Tag: ED cope

Content below is from #183 of Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

• This week I recommend you check out the show Billions.
  • Wealth, influence and corruption collide in this drama set in New York. Shrewd U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades is embroiled in a high-stakes game of predator vs. prey with Bobby Axelrod, an ambitious hedge-fund king. To date, Rhoades has never lost an insider trading case — he’s 81-0 — but when criminal evidence turns up against Axelrod, he proceeds cautiously in building the case against Axelrod, who employs Rhoades’ wife, psychiatrist Wendy, as a performance coach for his company. Wendy, who has been in her position longer than Chuck has been in his, refuses to give up her career for her husband’s legal crusade against Axelrod. Both men use their intelligence, power and influence to outmaneuver the other in this battle over billions. The high-profile cast is led by Emmy winner Paul Giamatti (“John Adams”) as Chuck Rhoades.
  • Shannon and I are currently watching it via Amazon Prime, but it is created by Showtime
  • The first 5 or so seasons are on Amazon and a bunch of other streaming platforms. It is addicting and we love it.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

• The first thing my 4-year-old nephew says to me when I visit is either something about Spiderman or something about dinosaurs. He loves them.
  • He astonishingly tells me the names of obscure dinosaurs even though their names are several syllables long. This is typical for a little kid. They love dinosaurs, fascinated by them.
  • We adults most likely remember a time in our lives, long ago, when asking “what is your favorite dinosaur?” was common etiquette on the school playground.
• We now think of Dinosaurs as a given. Everyone knows about them. Dinosaurs are featured in our movies, toys, museums, and even come in chicken nugget form.
  • That’s why it is hard for us to imagine a world where no one even knew they existed.
  • It wasn’t that long ago.
• You see, the first dinosaur bones found were regarded as unremarkable. The first bone was found in New Jersey, but because no one seemed to care, the person who found it and the bone itself have been lost to history.
• But then scientists became obsessed to figure out how old the Earth was.
  • The working estimation was about 20 Million years old, but that was based on Lord Kelvin (a titan in science) and his guestimations.
  • Until we started to find more and more fossilized bones of the megafauna and recognizing a pattern.
  • Geologists societies in England pointed out that there are different layers of Earth and that each layer contained different kinds of fossils.
  • So there was motivation to find as many of these ancient fossils as possible and document what layer of Earth they came from.
  • Scientists started to realize that if the Earth was merely 20 million years old, then these vast amounts of extinct species would have come into existence and become extinct virtually in the blink of an eye.
  • Eventually, they discovered the Earth is much older and now we know the Earth is 4.543 Billion years old… but our fascination with Dinosaurs didn’t stop there.
• In comes one of the most famous figures from this Dinosaur discovery period in science. Sir Richard Owen.
  • I partially picked Owen to be this episode’s main topic because of his importance to the study of dinosaurs / paleontology (study of the history of the Earth based on fossils) and partially picked him because he was such an odd person.
  • He was by most accounts, a horrible person.

Sir Richard Owen  (20 July 1804 – 18 December 1892) was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist. Owen is generally considered to have been an outstanding naturalist with a remarkable gift for interpreting fossils.

Owen produced a vast array of scientific work, but is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria (meaning “Terrible Reptile” or “Fearfully Great Reptile“). An outspoken critic of Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution by natural selection, Owen agreed with Darwin that evolution occurred but thought it was more complex than outlined in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Owen was the first president of the Microscopical Society of London in 1839 and edited many issues of its journal – then known as The Microscopic Journal. Owen also campaigned for the natural specimens in the British Museum to be given a new home. This resulted in the establishment, in 1881, of the now world-famous Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London. Bill Bryson argues in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything that, “by making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for.”

While he made several contributions to science and public learning, Owen was a controversial figure among his contemporaries, both for his disagreements on matters of common decency, and for accusations that he took credit for other people’s work.

• He worked with reptiles early in his career. He would take skeletons of extinct reptile species and construct what the creature would have looked like.
  • His work was published in a series. History of British Fossil Reptiles (4 vols. London 1849–1884)
  • He published the first important general account of the great group of Mesozoic land-reptiles, and he coined the name Dinosauria from Greek δεινός (deinos) “terrible, powerful, wondrous” + σαύρος (sauros) “lizard”. Owen used 3 genera to define the dinosaurs: the carnivorous Megalosaurus, the herbivorous Iguanodon and armoured Hylaeosaurus‘, specimens uncovered in southern England.

• Like his work with reptiles, he took dinosaur fossils and tried to reconstruct them similar to how we see dinosaur skeletons in museums today.
  • Humorously though, he didn’t have a reference like we do now and the results were all over the place.
  • Looking back on his first attempts, the thumb bones of dinosaurs would be placed on the head like a horn or bipedal species would have been depicted with 4 legs awkwardly.
• Despite his mistakes, Owens is still regarded as one of the most talented people to construct the skeletons of these ancient extinct creatures.
  • He gained quite the reputation and was granted permission to have the freshly dead animals from the London Zoo. It was known as “right of first refusal.”
  • He would have all manner of species at his home for him to disect and tear apart to further his scientific understanding.
  • His wife once arrived home to find the carcass of a newly deceased rhinoceros in her front hallway.

He was the first director in Natural History Museum in London and his statue was in the main hall there until 2009, when it was replaced with a statue of Darwin. A bust of Owen by Alfred Gilbert (1896) is held in the Hunterian Museum, London.

