In fact, Owen coined his famous moniker for a precisely opposite reason. He wished to emphasize the awesome and fearful majesty of such astonishingly large, yet so intricate and well-adapted creatures, living so long ago. He therefore chose a word that would evoke maximal awe and respect—terrible, used in exacdy the same sense as Julia Ward Howe’s “terrible swift sword” of the Lord’s martial glory. (I am, by the way, not drawing an inference in making this unconventional claim, but merely reporting what Owen actually said in his etymological definition of dinosaurs.)*
Owen (1804-92), then a professor at the Royal College of Surgeons and at the Royal Institution, and later the founding director of the newly independent natural history division of the British Museum, had already achieved high status as England’s best comparative anatomist. (He had, for example, named and described the fossil mammals collected by Darwin on the Beagle voyage.) Owen was a complex and mercurial figure—beloved for his wit and charm by the power brokers, but despised for alleged hypocrisy, and unbounded capacity for ingratiation, by a rising generation of young naturalists, who threw their support behind Darwin, and then virtually read Owen out of history when they gained power themselves. A recent biography by Nicolaas A.Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (Yale University Press, 1994), has redressed the balance and restored Owen’s rightful place as brilliantly skilled (in both anatomy and diplomacy), if not always at the forefront of intellectual innovation.
Owen had been commissioned,and paid a substantial sum, by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to prepare and publish a report on British fossil reptiles. (The association had, with favorable outcome, previously engaged the Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz for an account of fossil fishes. They apparently took special pleasure in finding a native son with sufficient skills to tackle these “higher” creatures.) Owen published the first volume of his reptile report in 1839. In the summer of 1841, he then presented a verbal account of his second volume at the association’s annual meeting in Plymouth. Owen published the report in April 1842, with an official christening of the term Dinosauria on page 103:
The combination of such characters… all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or suborder of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria.
(From Richard Owen, Report on British Fossil Reptiles, Part II, London, Richard and John E. Taylor, published as Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1841, pages 60–204.)
Many historians have assumed that Owen coined the name in his oral presentation of 1841, and have cited this date as the origin of dinosaurs. But as Torrens shows, extensive press coverage of Owen’s speech proves that he then included all dinosaur genera in his overall discussion of lizards, and had not yet chosen either to separate them as a special group, or to award them a definite name.(“Golden age” myths are usually false, but how I yearn for a time when local newspapers—and Torrens got his evidence from the equivalent of the Plymouth Gazette and the Penzance Peeper, not from major London journals— reported scientific talks in sufficient detail to resolve such historical questions!) Owen therefore must have coined his famous name as he prepared the report for printing—and the resulting publication of April 1842 marks the first public appearance of the term dinosaur.As an additional problem, a small initial run of the publication (printed for Owen’s own use and distribution) bears the incorrect date of 1841 (perhaps in confusion with the time of the meeting itself, perhaps to “backdate” the name against any future debate about priority, perhaps just as a plain old mistake with no nefarious intent)—thus confounding matters even further.
William Buckland’s personal copy of Richard Owen’s initial report on dinosaurs. Note Buckland’s signature on the title page (left) and his note (right) showing his concern with the subject of evolution (“transmutation”).
In any case, Owen appended an etymological footnote to his defining words cited just above—the proof that he intended the dino in dinosaur as a mark of awe and respect, not of derision, fear, or negativity. Owen wrote:“Gr. [Greek] deinos [Owen’s text uses Greek letters here],fearfully great; sauros, a lizard.” Dinosaurs, in other words, are awesomely large (“fearfully great”), thus inspiring our admiration and respect, not terrible in any sense of disgust or rejection.
I do love the minutiae of natural history, but I am not so self-indulgent that I would impose an entire essay upon readers just to clear up a little historical, matter about etymological intent—even for the most celebrated of all prehistoric critters. On the contrary: a deep and important story lies behind Owen’s conscious and explicit decision to describe his new group with a maximally positive name marking their glory and excellence—a story, moreover, that cannot be grasped under the conventional view that dinosaurs owe their name to supposedly negative attributes.
Owen chose his strongly positive label for an excellent reason—one that could not possibly rank as more ironic today, given our current invocation of dinosaurs as a primary example of the wondrous change and variety that evolution has imparted to the history of life on our planet. In short, Owen selected his positive name in order to use dinosaurs as a focal argument againstthe most popular version of evolutionary theory in the 1840s. Owen’s refutation of evolution—and his invocation of newly minted dinosaurs as a primary example— forms the climax and central point in his concluding section of a two-volume report on British fossil reptiles (entided “Summary,” and occupying pages 191-204 of the 1842 publication).
This ironic tale about the origin of dinosaurs as a weapon against evolution holds sufficient interest for its own immediate cast of characters (involving, in equal measure, the.most important scientists of the day, and the fossils deemed most fascinating by posterity). But the story gains even more significance by illustrating a key principle in the history of science. All major discoveries suffer from simplistic “creation myths” or “eureka stories”—that is, tales about momentary flashes of brilliantly blinding insight by great thinkers. Such stories fuel one of the primal legends of our culture—the lonely persecuted hero, armed with a sword of truth and eventually prevailing against seemingly insuperable odds. These sagas presumably originate (and stubbornly persist against contrary evidence) because we so strongly want them to be true.
