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DINOSAURS! They're on the new stamps, they're on the television and Lancaster has its own very important part to play in their history.
If it had not been for one of Lancaster's famous sons, these fascinating extinct creatures may have escaped us without a name. It was Sir Richard Owen's brainwave to call them dinosaurs which is the Greek for ‘fearful lizards.'
This latest spell of dinosaur fever has once again brought Richard Owen's name into the limelight. But who was this man and what was his connection with Lancaster?
Born on July 20, 1804 at ‘Owen House' - which was on the corner of Thurnham Street and Brock Street and has since been demolished - he was the son of a West India merchant. Owen's mother was the daughter of Robert Parris, the organist at the Parish Church. Richard Owen was an old boy of Lancaster Grammar School which he left when 16 to become an apprentice to a Lancaster doctor. In 1824 he graduated from Edinburgh University.
Ten years later, he became Professor of Comparative Anatomy at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London but it was in 1851 with the opening of the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace that his most famous association with dinosaurs became widely known.
It was Richard Owen who suggested and devised the exhibition there of models of extinct animals and first coined the word ‘dinosaur'.' Before the model monsters were erected, he and a number of other eminent scientists dined inside the half completed structure of the iguanodon!
We can also thank Owen for the Natural History Museum as it was in 1859 that he submitted a strong report to the trustees of the British Museum - where he was superintendent of natural history - his views about a national museum of natural history. Eventually, land was bought in South Kensington and the Natural History Museum where many people can now view dinosaur bones, opened there in 1881.
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The middle of the Nineteenth Century was a wonderful time to be a scientist, working in the days when one of the most famous of them all, Charles Darwin was introducing his theories on evolution.
Owen met him in 1836 and was often found hobnobbing with a lot of other famous names of the day including Dickens, Turner and Tennyson.
Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert was attracted by Owen's books and the queen herself offered him a 'grace and favour' cottage in Richmond Park where he lived for 40 years.
Sir Richard Owen was honoured by many people in many countries and although he moved away from Lancaster he was still thought of with affection by his home town which held a complimentary dinner for him in 1842. |
Sir Richard Owen |
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And although neither Sir Richard Owen nor his dinosaurs roam this earth any longer, Lancaster ensures his memory never becomes extinct!
Taken from Lancaster Guardian, 13th September 1991
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