on biblical literalism. Then, in 1877, his ‘Researches on the Fossil Remains of the Extinct Mammals of Australia and Memoirs on the Extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand’ was published, followed by ‘Experimental Physiology; its Benefits to Mankind’, in 1882.
Owen’s stance on evolution has remained obscure but, as in the theory of ‘the natural origin of species’, he believed that individual species came into being through the accomplishment of a pre-ordained plan, but then they had adapted naturally to the changing circumstances of their environment. In February 1849, during a speech to the Royal Institution, Owen made it known that he took the same stance on human evolution. He did not deny the presence of a divine hand, which he saw as being evident in the unity of nature. The transmutation of species was an evolutionary theory against which Owen was outspoken. From this stance has grown the mistaken idea that he opposed Charles Darwin’s* ideas.
Owen studied the natural emergence and disappearance of different species. He suggested that the large extinct mammals and birds of South America, Australia and New Zealand had not adapted into the smaller ones of today, but that similar, smaller, species existed in certain locations. The smaller creatures, he claimed, were no more recent than the larger ones, the two forms of animal having lived side by side. The fact that one of two similar species had been able to survive proved, for Owen, that there had been no universal deluge. His view was that the smaller the animal, the more likely it was to survive, that greater bulk made it more likely that a variety or species would die out.
Owen supported the ideas of evolution that Darwin and Wallace* proposed at the Linnaeum Society in 1858. He was one of the few naturalists who made his contemporaries aware of the importance of the work of Darwin and Wallace, prior to publication of Darwin’s ‘Origin’. Despite this, he still wrote a hostile review of it for the ‘Edinburgh Review’ in 1860.
ASSESSMENT: In the course of his career across nearly sixty years, Owen came to represent ‘natural history’ in the public mind.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: His work related to that of Hutton* and Buckland*.
Queen Victoria* gave him a residence.
He met Asa Gray*
He was a close friend of Murchison*
ONELINER: Richard Owen, founder of London Natural Hstory Museum
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Rupke, Nicolaas A., Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1994.
Extra Resources:
Atlas Obscura: How New Yorkers Became Convinced That Dinosaur Bones Were Buried in Central Park
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-new-yorkers-became-convinced-that-dinosaur-bones-were-buried-in-central-park
BBC profile: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-31623397
UC Profile: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/owen.html
Strange Science:http://www.strangescience.net/owen.htm
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Richard and Catherine Parrin Owen.
SIBLINGS: Maria and four others.
SPOUSE: Caroline Clift, married 1835.
CHILDREN: William, born 1837.