Education
He studied at the Royal Military Academy in Breda from 1867.
He studied at the Royal Military Academy in Breda from 1867.
He is best known for writing the first formal description of the (Varanus komodoensis) in 1912. Ouwens was the child of Pieter Anthonis Ouwens, accountant in Amsterdam, and Caroline Reiniera Nagels. In 1871, he became lieutenant at the Infantry in the Dutch East Indies and by 1883 he had been promoted to captain.
He remarried again in 1902 with Anna Josephina Soesman.
He eventually became curator of the Zoological Museum in Buitenzorg (now Bogor). As such he received a photo and a skin of a from Lieutenant Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek who had been the first Westerner to observe the lizards and had been told that they could reach 6 to 7 meters.
Ouwens dispatched a collector to Komodo who returned to Java with two adults and a young specimen. Ouwens named the species Varanus komodoensis in a publication of 1912.
