Morning comes early when you’re in the field. No matter where you are—Mongolia, Montana, or Madagascar—it’s bound to be impossibly hot later in the day. So it’s better to be looking for fossils when it’s reasonably comfortable to be walking around or digging in the rocks to extract dinosaur bones and teeth.
It’s 6:30 a.m. and we’re camped on a small piece of real estate, a wooded island of sorts, midstream in the Sibişel River, which rushes by us from its headwaters in the Retezat Mountains some 25 kilometers away to the south, eventually to reach the Danube and then the Black Sea. We are in the northern foothills of the Southern Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania in western Romania.
It’s clear and crisp this morning and has been dry for about a week now, ever since we began our fieldwork near the village of Sânpetru. The night’s dew still clings to the outside of our domed tents, which make an assemblage of what looks like blue turtles (Plate I, top). The camp also has a few more-conventional walled tents for storage and a kitchen. From the cook tent, the smell of freshly brewed camp coffee floats across our small opening in the woods and others must smell it, too, since they are also groggily emerging from their tents.
In addition to the strong coffee, breakfast consists of bread and cheeses—pâine şi brânză—and some juice or fruits. Sometimes there is slănină, a kind of thick bacon nearly devoid of meat. Not much good for those of us who are vegetarians, but many enjoy its taste and the way it sizzles as we watch the sun come up.
After breakfast, it’s time to pack up the bags of supplies we’ll need in the field, making sure to bring water and checking that there is fuel for the jackhammer. After everything is accounted for, we head out of our camp. Single file, we cross the makeshift bridge of timber and ancient wooden slats to get to the west side of the Sibişel River and the dirt road that connects Sânpetru to the village of Ohaba Sibişel farther to the south, with exposures of mixed orange and gray-green rocks outcropping on our side of the river and along the bluffs on the other side. Women from the village pound out their laundry on the rocks along the banks of the Sibişel, while their husbands and older children tend their herds of sheep and cows in the hills above the river.
Prospecting and quarrying are the order of the day, so our crew (Plate I, bottom)—variable in number but often consisting of a dozen or so volunteers from nearby towns and cities, high schoolers as well as friends and colleagues—is split in two. Prospecting, the foundation of all paleontological discoveries, is the only way we can know where there are fossils—by walking and looking. On the whole, there are lots of bones to be found in the rock outcroppings in the Haţeg Basin in southern Hunedoara County, especially along a 2.5 km stretch of the Sibişel Valley directly south of Sânpetru. These rocks constitute the Sânpetru Formation, a cyclic stack of sandstones and mudstones that were originally deposited here as sediment by braided streams and floodplains that occupied the lower part of an alluvial fan about 70 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous. A good time period and environment in Earth’s history to encounter our ancient objectives: dinosaurs.
Locating the remains of dinosaurs and other extinct organisms, however, is generally a matter of serendipity. The problem in this part of the world is twofold: most of the fossils occur in isolation, with the separate bits removed from each other, and most of the rocks available for collecting are covered with vegetation. As a result, you need to have good eyes to see these bones and teeth emerging from their sedimentary tomb, as well as a strong back and legs to clamber up rocky slopes and range widely from exposure to exposure. Fortunately, we have both; prospecting thus far has yielded several isolated vertebrae belonging to two different kinds of dinosaurs (the ornithopod Zalmoxes and a titanosaurid sauropod), a cervical rib whose owner we haven’t yet identified, lots of turtle fragments—virtually all shell material, probably from Kallokibotion—and a partial tooth that appears to belong to the duck-billed Telmatosaurus.
The quarry workers have to recross the Sibişel River farther down by means of another makeshift bridge, this time a long, narrow slab of concrete, all the while pushing a gaggle of stubborn sheep out of the way as a shepherd watches from under a tree and his dog growls territorially at us. We are making our way to the Lower Quarry, one of the sites we’re presently working. Thus far, the Lower Quarry has produced teeth attributable to crocodilians, Zalmoxes, and a few small theropods. Right now, a Telmatosaurus scapulocoracoid (shoulder girdle) and two sauropod humeri are visible in the quarry. Today we’re removing what looks to be a modest-sized braincase, but we cannot yet say to whom it belongs.
