Owen coins Dinosauria

In 1842 the English anatomist Richard Owen, in a report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, grouped three fossil reptiles, Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus, into a new order he called Dinosauria. Hylaeosaurus, an armored plant eater, had been found by Gideon Mantell in Sussex in 1832, and Owen judged all three to be larger and more advanced than any living reptile. The name comes from the Greek deinos, terrible or fearfully great, and sauros, lizard. Owen noted shared features, especially a pelvis fused to five sacral vertebrae, and upright limbs held under the body, unlike the sprawling gait of lizards or crocodiles.

Owen was a brilliant comparative anatomist and a rival to Darwin's allies. He rejected evolution, so he pictured dinosaurs as stately, heavy, mammal-like animals, more advanced than modern reptiles, rather than as ancestors of anything. In the Crystal Palace Park in London, the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins built life-size concrete models under Owen's advice, opened in 1854. He coined many other terms, including homology, described Archaeopteryx in 1863, and led the campaign for a national museum, and the Natural History Museum in South Kensington opened in 1881.

The label turned a scatter of puzzling bones into a recognized category of life, which people could study, display and love. Later research showed that Owen's guess was partly right and partly wrong: dinosaurs are indeed a distinct group, but they are close kin to birds.