Richard Owen loathed small mammals, calling them “ratlike, shrewlike forms of the most stupid and unintelligent order of sucklers.” That wouldn’t have mattered if Owen weren’t one of the most powerful scientists of the Victorian era. A leading anatomist and paleontologist, a founder of London’s famed Natural History Museum, a puller of strings and dispenser of favors, he represented the pinnacle of British scientific endeavor, and when he spoke, even or especially when it was trash talk, it was science speaking. In an age when dinosaurs were all the rage (partly because they were one of Owen’s passions; it was he who coined the word “dinosaur”), he had no truck with runty mammalian fossils that dared vie for attention.
Now, some 150 years later, comes the paleontologist Elsa Panciroli, a research fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, with “Beasts Before Us,” her smart, passionate and seditious book aimed at erasing Owen’s lingering influence and showing us the wonders he missed when he dissed small mammals.
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