As the morning progresses, the temperature in the quarry rises to 38°C (100°F) or more, and the humidity reaches as much as 80%. We have no cover from the sun in the quarry, but there’s modest shade to be had in a nearby scrub shelter. Quarry work is not particularly high tech. We rely mostly on tools generally found at home: chisels, paint brushes, ice picks, glue bottles, and other hand tools. There’s also a stash of rock hammers for everyone; a pry bar, shovels, and a pickax for removing soil and rocks as the perimeter of the quarry becomes ever larger; and, when the work demands it, a jackhammer and a generator to blast though the more resistant overburden. We also have some acetone and polyvinyl acetate beads to make the dilute hardener for preserving our fossils. Most of the specimens, small and often isolated, are simply removed from the rocks with a modicum of effort but the greatest of care. A label is made to indicate where it was collected, and then the specimen is placed in a bag, to be stored at camp. Occasionally, a jacket made of plaster and strips of burlap is constructed around the larger and more fragile specimens to keep them intact. Meanwhile, back at camp, there are a few people whose job it is to squat in the shallows of the Sibişel River, attending to bags of cheesecloth that contain loose sediment and, we hope, small fossils from several outcrops of the Sânpetru Formation. Our wet-screening efforts are designed to find tiny dinosaur teeth or the fossil remains of fish, amphibians, lizards, or mammals, the smaller inhabitants of the region during the Late Cretaceous.
Despite the heat and incumbent discomfort (or maybe because of it), time spent prospecting or quarrying gives everyone a chance to learn about each other. With luck and some ill-defined, essential ingredients, the beginnings of a community take place. Names are learned—Cristina, Bogdan (Bob), Cosmin, Vali, George, Ovidiu, Mircea, Nicu, Roxanna, Florin—and personalities surface: the leaders, followers, clowns, fixer-uppers, and just plain hard workers. Later, during meals, rest times, and at night, the rhythm of the place transforms the crew into a family. This family fuels our dinosaur expedition, a joint, international effort between Muzeul Civilizaţiei Dacice şi Romane Deva, Romania, the museum where our fossils will later reside, and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.
By noon, we’re in considerable need of rest and food, so it’s back to camp. Lunch preparation is a traded-off duty shared by the crew. It usually consists of some combination of fresh veggies, rice, pasta, potatoes, or cabbage; meats such as mici (pronounced “meech”: small, spicy grilled sausages) or salami; and bread. Pate de ficat (liver pâté) is the most appreciated food in the field. The stove runs poorly; it’s American made, but forced to run with leaded fuel. As a consequence, it needs to be cleaned out daily. How it manages to run for the duration of the summer, only the deities of fieldwork can say.
How we obtain our food and water takes some planning, particularly since we don’t have regular use of a vehicle or a freezer. Consequently, we bring most of our food with us from Deva when we first travel from the museum to camp at the beginning of the field season. With a population of nearly 70,000, Deva, the county seat of Hunedoara County, has a great outdoor market and quite a few grocery stores for buying our essentials. Canned fruits, vegetables, and meats are available in Haţeg, a city of 11,000 and our closest connection to the civilized world. Other necessities—such as cheeses, milk, bread, and fresh vegetables—are bought from the villagers in Sânpetru. For our supply of water, we walk up the road to the outskirts of Sânpetru, where a farmer has allowed us to fill up water jugs from his spring. Beer—Haţegana, brewed in the city of Haţeg, of course—can be had from the local bar in Sânpetru.
