To most men the work which these lectures, together with the catalogue, entailed, would have been sufficient. But Owen loved diversity of occupations; and one of his fortunate accidents presently threw an attractive paleontological subject in his way. It happened in this wise. Readers of the _Life of Charles Darwin_ will remember his disappointment, on his return home from the now classic voyage of the _Beagle_, to find that zoologists cared but little for his collections; that, in fact, Lyell and Owen were the only two who wished to possess any of his specimens. The latter, who had been introduced to him by the former, was not slow to grasp the scientific value of the extinct animals whose bones Darwin had dug with his own hands out of the fluviatile deposits of South America. He began with a huge skull—‘the head of an animal equalling in size the hippopotamus’—and described it before the Geological Society, in 1837, under the name of _Toxodon platensis_. Further, as Mr Huxley points out:
‘It is worthy of notice, that in the title of this memoir there follow, after the name of the species, the words “referable by its dentition to the Rodentia, but with affinities to the Pachydermata and the herbivorous Cetacea,” indicating the importance in the mind of the writer of the fact that, like Cuvier’s _Anoplotherium_ and _Paleotherium_, _Toxodon_ occupied a position between groups which, in existing Nature, are now widely separated’ (ii. 308).
The same writer bids us remark that this ‘maiden essay in paleontology possesses great interest’ from another point of view, for ‘it is with reference to Owen’s report on _Toxodon_ that Darwin remarks in his _Journal_: “How wonderfully are the different orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in different points in the structure of _Toxodon_.”’ Soon afterwards Owen described the rest of Darwin’s fossil specimens in the geological part of _The Zoology of the ‘Beagle’ Voyage_.
Two years later, in 1839, a second and still more sensational _trouvaille_ came into his hands. A fragment of bone was offered for sale to the College of Surgeons, with the statement that it had been obtained in New Zealand from a native, who said that it was the bone of a great extinct eagle. Out of this fragment there ultimately grew that phalanx of huge extinct birds to which Owen gave the name of _Dinornis_ (bird of wonder), on which he occupied himself till his death. His recognition of the true origin of this fragment was, no doubt, a wonderful instance of his osteological sagacity; but it is a misrepresentation of fact to say that he evolved the whole of an extinct bird out of a fragment of bone six inches long. What he did do, and how he did it, shall be told in his own words: