Owen , Sir , Richard , 1804-1892 , Knight , naturalist

Born, Lancaster, 1804; educated, Lancaster Grammar School; enlisted as a midshipman in the Royal Navy; became interested in surgery; returned to Lancaster and became indentured to a local surgeon, 1820; became interested in anatomy; entered the University of Edinburgh medical school, 1824; privately attended the lectures of Dr John Barclay; moved to London and became apprentice to John Abernethy, surgeon and philosopher and President of the Royal College of Surgeons, 1825; member, Royal College of Surgeons, 1826; Assistant Curator, Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1827 and commenced work cataloguing the collection; set up a private practice in Lincoln's Inn Fields; Lecturer on comparative anatomy, St Bartholomew's Hospital, 1829; met Georges Cuvier in 1830 and attended the 1831 debates between Cuvier and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, Paris; worked in the dissecting rooms and public galleries of the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 1831; published anatomical work on the cephalopod Nautilus; started the Zoological Magazine, 1833; worked on the fossil vertebrates brought back by Darwin on the Beagle; Fellow of the Royal Society, 1834; Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, 1836-1856; gave his first series of Hunterian Lectures to the public, 1837; awarded the Wollaston gold medal by the Geological Society, 1838; helped found the Royal Microscopical Society, 1839; identified the extinct moa of New Zealand from a bone fragment, 1839; refused a knighthood, 1842; examination of reptile-like fossil bones found in southern England led him to identify "a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles" he named Dinosauria, 1842; developed his concept of homology and of a common structural plan for all vertebrates or 'archetype'; Joint Conservator of the Hunterian Museum with William Clift, 1842, and Conservator, 1849; elected to 'The Club', founded by Dr Johnson, 1845; member of the government commission for inquiring into the health of London, 1847, Smithfield and other meat markets, 1849; described the anatomy of the newly discovered (in 1847) species of ape, the gorilla, [1865]; engaged in a long running public debate with Thomas Henry Huxley on the evolution of humans from apes; member of the preliminary Committee of organisation for the Great Exhibition of 1851; Superintendent of the natural history collections at the British Museum, 1856; began researches on the collections, publishing many papers on specimens; prosector for the London Zoo, dissecting and preserving any zoo animals that died in captivity; taught natural history to Queen Victoria's children, 1860; reported on the first specimen of an unusual Jurassic bird fossil from Germany, Archaeopteryx lithographica, 1863; lectured on fossils at the Museum of Practical Geology; Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, 1859-1861; taxonomic work included a number of important discoveries as he named and described a vast number of living and fossil vertebrates; campaigned to make the natural history departments of the British Museum into a separate museum, leading to the construction of a new building in South Kensington to house the new British Museum (Natural History), opened in 1881; [now the Natural History Museum;] knighted, 1884; died, Richmond, 1892.
Publications include: Memoir on the pearly nautilus (1832); The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle pt. 1. Fossil Mammalia: by Richard Owen (Smith, Elder & Co, London, 1840); Odontography 2 vol (London, 1840-45); Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Invertebrate Animals, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, in 1843 ... From notes taken by W. W. Cooper (London, 1843-46); Report on the State of Lancaster (W. Clowes & Sons, London, 1845); A History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds (London, 1846); On the archetype and homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London, 1848); A History of British Fossil Reptiles (Cassell & Co, London, 1849-84); Descriptive catalogue of the Osteological Series contained in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (London, 1853); On the classification and geographical distribution of the Mammalia (London, 1859); Palæontology, or a systematic summary of Extinct Animals and their geological relations (Edinburgh, 1860); Monograph of the Fossil Reptilia of the cretaceous and Purbeck Strata (1860); Memoir on the Megatherium; or, Giant Ground-Sloth of America (London, 1861); Description of the skeleton of an extinct gigantic Sloth, Mylodon Robustus (London, 1862); Inaugural Address .. on the opening of the New Philosophical Hall at Leeds (Leeds, 1862); On the extent and aims of a National Museum of Natural History (London, 1862); Memoir on the Gorilla (London, 1865); On the Anatomy of Vertebrates 3 vol (Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1866-68); Descriptive and illustrated catalogue of the Fossil Reptilia of South Africa in the collection of the British Museum (London, 1876); Researches on the fossil remains of the Extinct Mammals of Australia; with a notice of the extinct Marsupials of England 2 vol (London, 1877); Memoirs of the extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand (London, 1879); International Medical Congress. On the scientific status of medicine (J W Kolckmann, London, 1881); Experimental Physiology, its benefits to mankind (Longmans & Co, London, 1882).