Richard was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary named Dickinson when he was young. Dickinson died, and Richard was apprenticed to two other surgeons. As an apprentice, Richard gained experience in performing post mortems (examinations of the body after death), this led to his interest in anatomy.
He then attended Edinburgh University in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he studied comparative anatomy. After graduation, he continued his studies at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. His job there was to prepare specimens for surgical lectures.
In 1826, he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and set himself up in his own surgical practice. In 1827, he also became the Assistant Conservator at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1830, he turned from practical medicine to natural science, although he remained with the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1836, he became the College's Hunterian Profesor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. In 1856, he left the College to become the first Superintendent of the British Museum in London (now known as the Natural History Museum in London), and remained there until 1883.
Owen's first recorded publication is an account of an aneurism. The second work he published was a catalogue of specimens in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. But, in 1831, he wrote eight papers on the anatomy of various mammals, birds, and reptiles which had died in the Zoological Gardens in London. He was only twenty-six at the time, and he continued to be a prolific writer of scientific articles for the rest of his life.
In April of 1842, Owen had an article published in The Proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in which he established the Dinosauria, the group that contains the dinosaurs. He created the name from the Greek words "deinos", meaning "fearfully great", and "sauros", meaning "lizard." He separated the dinosaurs from other reptiles by several characteristics, including their column-like stance, rather than the sprawling gait seen in other reptiles (see my previous article "Dinosaur Primer"), and the fact that they had five fused vertebrae that were fused to their pelvic girdles (the pelvis). (See my article "Biological Nomenclature" for more information about how biologists divide animals into groups.)
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