that of Cuvier's adversaries; but in matters of comparative anatomy and of palæontology 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 of the Vertebrates, the late Sir William Flower called it "the most encyclopædic work on the subject accomplished by any one individual since Cuvier's Leçons d'Anatomie Compareé."
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 Archæopteryx macrura, the oldest known reptilian bird found in the Solenhofen stone of Bavaria, on the