Well, sudden conversions and scales falling from eyes may work for religious epiphanies, as in the defining tale about Saul of Tarsus (subsequently renamed Paul the Apostle) on the Damascus Road:“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why per-secutest thou me?… And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales; and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized”* (Acts 9:4). But scientific discoveries are deep, difficult, and complex. They require a rejection of one view of reality (never an easy task, either conceptually or psychologically), in favor of a radically new order, teeming with consequences for everything held precious. One doesn’t discard the comfort and foundation of a lifetime so lighdy or suddenly. Moreover, even if one thinker experiences an emotional and transforming eureka, he must still work out an elaborate argument, and gather extensive empirical support, to persuade a community of colleagues often stubbornly committed to opposite views. Science, after all, operates both as a social enterprise and an intellectual adventure.
A prominent eureka myth holds that Charles Darwin invented evolution within the lonely genius of his own mind, abetted by personal observations made while he lived on a tiny ship circumnavigating the globe. He then, as the legend continues, dropped the concept like a bombshell on a stunned and shocked world in 1859. Darwin remains my personal hero, and The Origin of Species will always be my favorite book—but Darwin didn’t invent evolution and would never have persuaded an entire intellectual community without substantial prim
ing from generations of earlier evolutionists (including his own grandfather).These forebears prepared the ground, but never devised a plausible mechanism (as Darwin achieved with the principle of natural selection), and they never recorded, or even knew how to recognize,enough supporting documentation.
We can make a general case against such eureka myths as Darwin’s epiphany, but such statements carry no credibility without historical counterexamples. If we can show that evolution inspired substantial debate among biologists long before Darwin’s publication, then we obtain a primary case for interesting and extended complexity in the anatomy of an intellectual revolution. Historians have developed many such examples (and pre-Darwinian evolutionism has long been a popular subject among scholars),but the eureka myth persists, perhaps because we so yearn to place a name and a date upon defining episodes in our history. I know of no better example, however little known and poorly documented, than Owen’s invention of the name dinosauras an explicit weapon—ironically for the wrong side, in our current and irrelevant judgment—in an intense and public debate about the status of evolution.
Scattered observations of dinosaur bones, usually misinterpreted as human giants, pervade the earlier history of paleontology, but the first recognition of giant terrestrial reptiles from a distant age before mammalian dominance (the marine ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs had been defined a few years earlier) did not long predate Owen’s christening. In 1824, the Reverend William Buckland, an Anglican divine by tide, but a leading geologist by weight of daily practice and expertise, named the first genus that Owen would eventually incorporate as a dinosaur—the carnivorous Megalosaurus.
Buckland devoted his professional life to promoting paleontology and religion with equal zeal. He became the first officially appointed geologist at Oxford University, and presented his inaugural lecture in 1819 under the title “Vindiciae geologicae; or the connexion of geology with religion explained.” Later, in 1836, he wrote one of the eight Bridgewater Treatises, a series generously endowed by the earl of Bridgewater upon his death in 1829, and dedicated to proving “the power, wisdom and goodness of God as manifested in the creation.” Darwin’s circle referred to this series as the “bilgewater” treatises, and the books did represent a last serious gasp for the venerable, but fading, doctrine of “natural theology” based on the so-called “argument from design”—the proposition that God’s existence, and his attributes of benevolence and perfection, could both be inferred from the good design of material objects and the harmonious interaction among nature’s parts (read, in biological terms, as the excellent adaptations of organisms, and the harmony of ecosystems expressed as a “balance of nature”).
Buckland (1784-1856) provided crucial patronage for several key episodes in Owen’s advance, and Owen, as a consummate diplomat and astute academic politician, certainly knew and honored the sources of his favors. When Owen named dinosaurs in 1842, the theoretical views of the two men could only evoke one’s favorite metaphor for indistinction, from peas in a pod, to Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Owen later became an evolutionist, though never a supporter of Darwinian natural selection. One might be cynical, and correlate Owen’s philosophical shift with the death of Buckland and other powerful men of the old guard, but Owen was too intelligent (and at least sufficiendy honorable) to permit such a simple interpretation, and his later evolutionary views show considerable subtlety and originality. Nonetheless—in a point crucial to this essay—Owen remained an unreconstructed Bucklandian creationist, committed to the functionalist approach of the argument from design, when he christened dinosaurs in 1842.
Gideon Mantell, a British surgeon from Sussex, and one of Europe’s most skilled and powerful amateur naturalists, named a second genus (that Owen would later include among the dinosaurs) in 1825—the herbivorous Iguanodon,now classified as a duckbill. Later, in 1833, Mantell also named Hylaeosaurus, now viewed as an armored herbivorous dinosaur ranked among the ankylosaurs.
