The man who named the dinosaurs once dined inside one
On New Year's Eve 1853, anatomist Richard Owen hosted 21 leading scientists for dinner inside a hollow concrete Iguanodon. Owen had coined the word Dinosauria, founded London's Natural History Museum and could read a fossil like few others. He also spent years losing a bitter public fight over brains to Darwin's champion, Thomas Huxley.
Born in 1804, Owen apprenticed to a surgeon at 16 and rose through the Royal College of Surgeons, where he catalogued its Hunterian collection. He took every chance to dissect, winning first call on any animal that died at London Zoo; his wife once came home to a dead rhinoceros in the hall. His 1832 memoir on the pearly nautilus became a classic, and fossils shipped from Australia made him the leading authority on that region's extinct giants, including Diprotodon and the marsupial lion Thylacoleo.
From three British finds, the meat-eating Megalosaurus, plant-eating Iguanodon and armoured Hylaeosaurus, he defined a new group and named it Dinosauria, from Greek words for terrible or wondrous lizard. With sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins he produced the first life-sized dinosaur models, 33 of which ended up in Crystal Palace Park. His bulky Iguanodon was already out of date: its discoverer Gideon Mantell had realised it had slender forelimbs.
Owen accepted that species evolve but thought Darwin's natural selection too simple, and he may have muted his own developmental ideas after a hostile reaction to an anonymous evolutionary book. His undoing was the so-called Great Hippocampus Question. He claimed human brains had structures missing in apes, making humans a separate sub-class. Huxley staged ape dissections from 1862 showing those structures present, a two-year campaign that swayed the scientific community toward Darwin.
Owen was accused by contemporaries of taking credit for others' work, yet his campaign for a public home for the British Museum's specimens produced the Natural History Museum in South Kensington in 1881. His statue stood in its main hall until 2009, when Darwin's replaced it. A fossil snake named after him in 2025 honours both his research and the museum.
Source: Richard Owen
