Richard Owen and the moa

Richard Owen held a piece of bone in his hand. It was about 15cm long and he initially had no idea what it was.
He thought it might be from an ox since it was clearly part of a larger bone - probably a leg.
He was sent bones by a variety of people finding them around New Zealand and at one point he had boxes of unidentified bones.
In 1839, he had theorised a huge flightless bird but there was little evidence.
Then missionaries William Colenso and William Williams sent two big boxes that intrigued Owen.
On January 19, 1843, he picked up a huge intact femur and came to the conclusion it was part of a femur of a huge flightless bird.
The discovery was astounding. The world of course, knew of ostriches and other big flightless birds, but nothing like the one Owen was suggesting.
It caused a furor - here, in the boxes in front of him was bone after bone from that bird.
The bones had come from Poverty Bay and were from a bird Māori called a moa.
The bones were displayed, vindicating Owen’s theory and he gave the bird a name - Megalornis novaezealandiae - later changed to dinornis.
The idea of a bird that stood 14ft or so tall captured the imagination. And one was reconstructed that people flocked to see.
It was Owen who created the term dinosauria from which we get dinosaur.
Owen was born on July 20, 1804, in England to a distinctly poor family and lost his father by the time he was five.
He went to Lancaster Grammar school but did not distinguish himself and ended up joining the Royal Navy as a midshipman. When that was not for him he went to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine but was unhappy there and went on to Barclay School - the same school Charles Darwin went to.
He became an assistant cataloguing the Hunterian Collection - specimens from famous surgeon John Hunter for the Crown.
He had to identify and categorise it from scratch as the papers that had come with it were burned. It got him interested in comparative anatomy.
From there his reputation took off and he is now considered one of the most outstanding naturalists in the world.
Owen died on December 15, 1892 and is buried in the churchyard at St Andrew’s near Richmond in Surrey.​