OWEN, SIR RICHARD (1804-92) was born at Lancaster. He was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary and studied medicine at Edinburgh University and St Bartholomew's Hospital. The eminent surgeon John Abernethy advised him to accept the position of assistant conservator in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. There he made catalogues of the Hunterian collection; in 1836 he was appointed Hunterian professor and in 1849 conservator. He was appointed in 1856 superintendent of the natural history department of the British Museum, and his scheme of a national museum of natural history resulted in the removal of the collections to South Kensington. He retired in 1884 (K.C.B.).

In 1839 a fragment of fossil bone which had been brought from New Zealand by Dr James Rule (q.v.) was offered to Owen, who could not afford to pay for it out of his own pocket. He studied the fragment, however, and declared definitely that it was part of the skeleton of a wingless bird as large as the full-sized male ostrich. Further research established the existence of the moa (dinornis), upon which the reputation of Owen largely rests. In the proceedings of the Zoological Society for 1840 he described the bone, and the discovery was dealt with later in Dinornis, pts. 1-8 (1854-56) and Memoirs on the Extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand (1879). Owen made important contributions to many other branches of comparative anatomy and zoology. His life was written by his grandson, the Rev R. O. Owen, in 1894.

D.N.B.; N.Z. Jour. of Science, Sep 1885; Buick, Dinornis; Owen, op. cit.

Reference: Volume 2, page 74

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