The Dastardly Doings of the Palaeolographical Professor

n                          You might imagine that RichardnOwen would have been one of history’s Good Guys – he had the advantage of beingnborn in Lancashire, which automatically blessed him with one of life’s greatestnbenefits, and in later life he championed the opening of the Natural HistorynMuseum at Kensington to the general public, when the general consensus of thenscientific community was that entry to museums should be solely reserved fornspecialist scholars. 

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nWhen, as a teenager, he was training as an anatomist innLancaster, he started a collection of mammal skulls – dogs, deer, mice, catsnand so on – and when he was present at the post mortem of a black prisoner whonhad died in Lancaster Gaol, he determined to procure the dead man’s skull tonadd to his collection. Armed with a stout brown paper sack and swathed in anheavy black cloak, he returned to the dissection room in Hadrian’s Tower atnLancaster Castle after dark, got the keys and a lantern from the turnkey andnlocked himself in, using the instruments in the room to detach the head. Hidingnhis grisly trophy in the sack beneath the folds of his cloak, he tipped thenwink to the turnkey and made his way out of the prison and into the night. 

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nNow,nat the bottom of the hill below the castle, there was a cottage that had oncenbelonged to a former slaver, who had died in a bar fight, and where his widownand daughter still lived. That night, by the light of the fire, they werentelling tales of the slave trade, when suddenly there was a thump at the door,nwhich burst open and there, in the glow of the firelight, they saw the whitesnof a black man’s eyes staring up at them. They screamed and tried to run, whenna man cloaked in black erupted into the room, snatched up the black man’s headnand disappeared into the dark. The Devil, it seemed, was abroad in Lancasternthat night and had come for his own. In reality, Owen had slipped on the slicknice on the cobbles and dropped his prize, which had rolled down the hill and innthrough the cottage door. Owen ran after it, grabbed it from the floor andndeparted as quickly as he had arrived, running for home as fast as his legsnwould bear him. 

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nOwen went on to study medicine at Edinburgh and London, but hisnwork at the Royal College of Surgeons confirmed his interest in scientificnresearch and he went on to become Professor at the Hunterian museum. Henpublished numerous academic studies on comparative anatomy and built anformidable reputation throughout Europe as an expert on palaeontology andnfossil identification. His first published work, Memoir of the PearlynNautilus (1832), was an instant classic, and over the next fifty years henwent on to make enormous contributions to all areas of anatomy andnpalaeontology. He was the automatic choice to study the fossils brought backnfrom South America by Charles Darwin on The Beagle in 1836, and it wasnOwen’s identification of the mammals as rodents and sloths related to existingnsmaller species still found on the pampas that lead Darwin to re-evaluate hisnearlier speculations that they were related to the larger African mammals, annimportant step in his formulation of the theory of evolution by naturalnselection. 

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nOne of Owen’s odder projects was as advisor on the construction ofnthe model dinosaurs (a word first coined by Owen) for the Great Exhibition ofn1851 (better known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition). In collaboration with thensculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, thirty-three life-size dinosaurs werenproduced and were moved to Sydenham when the Crystal Palace was moved there,nOwen famously hosting a dinner party for twenty-one distinguished guests insidenthe unfinished model of the iguanodon on New Year’s Eve 1853.

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n The figures werenbuilt from concrete and steel and fell into great disrepair over the yearsnuntil they were restored, starting in the 1950s and given Grade 1 Listed Statusnin 2007, in spite of being now regarded as out of date and wildly inaccurate.nAll well and good then – Owen sounds like he really was one of the GoodnGuys. 

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nExcept – he wasn’t. 

nAs we have seen in his treatment of Gideon Mantell,nhe was not above claiming the credit for the work of others – he wrote that itnwas he and Cuvier who had discovered the iguanodon, rather than the real discoverer – Mantell. 

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nHe also identified thenhorny thumb of the iguanodon as a horn, and it was placed on the head of theniguanodon figures at Sydenham, as well as having the creatures depicted asnbulky quadrupeds rather than the more gracile bipeds they actually were (and asnwhich Mantell had identified them).   

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nInn1844, Owen presented a paper to the Royal Society on fossil belemnites fornwhich he was presented with the Society’s Gold Medal in 1846, but he forgot tonmention the work of an amateur biologist, Joseph Channing Pearce, who hadndiscovered the belemnite (a type of Mesozoic marine cephalopod) in 1842, andnhad presented his own paper at a meeting of the Society at which Owen had beennpresent. In the scandal that followed, Owen was voted off the councils of thenRoyal Society and the Zoological Society, but his plagiarism didn’t stop there.nHe used illustrations from Mantell’s works and passed them off as his own, andnonly grudgingly apologised when he was found out. 

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nOwen was initially on goodnterms with Charles Darwin but their relationship soured over the years and Owennwas the only person whom Darwin was known to hate. In a repeat of his ‘anonymous’nmemoir of Mantell, Owen published an ‘anonymous’ review of Darwin’s On thenOrigin of Species (1859) in the Edinburgh Review (1860) which was highlyncritical of the book and the theory, but fulsome in its praise for ProfessornOwen and his works (from which he freely quotes), but adds with grudging praisenthat some of Mr Darwin’s observations on the varieties of pigeons are the ‘realngems’ of the opus. 

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nIn preview copies of The Origin, Owen had noted thatnDarwin’s use of the terms ‘I think’ and ‘I am convinced’ werenunscientific but urged him to retain them as they added to the overall charm ofnthe work, then, when the book was published, he vocally attacked Darwin fornusing such unscientific terms as ‘I think’ and ‘I am convinced’.nIn retaliation, Darwin wrote, “I used to be ashamed of hating him so much,nbut now I will carefully cherish my hatred & contempt to the last days ofnmy life.” In a letter to Asa Gray dated June 8^th 1860, he wrote “…nno one fact tells so strongly against Owen, considering his former position atnthe College of Surgeons, as that he has never reared one pupil or follower.”

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nIn 1857, Thomas Henry Huxleyn(popularly known as Darwin’s Bulldog) was leafing through Churchill’snMedical Dictionary when he noticed that a certain Richard Owen was listednas Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Government School ofnMines, which was something of a surprise to him, as that was a position he heldnhimself. He asked the editor of Churchill’s how such a mistake couldnpossibly have been made, and was told that the information had come directlynfrom Professor Owen himself. 

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nHis lugubrious appearance innlater life cannot have helped his cause – Bill Bryson calls his ‘a face tonfrighten babies’ – but he was almost universally disliked. His own son,nWilliam, who inexplicably committed suicide at the age of forty-nine, bemoanednhis father’s “… lamentable coldness of heart.”  One critic described him as “… a mostndeceitful and odious man,” and after his death, an Oxford professornremembered him as “…a damned liar. He lied for God and for malice.” Asnalways, make up your own minds but in my opinion Professor Sir Richard Owen FRSnKCB was an utter bounder and a frightful cad. So there.

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