Similar to the surrounding villages, Sânpetru consists of about a hundred or so dwellings, two churches (Orthodox, Baptist), a store where you could buy some foodstuffs, and two bars. In many ways, a visit to Sânpetru is like stepping into the late nineteenth century. The streets are dirt roads, traveled mostly by cows, sheep, geese, and a horse or two, with an occasional car or truck as the only acknowledgment of the present. The houses, one-story buildings of brick and clay topped with brick-orange tile roofs, are all gated so that family activities do not spill out into the road. Each house has a small vegetable plot, and the villagers also farm along the floodplain of the Sibişel River. Grazing is a communal affair, where everyone heads for the fields in the morning and shares the duty of watching the animals for the day, returning when it begins to turn dark. Harvests from the field are brought into town on wagons pulled by cows or horses. One road leads to nearby Săcel, another little village where there is a small nineteenth-century castle, now used as a storage building by an orphanage. Although now run down, the castle must have been magnificent when it belonged to a family of nobles, the Nopcsa family, prior to the 1920s.
The region surrounding us is quite beautiful and peacefully rural, with vistas of hills and mountains wherever you look. This is the heart of the some of the very early recorded human history in Transylvania, that of the Dacians (pronounced “Dachians”). They were a sedentary tribal people of Indo-European descent who lived in the Transylvanian region (then known as Dacia) between the second century BCE and first century CE. Agriculture and metallurgy were their chief occupations. The wheat, fruit, wine, honey, and wax they produced were traded to the Greeks for jewelry, ceramics, sheer fabrics, and oil. From their extensive iron-mining efforts, the Dacians made weapons and a great variety of tools that were superior to the earlier bronze tools. They also crafted jewelry and vessels from the gold and silver they exploited.
The Dacians built a sophisticated and powerful defense system—a series of fortresses and fortified cities around the capital of the Dacian kingdom, Sarmizegetusa Regia—especially during the reigns of King Burebista (70–44 BCE) and King Decebal (87–106 CE). Part of this defense ring can be seen 30 km to the northeast of where we are currently working. Sarmizegetusa Regia—as well as nearby fortresses at Costeşti, Blidaru, and Piatra Roşie—were the last points of resistance of the Dacians during the campaign of conquest by the Roman emperor Traianus (53–117 CE) in 105 CE. After conquering Dacia, the Romans expanded the mines, especially those previously used by the Dacians to obtain gold, and also started many new ones. To maintain peace in their newly conquered region, the Roman administration and its large army required new cities and camps; by the end of their rule, they built dozens across the former Dacian kingdom. The most important was Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, the capital of Roman Dacia, which can still be seen about a dozen kilometers due west of where we have set up camp. It was large, with all the features of a Roman city—streets, aqueducts, a small arena or coliseum, a palace, and a number of temples. The Romans flourished for a long time in Dacia, no doubt traveling and carrying on commerce right here along the Sibişel, but after two centuries they had to abandon the region, due to the weakening of their empire.
Much of the history of the Haţeg region since then is preserved in its small churches. They’re found in all of the villages in the area—in Sântămăria-Orlea, Pui, Săcel, Sânpetru, and Vălioara—but the Orthodox church in Densuş is the best known. A bizarre but very elegant church of some mystery—once thought to be a mausoleum for a Roman general or a temple for the god Mars—the Densuş church apparently was built in the thirteenth century, on a tenth- to eleventh-century foundation, from stones taken from the ruins of Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa. The unique and somewhat strange architecture is reminiscent of the Romanesque style, but the construction was certainly cobbled together from tiles, tombstones, and columns, with a pagan altar in the center of the church, as well as containing small statues and a stone-carved figure of a lion by a local builder who seems to have had little regard for strict architectural design.
That’s enough historical and geographic recounting for now; it’s time to head back to the field. In the afternoon, half of the crew again heads for the Lower Quarry for more work and the other half—the prospectors—head for Târnov Hill, in the middle of the Sibişel Valley, where the Sânpetru Formation is exposed. It looks entirely covered with scrub forest, but it may hide some interesting areas of outcrop. In any event, we haven’t searched it before, so off the dinosaur hunters go.
