I honestly wish I came up with that title for him, but that's one of the headlines from an article in
I just recently learned about Baron Nopcsa (apparently pronounced "nop-cha"), while listening to the I Know Dino podcast, I think episode 84, where they brought him up briefly. I had never heard of his man before, but after hearing the words "spy", "Baron", "would be king" and listing off his still relevant paleontology theories, I had to find out more about him.
I can't seem to find any books about him, only Wiki entries and two
Scientific American articles (links below). The one with the cool name you have to buy for $8, so I might pick it up. I am starting to grow more obsessed with this guy as I do my research.
The Baron of Szcsal Transylvania was a strange guy. Not just in the fact he was a freaking Baron of vampireville, but also because of his hobbies, connections and eccentric personality. He was known to be a bit of an egomaniac, knowing how brilliant he was in most aspects of his life, and seemed to have suffered from either manic depression or bipolar disorder.
His scientific work in the paleontology field still holds water today, but he's relatively unknown, having for whatever reason, slipped into obscurity.
Nopcsa was also openly gay, which at the time was pretty taboo, which added to his already "strange" personality back in the late 1800s. I'm guessing this probably had something to do with the fact he wasn't really talked about much in books and published works, even though he himself and his work was fascinating.
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| Nopcsa's work 1903 |
Franz Nopcsa von Felsö-Szilvás was born in 1877 in Transylvania into an aristocratic family. It was actually Nopcsa's sister who found a dinosaur bone when Nopcsa was a young man, thus sparking a passionate love for paleontology.
Now, back in the early 1900s, paleontology was hardly what it is today. It was a wild west frontier of science; theories flying in all directions that rarely had any backing in real study. This was during the "bone wars", so more people were obsessed with finding as many species and fossils as possible, not really doing any true
science.
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| I think this is a real game?? |
Nopcsa was different. And this is why he's so great.
That and he was a spy during World War I, which is neat.
The dinosaur bone his sister found was taken to the University of Vinna, to the head of the geological institute at the time, Eduard Suess. In what I imagine to be a movie like moment, the old professor identified the bone in question and when pressed for further detail about the creature by Nopcsa, the winkled old man bitterly said "Go study them!"
So he did.
- The Baron's work in Paleontology
Like everything he did, Nopcsa dove head first into his studies of paleontology the University at Vienna and quickly rose the ranks. According to his Wiki page, he did his first academic lecture at twenty-two. Dinosaurs were an extreme passion of the Baron's, something he would dedicate a good chunk of his rich life to pursuing.
After WWI, Nopcsa would eventually become the head of the Hungarian Geological Institute, were he would make ground breaking theories about dinosaurs that had never been brought to light until then.
Among his contributions to paleontology are some of the very first notions of complex behaviors in dinosaurs, ideas on how they reared their young, and how they may have looked.
This was all during a time were the only thing most paleontologists were after was the biggest, best collection of bones. It was because of this paleontologist pissing contest that we had so many misclassifications and garbage studies done on dinosaurs.
But hey, have to start somewhere, right?
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| Trex through scientific history |
The link between birds and dinosaurs is fairly well known today, but wasn't for a very long time. Nopcsa wrote about this during his time at the University, and discussed in detail about how dinosaurs may have had feathers in order to move faster and brood over their nests.
Nopcsa's theories on dinosaur's behavior and evolutionary link to birds wasn't widely accepted until the 1960s, long after Nopcsa was already dead, but his work was fantastic and ground breaking for his time.
He also believed that at least some of the dinosaurs were warm blooded, unlike the more commonly accepted theory that dinosaurs were slow moving "lizards". This of course is known widely held today.
Another study that I thought was interesting was his work in sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs, and a theory he coined as "insular dwarfism" now known as "island rule".
Sexual dimorphism is basically the difference between the sexes in animals, like size, color, etc. In dinosaurs, it's typically the bigger skeleton, where as in animals like deer, it would be the animal with horns.
The "island rule" is the theory that animals restricted to small islands, over generations, will adapt to be much smaller. Since some of the dinosaurs he found were considered "pygmy" at the time, this theory made sense to his research.
Shockingly, like everything else he's researched, this is also still widely accepted.
He also discovered a new small sauropod dinosaur, Magyarosaurus, which he named after the
providence he lived in.
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| Magyarosaurus |
- Spy, weapons smuggler, and would be King of Albania
It wasn't just Nopcsa's brilliant work in paleontology that made the man so unique, but also his colorful life as an Albanian nationalist. During that time in history, Albania was struggling to gain it's independence from the Turkish-Balkan Ottoman Empire.
Being the fearless seeker of adventure, and driven by his love for Albania, Nopsca was one of the first to explore the mountain area of Albania, learning the local customs of that area.
This exploration and study of the culture produced more than fifty different books and works on the folklore, linguistics, customs and so on from that region. He his known to be one of the biggest contributor to Albanian studies.
His speeches and support of Albania's liberation from the Turks helped to finally gain Albania's freedom, but he also smuggled weapons and supplies over to help aid the process. The Baron was content to become the "King of Albania", as seen from his diary entry quoted from his Wiki page:
"Once a reigning European monarch, I would have no difficulty coming up with the further funds needed by marrying a wealthy American heiress aspiring to royalty, a step which under other circumstances I would have been loath to take."
Dude doens't do anything small, right?
During WWI Nopcsa added "spy" to his already brilliant repertoire of colorful titles. If being a Baron, an aristrocat, and a brilliant paleontologist wasn't enough, then why not add something dangerous and mysterious to list!
Unfortunately, Nopcsa wasn't on the winning side of the war, and Transylvania was taken back over by Romania. This, sadly, had devastating effects on Nopcsa's finances and life.
- Tragic end to the Dinosaur Baron
By the end of WWI, Nopcsa had lost his family fortune. The once rich and prominent figure of the head of Hungarian Geological Institute was now penniless, and forced to sell his impressive fossil collection to England.
The financial blow, the loss of his fossils and work, and his emotional issues he already had caused Nopcsa to end his life, and that of his lover Bajazid Elmaz Doda in 1933.
Sources:
Franz's wiki page
"Baron Nopcasa: More than just Transylvanian Dinosaurs"
Scientific American September 2011 (
link)
"Dinosaur Baron of Transylvania"
Scientific American October 2011 (
link)
Back in the 1920's, possibly my favorite archaeologist/paleontologist/naturalist adventure seeker, Roy Chapman Andrews, traveled to Mongolia for the first ever fossil expedition in the Gobi Dessert. At the time, the area was the wild west, a real "no man's land", which bandits and thieves that prowled the dessert. Armed with a convoy of trucks baring the American Flag and a shit ton of rifles, Andrews and his crew ventured the Gobi to find dinosaur bones.
