34 Facts About Richard Owen

Sir Richard Owen was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist.

Richard Owen produced a vast array of scientific work, but is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria.

An outspoken critic of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Richard Owen agreed with Darwin that evolution occurred, but thought it was more complex than outlined in Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Richard Owen campaigned for the natural specimens in the British Museum to be given a new home.

Bill Bryson argues that, "by making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Richard Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for".

Richard Owen became a surgeon's apprentice in 1820 and was appointed to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1826.

In 1836, Richard Owen was appointed Hunterian professor at the Royal College, and in 1849, he succeeded William Clift as conservator of the Hunterian Museum.

Richard Owen held the latter office until 1856, when he became superintendent of the natural history department of the British Museum.

Richard Owen then devoted much of his energies to a great scheme for a National Museum of Natural History, which eventually resulted in the removal of the natural history collections of the British Museum to a new building at South Kensington: the British Museum.

Richard Owen retained office until the completion of this work, in December 1883, when he was made a knight of the Order of the Bath.

Richard Owen always tended to support orthodox men of science and the status quo.

Richard Owen died at home on 15 December 1892 and is buried in the churchyard at St Andrew's Church, Ham near Richmond, Surrey.

Richard Owen was allowed to examine all animals that died in London Zoo's gardens and, when the Zoo began to publish scientific proceedings, in 1831, he was the most prolific contributor of anatomical papers.

Richard Owen envisioned a resemblance of the animal to the living arthropod Limulus.

Richard Owen famously hosted a dinner for 21 prominent men of science inside the hollow concrete Iguanodon on New Year's Eve 1853.

However, in 1849, a few years before his death in 1852, Gideon Mantell had realised that Iguanodon, of which he was the discoverer, was not a heavy, pachyderm-like animal, as Richard Owen was proposing, but had slender forelimbs.

Richard Owen was granted right of first refusal on any freshly dead animal at the London Zoo.

Richard Owen described Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, and extinct species kangaroos and wombats of gigantic size.

Sometime during the 1840s Richard Owen came to the conclusion that species arise as the result of some sort of evolutionary process.

Richard Owen believed that there was a total of six possible mechanisms: Parthenogenesis, prolonged development, premature birth, congenital malformations, Lamarckian atrophy, Lamarckian hypertrophy and transmutation, of which he thought transmutation was the least likely.

The historian of science Evelleen Richards has argued that Owen was likely sympathetic to developmental theories of evolution, but backed away from publicly proclaiming them after the critical reaction that had greeted the anonymously published evolutionary book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844.

Richard Owen had been criticized for his own evolutionary remarks in his Nature of the Limbs in 1849.

Richard Owen demonstrated fossil evidence of an evolutionary sequence of horses, as supporting his idea of development from archetypes in "ordained continuous becoming" and, in 1854, gave a British Association talk on the impossibility of bestial apes, such as the recently discovered gorilla, standing erect and being transmuted into men, but Richard Owen did not rule out the possibility that humans had evolved from other extinct animals by evolutionary mechanisms other than transmutation.

Richard Owen tried to smear Huxley, by portraying him as an "advocate of man's origins from a transmuted ape" and one of his contributions to the Athenaeum was titled "Ape-origin of man as tested by the brain".

Richard Owen countered Huxley by saying the brains of all human races were really of similar size and intellectual ability, and that the fact that humans had brains that were twice the size of large apes like male gorillas, even though humans had much smaller bodies, made humans distinguishable.

Richard Owen was the first director in Natural History Museum in London and his statue was in the main hall there until 2009, when it was replaced with a statue of Darwin.

Richard Owen has been described by some as a malicious, dishonest and hateful individual.

Richard Owen famously credited himself and Georges Cuvier with the discovery of the Iguanodon, completely excluding any credit for the original discoverer of the dinosaur, Gideon Mantell.

Richard Owen was finally dismissed from the Royal Society's Zoological Council for plagiarism.

Richard Owen resorted to the same subterfuge he used against Mantell, writing another anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860.

Richard Owen did praise the Origin's description of Darwin's work on insect behavior and pigeon breeding as "real gems".

Richard Owen was a party to the threat to end government funding of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew botanical collection, orchestrated by Acton Smee Ayrton:.

Richard Owen's lost scientific standing was not due solely to his underhanded dealings with colleagues; it was due to serious errors of scientific judgement that were discovered and publicized.

Richard Owen continued working after his official retirement at the age of 79, but he never recovered the good opinions he had garnered in his younger days.