• But what I find more interesting is his personality.
  • He was described by his colleagues as a malicious, dishonest, and hateful person. … they all said that.
  • He was the only person that Charles Darwin adamantly hated.
  • He has been described in one biography as being a “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism. Addicted to controversy and driven by arrogance and jealousy”. 
  • Deborah Cadbury stated that Owen possessed an “almost fanatical egoism with a callous delight in savaging his critics.”
  • An Oxford University professor once described Owen as “a damned liar. He lied for God and for malice”.
  • Gideon Mantell (a tragedy story in his own right) claimed it was “a pity a man so talented should be so dastardly and envious”. 
  • Richard Broke Freeman described him as “the most distinguished vertebrate zoologist and palaeontologist … but a most deceitful and odious man”.
  •  Charles Darwin stated that “No one fact tells so strongly against Owen … as that he has never reared one pupil or follower.”
• Owen claims to have discovered the Iguanodon. He told Georges Cuvier as much.
  • He failed to mention the man who actually discovered the Iguanadon and dedicated his entire life to paleontology Gideon Mantell.
  • Mantell’s entire life (financially and personally) was destroyed by his passion for paleontology, but Owen took all the credit.
  • Owen famously credited himself and Georges Cuvier with the discovery of the Iguanodon, completely excluding any credit for the original discoverer of the dinosaur, Gideon Mantell.
  • This was not the first or last time Owen would falsely claim a discovery as his own.
    • Gideon Mantell lost all of his money and his wife and kids left him.
    • He had discovered so much and contributed so much to Paleontology, but had nothing to show for it.
    • One day, after he had lost his mansion and family, Mantell was in an accident where his carriage hit something and startled his horses. They dragged him for about a mile at a gallop. It left him crippled and in chronic pain. His spine was twisted in ways thought unsurvivable at the time.
    • What did Owen do when he heard about his peer’s misfortune?
    • That’s when Owen started taking all of the credit away from Mantell
    • It has also been suggested by some authors that Owen even used his influence in the Royal Society to ensure that many of Mantell’s research papers were never published. Owen was finally dismissed from the Royal Society’s Zoological Council for plagiarism.
  • He tried to wipe Mantell’s work from the historic record.
  • But Owen didn’t stop there. He had Mantell’s deformed skeleton brought to his lab for study and put Mantell’s twisted spine on display at one of his museums…
  • Poor Gideon Mantell (the real discoverer of the Iguanodon) had his spine on display from the 1800’s until is was destroyed by the Nazis in WW2 during an air raid on Britain.
  • How did Mantell die? Owen drove him to suicide… as he did his own son.
• Owen’s son described his father as having the “coldest of hearts” and a few days after saying so took his own life…
  • Owen was a monster.

Another reason for his criticism of the Origin, some historians claim, was that Owen felt upstaged by Darwin and supporters such as Huxley, and his judgment was clouded by jealousy. Owen in Darwin’s opinion was”Spiteful, extremely malignant, clever; the Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about”. “It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me”.

Owen also resorted to the same subterfuge he used against Mantell, writing another anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860. In the article, Owen was critical of Darwin for not offering many new observations, and heaped praise (in the third person) upon himself, while being careful not to associate any particular comment with his own name. Owen did praise, however, the Origin‘s description of Darwin’s work on insect behavior and pigeon breeding as “real gems”.

Owen’s lost scientific standing was not due solely to his underhanded dealings with colleagues; it was also due to serious errors of scientific judgement that were discovered and publicized. A fine example was his decision to classify man in a separate subclass of the Mammalia (see Man’s place in nature). In this Owen had no supporters at all. Also, his unwillingness to come off the fence concerning evolution became increasingly damaging to his reputation as time went on. Owen continued working after his official retirement at the age of 79, but he never recovered the good opinions he had garnered in his younger days

• I thought Owen was the paleontologist that asked for his bones to be the type specimen for the human race in his will.
  • That was NOT Owen, but instead Edward Drinker Cope
  • Quick little side story here because I find it fascinating.
  • Cope and Marsh were two paleontologists that had a bitter rivalry with each other. Obsessed with outdoing one another, they discovered hundreds of new dinosaur species in America.
  • Towards the end of their rivalry, ED Cope was poor and unwell. He asked to have his bones be the type specimen for homo sapiens.
    • Typically the type specimen for a species would be the first fossil discovered. So the first T-Rex bones found became the type specimen.
    • Well we don’t have the first human bones ever found so there was no official type specimen for mankind.
    • This is what ED Cope was asking his bones be used for to sort of immortalize himself.
    • While it was a weird request, no one seemed to have a good reason not to use Cope’s bones.
  • So his bones were shipped to the officials in charge of filing his remains away forever as the type specimen… but they found his bones riddled with syphilis and decided it best to NOT have them represent mankind. They were quietly put into storage.
  • LOL these old-school paleontologists were weird. The more important their contributions, the weirded they seemed to be on a personal level.

• There you have it.
  • The man who did some of the most important work in discovering that Dinosaurs were their own beasts on the evolutionary chain and even coined the term “Dinosaurs.”
  • The word dinosaurs means terrible lizard.
  • Ironic that many dinosaurs weren’t terrible, most of them were smaller than a chicken and they most certainly weren’t lizards. Reptiles predated Dinosaurs by millions of years.
  • What did seem to fit the description of a “terrible lizard” was the man Sir Richard Owen himself.

CREDIT:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Owen
• The main inspiration for this episode comes from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”
  • Which is a book I am currently listening to on my daily walks.