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OWEN, RICHARD (b. Lancaster, England, 20 July
1804; d. Richmond Park, London, England,
18 December 1892), comparative anatomy, vertebrate
paleontology, geology.
in 1871 work was begun on the new Natural History
Museum in South Kensington, with the galleries laid
out after the design Owen had submitted in 1859.
Owen continued as superintendent of the Natural
History Museum until after it was fully installed in the
new building. He retired in 1884 and was then made
K.C.B. After leaving the Royal College of Surgeons,
Owen was free to accept the Fullerian lectureship in
physiology at the Royal Institution. He also lectured
at the Royal School of Mines and on many natural
history topics in London and throughout Great
Britain. During his career he received most major
awards in his fields, including both the Royal and
Copley medals from the Royal Society; he was also a
member of many British and foreign scientific societies.
He served on several royal commissions that dealt with
aspects of public health and was president of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science in
1858. After a lengthy decline in his health, he died on
18 December 1892 at Sheen Lodge (in Richmond
Park), the use of which Queen Victoria had granted
him in 1851.
Unfortunately Owen is principally remembered as
T. H. Huxley's antagonist at the 1860 meeting of the
British Association and in the ensuing debates over
Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This view neglects
his authorship of massive quantities of detailed
monographs and papers, which made known many
new organisms (both recent and fossil), helped to
delineate several natural groups, and laid the bases for
much later work by many investigators. The attention
of the scientific community was first focused on Owen
in 1832 when he published Memoir on the Pearly
Nautilus (Nautilus Pompilius, Linn.), which was based
on a single specimen of this delicate organism that had
previously been known only by its shell. In this superb
piece of descriptive anatomy he also modified Cuvier's
Cephalopoda and proposed two orders that were considered
valid until 1894. He reviewed the Cephalopoda
in an 1836 article for Robert Todd's Cyclopaedia of
Anatomy and Physiology. Among many other works
on invertebrates, Owen in 1835 described the parasite
that causes trichinosis.
In 1828 Owen began dissecting the animals that died
in the gardens of the Zoological Society of London
and soon after helped to organize the evening scientific
meetings, the publication of which became Proceedings
of the Zoological Society of London. Of all the exotic
forms to which he thus had access probably none
interested him more than the monotremes and
marsupials. Before his work the means of generation
and of feeding the young of these groups was very
much a matter for discussion. Through specimens
from the Zoological Society and the many specimens
collected for him in Australia and New Zealand, Owen
was able to establish in a series of papers both the
mammalian nature and the egg-laying mode of
reproduction of the monotremes. Similarly he was able
to present details of the reproductive processes of the
marsupials. This work was brought together in the
articles “Monotremes” and “Marsupials” in Todd's
Cyclopaedia. Later in his career he was sent
and described numerous fossil monotremes and
marsupials, which further supported his argument
that these forms compose two distinct groups within
the Mammalia and that they have long been geographically
isolated.
Primates in general and anthropoid apes in
particular were of early and lasting interest to Owen,
especially in their relation to man. He published many
accounts of the anatomy of various primates from the
aye-aye to the gorilla. In 1839 Owen began a series,
“Contributions to the Natural History of the
Anthropoid Apes,” which at first was concerned with
the osteology of the orangutans but was broadened to
include the other apes as specimens became available,
often being sent to him by African explorers. Owen
separated man from the anthropoid apes into a
separate subclass of Mammalia, the Archencephala,
primarily on the basis of several supposed differences
in the gross structure of their brains.
Lyell introduced Owen to Charles Darwin in
October 1836, and thus began a long friendship. The
following year Darwin turned over to Owen, for
description, his South American fossils. Up to this
time Owen had not published on any fossils but did
have a broad knowledge of the anatomy, especially
the osteology, of recent vertebrates. He described
Darwin's Toxodon platensis (1837), and his description
of Darwin's fossils from South America was published
as the first volume of The Zoology of the Voyage of
H.M.S. “Beagle” (1840). The teeth of some of these
fossils intrigued Owen and led him into a major study
of the structure of teeth. He addressed a report to the
British Association in 1838, which served as the
nucleus of his Odontography (1840-1845) and his
article, “Odontology,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1858). This work on teeth contained a great deal
of new information and presented a uniform nomenclature
for the teeth and their parts that was of
considerable service to zoologists.
In addition to the monographs on comparative
anatomy, Owen published several general works.
Certain of his Hunterian lectures were published as
separate volumes: on invertebrates (1843), on fishes
(1844, 1846), and again on invertebrates (1855).
Between 1866 and 1868 Owen published the massive
On the Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates, the