There has long been confusion over the exact date that Owen proposed the name Dinosauria. Cadbury says, "it may be, too, that Owen deliberately obscured the timing of his key insights. For when copies of his report were finally issued in April 1842, many were wrongly dated August 1841. Quite how this error arose is unclear, but it has provided fine fuel for conspiracy theorists who have suggested that Owen did this to create the impression of having achieved his insights at an earlier date, well ahead of his rivals."
Long incapacitated after a carriage accident resulted in excruciatingly painful spinal injuries, Mantell slipped on his stairs on November 10th, 1852. He took a dose of his usual dose of opiates, but died the next day of narcotic poisoning. An anonymous obituary, believed to have been written by Owen, was published in the Literary Gazette which disparaged Mantell's scientific reputation.
Owen spent much of his later years campaigning for the creation of a museum of natural history in London. For all his earlier scheming, Owen himself had his own character disparaged after his death in 1892. His opposition to Charles Darwin's new hypotheses about evolution was used to ridicule him, and his previous rivalries and scientific conduct led to him being all but written out of the history of paleontological study. He was dismissed as "a damned liar...a bad case."
Many books about the history of science tend to focus only on the great works done by the early scientists, Cadbury prefers not only to show us the heights these early paleontologists rose to, but also the depths to which they descended. Although Cadbury's book caused me to lose some respect for Richard Owen, I had to remind myself that he was only human, and subject to the same temptations as all humans.
Deborah Cadbury's other books include The Feminization of Nature and Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science.
Deborah Cadbury, Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World, Forth Estate, London, 2000
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