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Professor Megalow's Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian literature

Richard Owen, the Victorian scientist who first named the “dinosaurs”, claimed that he could identify an animal, even an extinct one, from inspecting a single bone. Richard Fallon revisits other Owen-inspired fictions — by R. D. Blackmore, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Kingsley — and finds literature layered with scientific, religious, and political interventions, spurred by the discovery of prehistoric life.

In addition to providing us with the dinosaurs, Owen’s accomplishments included the reconstruction of the New Zealand moa and the giant South American ground sloth Mylodon, pioneering work on the gorilla, and — both before and after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species(1859) — he postulated innovative if arcane theories of life’s natural development through time. Pre-Darwinian controversies over “development” (or, to use a more recognisable term, evolution) raged, while the largely Christian community of British naturalists continued to construct sophisticated ways of making sense of Earth’s history via liberal interpretation of the Book of Genesis — and vice versa. Not least in scenes including the bone collector Mr Venus and the wooden-legged Silas Wegg, the question of conjuring the whole from the part comes to symbolize, as in Thackeray’s The Newcomes, the task of the Victorian serial novelist, who must prove that isolated fragments are all integral contributions to a harmonious and insightful end product.

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