Owen united these three genera to initiate his order Dinosauria in 1842. But why link such disparate creatures—a carnivore with two herbivores, one now viewed as a tall, upright, bipedal duckbill, the other as a low, squat, four-footed, armored ankylosaur? In part, Owen didn’t appreciate the extent of the differences (though we continue to regard dinosaurs as a discrete evolutionary group, thus confirming Owen’s basic conclusion). For example, he didn’t recognize the bipedality of some dinosaurs, and therefore reconstructed all three genera as four-footed creatures.
Owen presented three basic reasons for proposing his new group. First, the three genera share the most obvious feature that has always set our primal fascination with dinosaurs: gigantic size. But Owen knew perfecdy well that similarity in bulk denotes little or nothing about taxonomie affinity. Several marine reptiles of the same age were just as big, or even bigger, but Owen did not include them among dinosaurs (and neither do we today).
Moreover, Owen’s anatomical analysis had greatly reduced the size estimates for dinosaurs (though these creatures remained impressively large). Mantell had estimated up to one hundred feet in length for Iguanodon,a figure reduced to twenty-eight feet by Owen. In the 1844 edition of his Medals of Creation (only two years after Owen’s shortening, thus illustrating the intensity of public interest in the subject), Mantell capitulated and excused himself for his former overestimate in the maximally exculpatory passive voice:
In my earliest notices of the Iguanodon … an attempt was made to estimate the probable magnitude of the original by instituting a comparison between the fossil bones and those of the Iguana.
But the modern iguana grows short legs, splayed out to the side, and a long tail. The unrelated dinosaur Iguanodon had very long legs by comparison (for we now recognize the creature as bipedal), and a relatively shorter tail. Thus, when Mantell originally estimated the length of Iguanodonfrom very incomplete material consisting mostly of leg bones and teeth, he erred by assuming the same proportions of legs to body as in modern iguanas, and by then appending an unknown tail of greatly extended length.
Second, and most importantly, Owen recognized that all three genera share a set of distinct characters found in no other fossil reptiles. He cited many technical details, but focused on the fusion of several sacral vertebrae to form an unusually strong pelvis—an excellent adaptation for terrestrial life, and a feature long known in Megalosaurus,but then only recently affirmed for Iguanodon,thus suggesting affinity. Owen’s first defining sentence in his section on dinosaurs (pages 102-3 of his 1842 report) emphasizes this shared feature:“This group, which includes at least three well-established genera of Saurians,is characterized by a large sacrum composed of five anchylosed [fused] vertebrae of unusual construction.”
Third, Owen noted, based on admittedly limited evidence, that dinosaurs might constitute a complete terrestrial community in themselves, not just a few oddball creatures living in ecological corners or backwaters. The three known genera included a fierce carnivore, an agile herbivore, and a stocky armored herbivore—surely a maximal spread of diversity and ecological range for so small a sample. Perhaps the Mesozoic world had been an Age of Dinosaurs (or rather, a more inclusive Age of Reptiles, with dinosaurs on land, pterodactyls in the air, and ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs in the sea). In this view, dinosaurs became the terrestrial component of a coherent former world dominated by reptiles.
Owen then united all his arguments to characterize dinosaurs in a particularly flattering way that justified his etymological choice of “fearfully great.” In short, Owen depicted dinosaurs not as primitive and anatomically incompetent denizens of an antediluvian world, but rather as uniquely sleek, powerful, and well-designed creatures—mean and lean fighting and eating machines for a distinctive and distinguished former world. Owen emphasized this central point with a striking rhetorical device, guaranteed to attract notice and controversy: he compared the design and efficiency of dinosaurs with modern (read superior) mammals, not with slithery and inferior reptiles of either pa
st or present worlds.
Owen first mentioned this argument right up front, at the end of his opening paragraph (quoted earlier in this essay) on the definition of dinosaurs:
The bones of the extremities are of large proportional size, for Saurians…. [They] more or less resemble those of the heavy pachydermal Mammals, and attest… the terrestrial habits of the species.
Owen then pursues this theme of structural and functional (not genealogical) similarity with advanced mammals throughout his report—as, for example, when he reduces Mantell’s estimate of dinosaurian body size by comparing their leg bones with the strong limbs of mammals, attached under the body for maximal efficiency in locomotion, and not with the weaker limbs of reptiles, splayed out to the side and imposing a more awkward and waddling gait. Owen writes:
The same observations on the general form and proportions of the animal [Iguanodon]and its approximation in this respect to the Mammalia, especially to the great extinct Megatherioid [giant ground sloth] or Pachydermal [elephant] species, apply as well to the Iguanodon as to the Megalosaurus.
Owen stresses this comparison again in the concluding paragraphs of his report (and for a definite theoretical purpose embodying the theme of this essay). Here Owen speaks of “the Dinosaurian order, where we know that the Reptilian type of structure made the nearest approach to Mammals.” In a final footnote (and the very last words of his publication), Owen even speculates— thus anticipating an unresolved modern debate of great intensity—that the efficient physiology of dinosaurs invites closer comparison with warm-blooded mammals than with conventional cold-blooded modern reptiles: