History
Richard Owen: The Most Loathsome Man in Scientific History
How NHM-founder Richard Owen destroyed a marriage and drove a man to suicide
The year is 1822. Darwin is just a young teenager, still almost 10 years away from the voyage that would change the scientific world forever. Evolution is but a hushed whisper, frightened into obscurity by the stronghold of the Christian church. Egyptian Hieroglyphs have just been decoded, and Brazil has its first Emperor — Pedro the First.
Closer to home (for some of us), a country doctor and amateur paleontologist Gideon Mantell was visiting a patient near Crawley, Sussex, and his wife, Mary Mantell, accompanied him for the day. Being a woman, and not, therefore, a doctor, Mary took the liberty of taking a stroll through the Tilgate Forest, West Sussex, where she found fossil teeth embedded in the sediment.
The teeth she dug up looked exactly like those of an enormous iguana.
The first iguanodon
Gideon and Mary formed a cohesive research unit where each contributed authoritatively to what ensued. They began and funded excavation of the surrounding forest, where the tooth was found, to uncover more bones — through the skeleton was very incomplete, and just looked like…