After our work in the morning, there are no fossils showing in the Lower Quarry, but we’re confident that there are more bones and teeth to be had. So with jackhammer, pickaxes, and shovels, we begin enlarging the quarry. By 6:00 p.m., the quarry is now almost double its earlier size and ready for the finer-grained work of finding and removing the teeth and bones that are yet to be discovered at the Lower Quarry. So we troop back to camp, encountering on the way the outcrop wanderers. They have had some success, finding a crocodilian tooth in one place and, in another, a mish-mash of highly weathered bone scraps. We’ll head back there tomorrow to see if there are better specimens preserved beneath the ground; if so, then we’ll open up another quarry. But now it’s time to eat. Dinner is usually like lunch—bread, butter, and jam, roasted corn, and spaghetti. However, today someone brought back from Sânpetru a homemade mămăliguţa, a peasant dish made from crushed cornmeal that is also known as polenta.1 Considered by many to be the national dish of Romania, it is certainly one of the oldest, with recipes dating back beyond Romanian history to the Etruscans of the ninth century BCE. From the Etruscans to the Romans to the Romanians to us at our pale-ontological field camp.
Most days it’s sunny, hot, and humid in the field, but sometimes we get rain. Unlike other regions rich in dinosaur fossils, where rains are rare (though violent when they come), Transylvanian rains are much more common. Averaging 5 inches or more per month over the summer, a Transylvanian shower can last a while—throughout an afternoon, overnight, or for several days. The only thing left to do is wait it out, get cranky, realize that crankiness is an appalling way to occupy your time, and, when the rain stops, take down the tent and let it air dry in the sun. The mud-covered paths, rocks, and fossils will also need drying-out time.
Beyond an occasional rain, we also receive visitors in camp, some to help, some just passing through. A Sunday hardly ever goes by that the parents of some of the crew don’t stop by with meat dishes (sarmale: stuffed cabbage leaves; muşchi de porc: pork cutlet), soups (ciorbă de burtă cu smăntână: tripe soup with sour cream), and desserts (pastries like plăcintă and clătite, and even cookies)—it’s really a feast on Sundays. A crew of paleontologists and natural history aficionados come from Trieste, Italy, eager to join the dig. A monsignor from a nearby Orthodox church heads on foot toward a parish who knows where. Three generations of Gypsy women, barefooted and bedazzling in their long, brightly colored skirts, wander through the woods.
During the day, but especially at night, we share our world with mice, bugs, feral dogs, and mosquitoes. In the heat of the day, we see blue-headed and little brown rock lizards. There are also rumors of vipers in the area, but they appear to have no interest in paleontologists. Bears range wild in Retezat National Park, Romania’s first, located in the Retezat Mountains to the south of us, but they’ve never been reported to roam where we’re camped. Occasionally, hawks glide effortlessly above us, probably looking for things other than fossils from their vantage point. Of all the birds of the area, we always look for wild storks nesting on chimneys or telephone poles—these birds are known to bring good luck.
At night, it again turns cool and clear. The mountains look especially beautiful, set as a shadow enshrined in an ever-darkening sky. Before it’s too dim, field notes are written, someone pulls out a guitar, maybe there’s a campfire. Small bats cavort in the early, comforting quiet of the night. Soon the first stars flicker, maybe a satellite, eventually to be drowned out by the outrageous spectacle of the Milky Way, best seen during an occasional rendezvous with the corner bush in the middle of the night.
This, then, is the Joint Muzeul Civilizaţiei Dacice şi Romane Deva–Johns Hopkins University Transylvanian Dinosaur Expedition.
And it all begins again tomorrow.
One spring day in 1895, 12-year-old Ilona Nopcsa took a walk in the hills surrounding her family’s baronial estate (Plate II) outside the small village of Szacsal.2 There she found, by chance, the first fossilized bones recognized from the Transylvanian region. Taking them home to show her 18-year-old brother, Franz Baron Nopcsa, these fossils apparently had an immediate fascination for him. Ilona showed him the site, and he later returned on his own, collecting additional dinosaur fossils before returning to Vienna to begin his university education.
