Richard Owen

Richard Owen (1804-1892), English biologist, was born at Lancaster on the July 10th 1804, and received his early education at the grammar school of that town. In 1820, he was apprenticed to a local surgeon and apothecary, and in 1824 he enrolled as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh. He left the university the following year, completing his medical course in St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, where he came under the influence of the eminent surgeon, John Abernethy. He developed a deep interest in anatomy, and when he was offered the position of assistant to William Clift, conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, this gave him the opportunity to devote himself to purely scientific research. He prepared a series of catalogues of the Hunterian collection in the Royal College of Surgeons; and in the course of this he acquired a detailed knowledge of comparative anatomy which was to facilitate his research on extinct animals.

In 1836 he was appointed Hunterian professor in the Royal College of Surgeons, and in 1849 he succeeded Clift as conservator. In 1856, he became superintendent of the natural history department of the British Museum. He then devoted much of his energies to a 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 (Natural History). In 1884, when he received the distinction of K.C.B., and thenceforward lived quietly in retirement at Sheen Lodge, Richmond Park, until his death on the 18th of December 1892.

Comparative Anatomy

While cataloguing the Hunterian collection, Owen took every opportunity of dissecting fresh subjects, including the animals which died in the Zoological Society's gardens; when that society began to publish scientific proceedings in 1831, he was a voluminous contributor of anatomical papers. His first notable publication was a Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (London, 1832), and he continued to make important contributions to comparative anatomy and zoology for over fifty years.

In the sponges, he was the first to describe the "Venus's flower basket" or Euplectella (1841, 1857). Among Entozoa, his most noteworthy discovery was that of Trichina spiralis (1835), the parasite infesting the muscles of man in the disease trichinosis. Among Mollusca, he not only described the pearly nautilus, but also Spirula (1850) and other Cephalopoda, both living and extinct; and he proposed the universally-accepted subdivision of this class into the two orders of Dibranchiata and Tetrabranchiata (1832).

Owen's descriptions of the vertebrates were even more numerous and extensive. He devoted particular attention to extinct groups, and followed Cuvier as a pioneer in vertebrate palaeontology. Early in his career he made exhaustive studies of teeth, and described the remarkably complex structure of the teeth of the extinct animals which he named Labyrinthodonts. His memoir on the African mud-fish, which he named Protopterus, laid the foundations for the recognition of the Dipnoi by Johannes Muller. He also pointed out later the serial connexion between the teleostean and ganoid fishes, grouping them in one sub-class, the Teleostomi. Most of his work on reptiles related to the skeletons of extinct forms, and his chief memoirs on British specimens were reprinted in a connected series in his History of British Fossil Reptiles (4 vols., London, 1849-1884). He published the first important general account of the great group of Mesozoic land-reptiles, to which he gave the now familiar name of Dinosauria. He also first recognized the curious early Mesozoic land-reptiles, with affinities both to amphibians and mammals, which he termed Anomodontia. Most of these were obtained from South Africa, beginning in 1845 (Dicynodon), and eventually furnished materials for his Catalogue of the Fossil Reptilia of South Africa in 1876. His writings on birds included a classical memoir on the Apteryx (1840-1846), a long series of papers on the extinct Dinornithidae of New Zealand, and other memoirs on Aptornis, Notornis, the dodo, and the great auk. His monograph on Archaeopteryx (1863), the long-tailed, toothed bird from the Bavarian lithographic stone, was also an epoch-making work.

With regard to living mammals, Owen was also the first to recognize and name the two natural groups of typical Ungulata, the odd-toed (Perissodactyla) and the even-toed (Artiodactyla), while describing some fossil remains in 1848. Most of his writings on mammals, however, deal with extinct forms, to which his attention was directed by the fossils collected by Charles Darwin in South America. loxodon, from the pampas, was then described, and gave the earliest clear evidence of an 'extinct generalized hoof animal, a "pachyderm with affinities to the Rodentia, Edentata, and Herbivorous Cetacea."

Owen's interest in South American extinct mammals then led to the recognition of the giant armadillo, which he named Glyptodon (1839), and to memoirs on the giant ground-sloths, Mylodon (1842) and Megatherium (1860), besides other important contributions. At the same time, Sir Thomas Mitchell's discovery of fossil bones in New South Wales provided material for a series of papers on the extinct mammals of Australia, which were eventually reprinted in book-form in 1877. He discovered Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, besides extinct kangaroos and wombats of gigantic size.

While occupied with so much material from abroad, Owen was also busily collecting facts for an exhaustive work on similar fossils from the British Isles, and in 1844-1846 he published his History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds, which was followed by many later memoirs, notably his Monograph of the Fossil Mammalia of the Mesozoic Formations (Palaeont. Soc., 1871). One of his last publications was a little work entitled Antiquity of Man as deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton during Excavations of the Docks at Tilbury (London, 1884).

Owen was a pioneer in concise anatomical nomenclature; and, so far at least as the vertebrate skeleton is concerned, his terms were based on a carefully reasoned scheme, which distinguished between the phenomena of "analogy" and "homology." Owen's theory of the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848), subsequently illustrated also by his On the Nature of Limbs (1849), regarded the vertebrate frame as consisting of a series of fundamentally identical segments, each modified according to its position and functions.

Much of this was fanciful, and inconsistent with the facts of embryology, which Owen systematically ignored. On the deeper problems of biological philosophy he made scarcely any contributions. His generalities rarely extended beyond strict comparative anatomy, the phenomena of adaptation to function, and the facts of geographical or geological distribution. His lecture on "virgin reproduction" or parthenogenesis, however, published in 1849, contained the essence of the theory of the germ-plasm elaborated later by August Weismann; and he made some vague statements concerning the geological succession of genera and species of animals and their possible derivation one from another. He referred especially to the changes exhibited by the successive forerunners of the crocodiles (1884) and horses (1868); but it has never become clear how much of the doctrine of organic evolution he accepted. He contented himself with the bare remark that "the inductive demonstration of the nature and mode of operation" of the laws governing life would "henceforth be the great aim of the philosophical naturalist."

References

• Based on text imported from Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911