Richard Owen

Richard Owen publishes his detailed description of the London Archaeopteryx

Owen saw feather impressions and a tail built from separate vertebrae, and argued anyway that the animal was unequivocally a bird — not an evolutionary intermediate.

Volume 153 of the Philosophical Transactions

Owen's detailed study of the first Archaeopteryx skeleton appeared in 1863, in volume 153 of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, under a title beginning "On the Archeopteryx of von Meyer."

He described the Bavarian fossil's skeleton and feather impressions and classified it unequivocally as a bird, emphasising its exceptionally long, jointed tail. His title used the new species spelling Archeopteryx macrurus, distinguishing the skeleton from Hermann von Meyer's isolated feather.

Bought inside a lot of 1,900 fossils

The specimen had entered the British Museum in 1862 as part of a collection of more than 1,900 Solnhofen fossils purchased from Karl Häberlein for £700. The price covered the collection, not Archaeopteryx alone.

The skeleton came from near Langenaltheim in Bavaria. Its head was incomplete, and Owen did not recognise teeth in it.

Not the first description of a fossil bird

The claim in the listing does not hold. Fossil birds were already known, von Meyer had already described the Archaeopteryx feather, and a short firsthand notice of the skeleton appeared before Owen's full memoir — which is best described as the first extensive anatomical account of the London specimen.

The year is a publication date rather than a moment: the Royal Society received the manuscript on 6 November 1862 and had it read on 20 November 1862.

Owen resisted treating the fossil as a missing link, and Darwin's own discussion of Archaeopteryx did not appear until the fourth edition of On the Origin of Species in 1866.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The year 1863 is secure, but the scientific disclosure straddles two years: Owen’s manuscript was received and read to the Royal Society in November 1862, while the full Philosophical Transactions paper appeared in the 1863 volume.
Calling this the “first description of a fossilised bird” is untenable. Fossil birds were already known, von Meyer had already described the Archaeopteryx feather, and a short firsthand notice of the skeleton appeared before Owen’s full memoir. Owen’s work is best described as the first extensive anatomical account of the London skeleton.
Owen’s paper title used macrurus; macrura became the corrected conventional spelling.