When he entered the University of Vienna, Nopcsa sought out Professor Eduard Suess (figure 1.1), an eminent geologist at the University of Vienna, for advice.3 By his own admission, Nopcsa knew nothing about paleontology, osteology, or biology, to which Suess is supposed to have said, “Then learn it.” Nopcsa might have chosen any sort of career for himself, simply because of his brilliance and nobility. Yet Ilona’s serendipitous discovery at Szacsal provided the spark for Franz’s choice of a career, and he committed himself thereafter to the study of these fossils.
Yet how to begin? At that time, the university lacked even the most elementary educational possibilities in vertebrate paleontology. Without courses to take and textbooks to study, Nopcsa was forced along an autodidactic route. He educated himself by contacting researchers elsewhere in the world, by teaching himself comparative anatomy, and by bringing all of this information to bear on his new fossils. The material—a severely crushed skull, lower jaws, and some vertebrae—amounted to a paleontologist’s worst nightmare (figure 1.2). Where did one bone stop and the adjacent bone begin? Due to its considerable deformation, how could each skull element be reconstructed? And with such obvious problems, how could these fossils be reliably placed in a taxonomic scheme with other dinosaurs known from elsewhere in the world? Despite these quandaries, Nopcsa persevered, painstakingly preparing the fossils to glean as much information as possible about his new Transylvanian dinosaur. This material was to become the type specimen for a new genus and species of dinosaur, the duckbill known as Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus, described by the 22-year-old Nopcsa and published in the Memoirs of the Imperial Academy of Science of Vienna in 1900.4
Figure 1.1. Eduard Suess (1831–1914)
Figure 1.2. The first dinosaur known from the Haţeg Basin: the hadrosaurid Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus. (Original plate from Nopcsa 1900)
Figure 1.3. Louis Dollo (1857–1931)
Nopcsa’s recognition of a new form of dinosaur was no small achievement. T. transsylvanicus was the first dinosaur known from Transylvania, discovered at a time when very few good examples of dinosaur skulls and skeletons were known.5 Following tradition, Nopcsa’s paper began with a meticulous, if inevitably boring, anatomical description. Yet he knew that there were processes behind the formation of these bones, shaping them, providing them with the means to move against each other and to form rigid capsules around sense organs and the brain. With these things in mind, and the basic description completed, Nopcsa ventured into a less tangible, more interpretive research realm, becoming the first to attempt a reconstruction of the brain, nerves, musculature, and blood supply of a dinosaur head. This innovative perspective would soon tie Nopcsa to the central European school of paleobiology, a discipline whose goals were to link interpretations of the hard and soft anatomy of extinct organisms, their functional morphology, and their significance in evolutionary theory.6 Nopcsa’s paper was to bring him into contact with Louis Dollo (figure 1.3), the Belgian doyen of paleobiology during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, who praised the young researcher as “a comet racing across our paleontological skies, spreading but a diffuse sort of light.”7 Along with Othenio Abel (Nopcsa’s contemporary at the University of Vienna), Jan Versluys, Otto Jaekel, Carl Wiman, and Ferdinand Broili, Nopcsa came to be one of paleobiology’s greatest protagonists.8 Of relevance here are Nopcsa’s analyses of sexual dimorphism and growth and development in extinct vertebrates, and his soft-tissue reconstructions, as well as his studies on skin color and analyses of jaw mechanics and locomotion.9
With Telmatosaurus seeding the clouds, there was now a deluge of discoveries in Transylvania. As well as 14 brief studies, Nopcsa published six longer monographs on the Late Cretaceous vertebrates from the Haţeg Basin (Plate III, top). In addition to his first monograph on Telmatosaurus, three other monographs focused on the ornithopod Rhabdodon (now known as Zalmoxes10) and were published successively in 1902, 1904, and 1922. Another, dedicated to the Transylvanian turtle Kallokibotion, was published in 1922. The last, on the ankylosaur Struthiosaurus, appeared in 1929. Nopcsa intended to write a seventh monograph on the sauropod Magyarosaurus with his close friend Friedrich von Huene (figure 1.4), one of Germany’s most prominent vertebrate paleontologists, but this collaboration never took place.11
