At the crack of dawn, Franz Nopcsa mounted his horse and setoffforShkodra, one of the most ancient towns in Albania. It was1903 and the young aristocrat from Transylvania had just finished his PhD, a meticulous study of dinosaur remains dug up on his family estate. Now he was exploring a place he had dreamed about since childhood-the wild, romantic mountains of northern Albania, a land peopled by lawless tribes who were well-armed and very dangerous. As Nopcsa approached a bend in the road, there was a shot. âThe bullet went right through my hat and grazed my head, but did not injure me,â he wrote later. âI leapt off my horse and sought shelter.â But when he tried to fire back, his assailant had vanished. The rest of the journey, he wrote with some disappointment, âpassed without eventâ. Not much of Nopcsaâs life passed without event. Palaeontologist, spy and one-time contenderforthe throne of Albania, the baronâs life was one long adventure.
IF TRANSYLVANIAâS most famous son is Count Dracula, then Baron Nopcsa von Felsö-SzilvĂĄs comes a close second. And unlike Dracula, Nopcsa was real. The last of a long line of Hungarian aristocrats, he was half comic-book hero, half brilliant scholar. His extraordinary adventures ended in blood â but they began with a bone.
In 1895, Nopcsaâs younger sister Ilona was walking on the familyâs estate near SzentpĂ©terfalva when she discovered some strange bones sticking out of the ground. Intrigued, the 18-year-old Nopcsa sent them to the eminent Viennese geologist Eduard Suess for identification. Work it out for yourself, Suess told him. Nopcsa enrolled at the University of Vienna and did just that.
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The bones were dinosaur fossils. They belonged to a new species of hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived around 70 million years ago, not long before the dinosaurs disappeared. The baronâs vast backyard proved a fruitful hunting ground for a budding palaeontologist. Soon he had unearthed more fossils, including a heavily armoured ankylosaur, a long-necked sauropod and a pterosaur.
The Transylvanian dinosaurs kept Nopcsa busy for the next 30 years. But he was not like other palaeontologists. Flamboyantly homosexual, he strode about in a black velvet cloak or drove around on his motorbike with his lover in the sidecar. Self-taught and rich enough to pursue whatever line of enquiry took his fancy, he also looked at dinosaurs differently. He didnât see his fossils as collections of bones, but as living animals. âHe was a palaeobiologist rather than a palaeontologist. He wanted to attach some biology to the bones he had collected,â says David Weishampel of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, an expert on both Nopcsa and Transylvanian dinosaurs.
Nopcsa tried to reconstruct his dinosaursâ muscles and nervous systems. He tried to figure out how they moved, how they ate their food, how they fitted into the world they inhabited â and how they had evolved. He conjured up images of dinosaur societies in which adults cared for their young and exhibited sophisticated patterns of behaviour. He reasoned that pterosaurs must be warm-blooded.
Perhaps Nopcsaâs best-known idea was his ancestral bird, a creature he called âpro-avisâ. The discovery of Archaeopteryx in 1861 had prompted intense debate about the origins of flight. The prevailing view was that tree-dwelling reptiles went through a gliding stage, acquiring webbing between their fore and hind limbs before developing wings and powered flight. Nopcsa argued that the first flying animals had started on the ground. His pro-avis was a bipedal predator with powerful hind legs adapted for running and which acquired feathers and wings to give it extra speed in the chase.
âThe baronâs vast backyard proved a fruitful hunting ground. Soon he had found an armoured ankylosaur, a sauropod and a pterosaurâ
At the time Nopcsa got little support for his theory. âThe âground-upâ idea wasnât thought about again until the 1960s,â says Weishampel. After that, the argument swung Nopcsaâs way: experimental studies, theoretical models and new fossils all seemed to support the ground-up view â at least until the latest discovery in China of a tiny, possibly tree-dwelling therapod with feathers that pre-dates Archaeopteryx. âNopcsa was asking good questions, even if he didnât always get the answers right,â says Weishampel.
Dinosaurs were only one of Nopcsaâs great passions. Albania was another. The baron was as much an expert on the history and culture of Albania as he was on fossils. Despite his encounter on the road to Skhodra, he had a romantic view of the wild mountain tribes and often returned. He learned the local dialects, grew his hair long and adopted the traditional dress. What he admired most was the way the mountain men refused to be subjugated by the Turks, who had occupied their country for centuries. He did what he could to fuel rebellion: he gave fiery speeches and smuggled in weapons. In 1912 the Balkan states joined forces to drive out the Turks, then they squabbled over the spoils and fought among themselves. Albania emerged from the troubles as an independent state â and Europeâs leaders decided it should have a king. But who?
Nopcsa didnât wait to be asked. The Albanians loved him, he claimed. And he was wealthy: after he was installed he would have no need of financial support. âOnce 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,â he declared, although it was âa step which under other circumstances I would have been loath to take.â The crown went to William of Wied, a minor German princeling. The Albanians threw him out after seven months.
Nopcsaâs heroic exploits werenât over yet. In the first world war, he spied for Austria-Hungary and led a company of Albanian volunteers. This time Nopcsa was on the losing side, and he lost more than most. Hungary ceded Transylvania to Romania, and the baron lost his castle, his lands and his fortune. He tried to claim compensation, but on a visit to his former home a gang of men jumped him, leaving him for dead at the side of the road. He survived.
No longer wealthy, he was forced to take a job. Hungary put him in charge of its Geological Institute â but it didnât compare with being a king. Nopcsa soon packed his things and headed for Vienna, where he set up home with his long-standing Albanian lover and secretary Bayazid Doda, and went back to work on his fossils.
One question had been puzzling him for a long time. The Transylvanian dinosaurs were all unusually small. The sauropod, for instance, was just 6 metres long when many of its relatives in other parts of the world reached 20 or 30 metres. The Transylvanian species also showed many primitive features, which was odd given that they were some of the last dinosaurs that ever lived. Nopcsa reasoned that they had become dwarf because they lived on an island. In the late Cretaceous most of what is now Europe was covered by sea, but the area that would become Nopcsaâs estates was on what is known as Hateg Island, a warm swampy place cut off from the rest of the world. The dinosaurs were the descendants of species that had been marooned there millions of years earlier and had kept many of their ancient features. Stuck on an island with limited resources, smaller animals had an advantage, so the dinosaurs began to shrink. âHis ideas on the dwarf dinosaurs hold up rather well,â says Weishampel.
By now, though, Europeâs dinosaurs had been sidelined. North America was the centre of attention. Fossil hunters in the US and Canada had been finding magnificent specimens. The public was spellbound and the priority was to show off these big, bizarre creatures. âWhen the Americans found a dinosaur, they dug it up, reconstructed it, wrote a paper and put it on display,â says Weishampel. They werenât much interested in putting flesh on the bones. Besides, they disapproved of Nopcsa. He wasnât part of the academic establishment but a dilettante aristo, and a homosexual to boot. âThey thought he was just too whacky and brushed him aside,â says Weishampel.
Nopcsa grew increasingly depressed. Once the lord of a castle, he and his lover now shared a fourth-floor flat in Vienna. All the money had gone: he hadnât paid his maid for months, heâd sold his fossils to the Natural History Museum in London, and he was arranging to sell his precious books. On 26 April 1933, the Neue Freie Presse reported âBloody drama in the Singerstrasseâ. As Doda slept, Nopcsa shot him twice in the head, then walked to his study, sat at his desk and shot himself. It was a dramatic end to a dramatic life.
