The rehabilitation of Sir Richard Owen

Abstract

The career of an unlikely antihero has been resuscitated over the past decade, just in time for the 150th anniversary of some of his greatest accomplishments-ideas and works that changed the face of biology. Sir Richard Owen (1804- 1892; Figure 1), scientific founder of the Natural History Museum, devoted opponent of materialistic transmutation and natural selection, and said to be the only man that Darwin ever hated, was almost lost to the history of science before his death, although in his time he was the most influential of British biologists. Owen gave us the name Dinosauria and dozens of others, and he established for Anglophonic biologists the classification of mammals, standardized the terminology of teeth and the names of the skull bones, and distinguished between homology and analogy. He was the first to describe the newly discovered pearly nautilus, a "living fossil," and he made as many contributions to the anatomy and relationships of extinct vertebrates as to living ones-approximately 800 papers, books, and monographs, spread over 60 years.