80 BIOGRAPHIES OF SCIENTIFIC MEN 



that of Cuvier's adversaries ; but in matters of compara- 

 tive anatomy and of paleontology his place is next to 

 his master Cuvier, the founder of these sciences. In 

 fact, Owen has been called " the British Cuvier," and 

 lovingly by his friends " Old Bones," on account of his 

 vast knowledge of osteology ; and concerning his book on 

 The Anatomy and Physiology oj the Vertebrates, the late 

 Sir William Flower called it " the most encyclopaedic 

 work on the subject accomplished by any one individual 

 since Cuvier's Lemons d' Anatomic Comparee." 



Minute studies of the bones of living animals enabled 

 Owen to reconstruct many extinct and fossil forms 

 in this respect following in the footsteps of Cuvier. He 

 reconstructed the Dinornis from a fragment of its femur ; 

 asserting that it belonged to a gigantic wingless bird, 

 and, moreover, that it was a marrow bone like that of a 

 mammal, and not a pneumatic one like those of birds ; 

 and, later, the whole skeleton of this bird was brought 

 from New Zealand, and was exactly like the outline 

 drawn (from a single bone) by Owen. 



In 1849-84 he published his great work, The History 

 of British Fossil Reptiles, and in 1846 a similar one on 

 British Fossil Mammalia and Birds. His memoirs on 

 the gigantic sloth (Mylodon robustus) discovered near 

 Buenos Ayres, on the giant birds of New Zealand, on 

 the Archseopteryx macrura, the oldest known reptilian 

 bird found in the Solenhofen stone of Bavaria, on the 



