It Wasn't The Lizards That Were Terrible

Dinosaur. It's a great word that most of us don't even think about anymore, unless we're going to a museum or something. Most of us probably know that it means 'terrible lizard,' and some of you may even know that the word is Greek in origin, insofar as it's made up of two Greek words, not that it was a word made by a Greek. So who did come up with the word dinosaur? This guy:

Either a scientist or a sorcerer.
Possibly both.

His name is/was Richard Owen, more specifically Sir Richard Owen, Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Order of Bath.  Maybe he was a sorcerer, or at least a seriously hardcore LARPer...  Anyway, he was definitely a scientist, focusing on biology, comparative anatomy and palaeontology.  He was a contemporary of Charles Darwin (who was not a knight, and probably not a sorcerer), who quite famously feuded with Darwin about evolution.  What his personal views were on evolution, nobody's entirely sure.  Owen may not have been sure himself.  It's said that, later in life, he said the following things about Darwin's theory of evolution:

• that it's wrong
• that he'd never heard of it (he was, in fact, given a copy by Darwin himself during the first printing)
• that he came up with the theory a decade before Darwin did

Basically, he was a dick about the whole evolution thing, particularly since he and Darwin were acquaintances from their younger days as students.  Some people say it was because Darwin's name had become famous, while his own, despite being one of the most important scientists in England (he was the superintendent of natural history at the British Museum), was pretty much unknown to anyone outside the scientific world.

Not that his name and reputation were spotless within the scientific world either.  He also had a fairly long running feud with one Gideon Algernon Mantell (what a brilliant name!), who was also a palaeontologist.  Mantell's probably best known for figuring out how the wonky skeleton of the iguanodon fit together, and this is also the source of the disagreement between Owen and himself.  Owen based a lot of his iguanodon ideas on Mantell's, while opening calling Mantell's ideas incompetent.  Also, Mantell was the first one to make major use of the suffix -saurus (he originally called iguanodon iguana-saurus), before Owen came up with the term dinosaur I should point out, and Owen pretty much just swooped in and stole the -saurus thing and threw dino- in front of it to classify the entire group.  Without ever crediting Mantell.

It almost seems as if he made a career out of dick moves, but... There is no but.  Alright, he was the one who is responsible for the Natural History Museum (of London), since he argued that to properly cover the field it needed more space than was available in the British Museum, but the dude was a total dick.  How big a dick was he?  Well, Mantell suffered from scoliosis, a deformation of the spine, and when he died (opium overdose, FYI) Owen had Mantell's spine removed and put on display in the Royal College of Surgeons.  Labeled "the severest degree of deformity."  Seriously.  It stayed there for over 100 years with that same dick label before, due to space issues, it was removed and destroyed.

Now, I'm not going to say that Owen was such a dick that he inspired the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. That would be ridiculous, since A Christmas Carol was published when Owen was only in his 40s, but... maybe Owen modeled himself after a pre-ghosts version of Scrooge...

Lost the staff made of moa bones,
but the floppy wizard cap makes up for it.

Sir Richard Owen: Knight Commander of the Most Horrible Order of Dick-Move Scientists.

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Sources:
Young Richard Owen picture taken from NZBirds.com
Old Richard Owen picture taken from NNDB.com
StrangeScience.com
UCMP Berkeley
NNDB.com
Wikipedia articles on Richard Owen and Gideon Mantell