Owen’s vertebral theory of the origin of the skull, later refuted by Thomas Huxley and others.
"Owen began working systematically on problems of transcendental morphology in 1841, as part of his curatorial task to arrange the osteological collection of the Hunterian Museum. The osteological work was not published until 1853, but in the intervening years various spin-offs of this basic museum work appeared in print. . . . Owen extracted from the catalogue work his comprehensive account of transcendental osteology which he presented to the British Association in the form of a major report (1846); it was enormously detailed, densely packed with specifics, loaded with technical terms, and tedious to read. This report, with some additions, was published in book form under the title On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848). The following year, 1849, Owen expanded upon some parts of his BAAS Report in a lecture at the Royal Institution, published as On the Nature of Limbs. It was less overloaded with anatomical detail and nomenclature than his report, and more accessible to a wider audience" (Rupke, Richard Owen Victorian Naturalist, pp. 163-64)