| AdminHistory | Sir Richard Owen (1804 - 1892) was a British anatomist and paleontologist who worked closely with fossil animals, especially dinosaurs.
Owen was born in Lancaster on 20 July 1804, one of six children of Richard Owen, a West Indian merchant, and Catherine Parrin. He was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School before being apprenticed in 1820 to a local surgeon and apothecary. Iin 1824 he proceeded as a medical student to the University of Edinburgh but left the following year and completed his medical course in St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, where he came under the influence of the surgeon, John Abernethy. He was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons of England, where he was engaged as curator of the Hunterian Collections and set up in medical practice. In 1831 he visited his friend, Georges Cuvier, a French paleontologist, in Paris, where he studied specimens in the National Museum of Natural History.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1834 and in 1836 he became Hunterian professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1837 he became its professor of anatomy and physiology, as well as Fullerian professor of comparative anatomy and physiology at the Royal Institution. Leaving medical practice and devoting himself to research, he was appointed superintendent of the natural history departments of the British Museum in 1856. From then until his retirement in 1884 he was largely occupied with the development of the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington, London [now known as the Natural History Museum]. On retirement he was created a knight of the Order of the Bath.
In 1835 he married Caroline Amelia Clift in St Pancras by whom he had one son, William Owen. He died on 18 December 1892 in London. |