Britain's leading evolutionary biologists are preparing to celebrate the 200th birthday of one of Charles Darwin's most ferocious opponents.
Richard Owen went to his grave believing Darwin was wrong to argue that life evolved by natural selection operating on random mutation -- but he also discovered the gorilla for science, identified the dodo, coined the word "dinosaur" and founded London's famous Natural History Museum in 1881. A special exhibition and a Richard Owen trail open at the museum today.
"This is not to say he was a nice character, because we know he wasn't," said Angela Milner, a palaeontologist at the museum and one of the organizers of the exhibition.
"Owen was an extraordinarily clever scientist, he was the leading comparative anatomist of his day, there is absolutely no doubt about that. He was a brilliant man, but he was also very competitive, very arrogant and he didn't want anybody taking his crown away from him," she said.
Richard Owen was born in Lancaster in northern England on July 20, 1804. He trained at Edinburgh, went to the Royal College of Surgeons and then moved to superintend the natural history collections of the British Museum in Bloomsbury. This priceless assortment of gems, minerals, dried plants, pickled fish and reptiles, fossils, skeletons, skins and stuffed mammals gathered by Captain Cook, Joseph Banks, Hans Sloane and other 18th century explorers was growing and deteriorating at the same time. Owen promptly began a 25-year campaign that climaxed in the present "cathedral of nature" in South Kensington.
He had originally enjoyed a working relationship with the younger Charles Darwin, but having been a devout Christian from the beginning, Owen saw creation as a series of experiments by a Creator, and he was outraged by Darwin's masterwork On the Origin of Species.
Owen was a tall, imposing figure with a charismatic public presence and a mission to educate: people flocked to his lectures. He hobnobbed with royalty and cultivated relations with the powerful.
"I suppose one could use the word snob, by today's standards," Milner said. "Darwin was a very shy, introvert, reclusive figure who didn't want any of this, whereas Owen was quite the reverse."
Owen also identified New Zealand's giant flightless bird, the moa or dinornis, from a piece of shin just 15cm long.
"It was a small fragment of tibia, but there was enough anatomy there for Owen to know that it was a bird bone, and there was just enough of the muscle scars on part of it for him to be able to place which bone it was. He deduced it must have been flightless," Milner said.
"And two or three years later when complete moa skeletons were discovered, he was proved to be spot on," he said.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
RSS