Although we regard Nopcsa’s studies of the Transylvanian dinosaurs as his greatest legacy, he is equally well known for his work on Albania.12 Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, Nopcsa began a short but intense relationship with the remote Balkan country of Albania.13 He had first been introduced to the Albanian region in 1899, when he met Ludwig Graf Drasković, a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army who was returning from this part of the Balkans. Apparently it was Drasković who overwhelmed Nopcsa with thrilling stories of rugged mountains, poor but proud villagers, and blood feuds. It was not until after his graduation from the University of Vienna, however, that Nopcsa made his first trip to Albania, thanks to a graduation gift of 2,000 Austrian crowns from his uncle and namesake, Franz Baron Nopcsa (Franz Baron Nopcsa, the elder, was the First Lord Chamberlain to Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary). Traveling first through Greece in 1903, then through the eastern Balkans, Nopcsa finally made his way to Skutari (now Shkodra) in northern Albania, where he lived with a local family. His extensive travels in the mountains of northern Albania over the next 15 years provided the basis for his detailed accounts of the geology and geography of the region, which he used later in his scientific career in support of Wegener’s theory of continental drift. It also gave Nopcsa the opportunity to learn about the laws, customs, and people of this remote area of the ever-explosive Balkan Peninsula. Living with and working alongside members of the Merdite tribe, Nopcsa integrated himself into the community, amassing considerable information about the tribes of northern Albania: their history, languages, and religious practices. His major works—amounting to well over a thousand pages of text—are still considered among the most significant in Albanology.
Figure 1.4. Franz Baron Nopcsa (left) and Friedrich von Huene (1875–1969; right) inspecting the fossil-bearing, Lower Jurassic strata at Holzmaden, Germany. (Photo courtesy of Universität Tübingen, Germany)
The ethnic and political problems of today’s Balkans are deeply rooted in history, manifested, for instance, in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. At that time, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires politically dominated the region, with tensions in the northern Balkan area being especially high. No one could have appreciated this situation more than Nopcsa. He had lived with the people, learned their language and dialects, been involved in a blood feud, and was a leader of soldiers. As a stalwart supporter of Austro-Hungary, he feared Turkish and Serbian aggressions from the south and east, and sought solutions through his political connections and influence. He pushed for an independent Albania allied to Austro-Hungary, a union presumably desired because of his love for his adopted Albania and his loyalty to the Empire. He used whatever influence he could muster to sway Count Pál Teleki von Szék and Count István von Bethlen, two fellow Transylvanians destined to be successive prime ministers of Hungary, and the general chief of staff of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff. Nopcsa’s plan was to arm the northern Albanian tribes and carry out a guerrilla war against the Turks, routing them and liberating Albania. Nopcsa also had his name put forward as a potential candidate for King of Albania in 1913, should his campaign have resulted in success. It was Prince Wilhelm zu Wied, however, who got the job, even though the latter held it for only six months before being driven out by the Albanians. The 1914 murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was a turning point for Nopcsa; although he continued to publish his often-massive Albanian studies until his death, he was never to return to his adopted country after 1916. His involvement in the geopolitics of the Balkans did not stop with Albania, however. During World War I and immediately afterwards, he apparently also carried out espionage in western Romania under the auspices of the prime minister of Hungary, Count István Tisza.
Figure 1.5. Nopcsa’s secretary, Bajazid Elmas Doda (1888–1933; left), and Franz Baron Nopcsa (right). (Photo courtesy of the Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest)
It’s a pity that Nopcsa was never able to fully explore the paleobiology, paleoecology, and evolutionary dynamics of the Haţeg fauna. For on 25 April 1933, Nopcsa’s body and that of his Albanian secretary, Bajazid Elmas Doda (figure 1.5, on previous page), were found by police at their Singerstrasse residence in Vienna. A note at the scene, written in Nopcsa’s hand, made clear the last moments of the lives of these two men: Nopcsa had doctored Bajazid’s morning tea with sleeping powder and then had shot him; thereafter Nopcsa had put a gun to his own head to commit his final act.
