English biologist

Sir Richard Owen was a comparative anatomist, paleontologist, and zoologist who originated the term "dinosaurus." After insisting that a group of fossils he observed belonged to a separate taxonomic order of extinct reptiles unrecognized at the time, Owen named the animal by combining the Greek words "deinos" for terrible and awe-inspiring with "sauros" meaning lizard. Owen noticed that the dinosaur sacral vertebrae were fused, thereby allowing the animal exceptional strength.

Owen was the Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons, London, from 1836 to 1856. He then became the superintendent of the Natural History Section of the British Museum in London in 1849, and was superintendent of the entire museum from 1856 to 1883. He is best known as an influential paleontologist during an exciting time in the nineteenth century, when the fossils of extinct dinosaurs were first discovered...