by Tim Flannery
Let us open the door of our time machine and step out onto Hateg, land of dragons. We have arrived at the end of a glorious autumn. The sun shines reassuringly, but at this latitude it is rather low in the sky. The air is tropic-warm, and the fine white sand of a bright beach crunches beneath our feet. The vegetation in our vicinity is a mix of low, flowering bushes, but elsewhere groves of palms and ferns are over-topped by ginkgos, their rich-gold autumnal foliage ripe to drop with the first squall of the coming, mild winter.3 We also see signs, in the form of large, scoured river valleys originating in the distant highlands, that rainfall is highly seasonal.
On a dry mountain ridge, we spy forest giants that resemble the cedars of Lebanon. Belonging to the now-extinct genus Cunninghamites, they are indeed a long-vanished kind of cypress. Nearer to hand, a fern-fringed waterhole is resplendent with waterlilies and lined with trees that bear a striking resemblance to the familiar London plane tree (genus Platanus). Waterlilies and plane trees are ancient survivors, and Europe has preserved a surprising number of such ‘vegetable dinosaurs’.4
Our eye is drawn from the land to the azure sea, where the strand is littered with what look at first to be opalescent truck tyres, complete with corrugated treads. They shine with a strange beauty in the tropical sun. Somewhere far out to sea a storm has killed a school of ammonites—nautilus-like creatures whose shells can exceed a metre in diameter—and wave, wind and current have brought their shells to Hateg’s shore.
As we walk the glistening sand we detect a stench. Ahead lies a great, barnacled lump stranded by the receding tide. It is a beast, unlike anything living today—a plesiosaur. The four flippers that once powerfully propelled her now lie flat and motionless on the sand. Protruding from the barrel-like body is an inordinately long neck, at the end of which sits a tiny head, still bobbing in the waves.
Three gigantic, vampire-like figures wrapped in leathery cloaks, each as tall as a giraffe, shamble out of the forest. Evil of eye and immensely muscular, the trio surround the carcass, which the largest effortlessly decapitates with its three-metre-long beak. The scavengers circle, and with savage jabs consume the body. Sobered by the spectacle, we step back to the safety of our time machine.
What we have seen hints at what a strange place Hateg is. The vampire-like beasts are a kind of giant pterosaur known as Hatzegopteryx. They, rather than some toothy dinosaur, were the island’s top predator. Had we ventured inland we might have encountered their usual prey—an array of pygmy dinosaurs. Hateg was a doubly strange place: strange to us because it dates to a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, but strange even within the age of dinosaurs because—like the rest of the European archipelago—it is an isolated land with a highly unusual ecology and fauna.
CHAPTER 2
Hateg’s First Explorer
The story of how we came to know about Hateg and its creatures is almost as astonishing as the land itself. In 1895, while the Irish novelist Bram Stoker was writing Dracula, a real Transylvanian nobleman, Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, Baron of Sǎcel, sat in his castle, obsessing not over blood, but bones. The bones in question had been a gift from his sister Ilona, who had found them while strolling along a riverbank on the Nopcsa family’s estate. They were clearly very, very old. Today the Nopcsa family castle at Sǎcel is a ruin, but in 1895 it was an elegant two-storey mansion with walnut furniture, a large library and a great entertainment hall, whose grand interior can still be glimpsed through its shattered windows. Although modest by grand European standards, the estate provided sufficient income to allow young Nopcsa to pursue his passion for old bones.
Nopcsa would become one of the most extraordinary palaeontologists who ever lived, yet today he is all but forgotten. His intellectual journey began when he left his castle, the gift of bones in hand, and enrolled in a science degree at the University of Vienna. Working largely alone, he soon established that the bones his sister had found were from the skull of a small, primitive kind of duckbilled dinosaur.1 Fascinated, the count embarked on his life’s work—resurrecting the dead of Hateg.
A polymath, loner and eccentric, Nopcsa saw many things more clearly than others, yet he described himself as suffering from ‘shattered nerves’. In 1992 Dr Eugene Gaffney, an unexcelled authority on fossil turtles, remarked of Nopcsa that ‘in his lucid periods he directed his mind to research on dinosaurs and other fossil reptiles’, but that between these moments of brilliance were periods of darkness and eccentricity.2 Today, perhaps, Nopcsa would be diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder. Whatever his malady, it left him without any sense of etiquette. In fact, he all too often displayed ‘a colossal talent for rudeness’.3
A telling example was recounted by that pioneer of fossil brain research Dr Tilly Edinger, who made a study of Nopcsa in the 1950s. In his first year at university, Nopcsa had published a description of his dinosaur skull—a considerable accomplishment. And when he met the most eminent palaeontologist of his day, Louis Dollo—also an aristocrat, the youthful count crowed, ‘Is it not marvellous that I, so young a man, have written such an excellent memoir?’4 Later, Dollo would offer a backhanded compliment, recalling Nopcsa as a ‘comet racing across our palaeontological skies, spreading but a diffuse sort of light’.5
At the University of Vienna, Nopcsa seems to have been left largely unsupervised. Isolated from colleagues, his independence extended even to the invention of a glue to repair his fossils. But he did have one colleague, Professor Othenio Abel, who shared an interest in palaeobiology. Abel was a fascist who founded a secret group of eighteen professors who worked to destroy the research careers of ‘Communists, Social Democrats and Jews’. He was nearly murdered when a colleague, Professor K. C. Schneider, attempted to shoot him. When the Nazis came to power Abel emigrated to Germany. Visiting Vienna after the Anschluss in 1939, he saw the Nazi flag flying at the university, and proclaimed it the happiest day of his life. Nopcsa had his own way of dealing with Abel. When Nopcsa fell ill he called Abel to his flat, commanding one of Europe’s greatest palaeontologists (who was nonetheless a commoner), to deliver a worn pair of gloves and a coat to Nopcsa’s lover.6
As Nopcsa studied his dinosaurs, a second great passion was stirring in his breast. While roaming the Transylvanian countryside he had met and fallen in love with Count Draŝković. Two years older than Nopcsa, Draŝković had been an adventurer in Albania, a place which, a century after Byron’s visit, remained exotic, dark and tribal. Influenced by his lover’s stories, Nopcsa made a number of privately funded trips to Albania, where he lived among the tribes, learned their languages and traditions, and even got involved in their disputes. A photograph shows him in his pomp, armed and dressed in the distinctive tribal regalia of the Shqiptar warrior. If wildly romantic, Nopcsa was also deeply inquisitive and a meticulous documenter who was soon recognised as Europe’s foremost expert on Albanian history, language and culture.
While travelling in Albania in 1906 Nopcsa met Bajazid Elmaz Doda, a shepherd who lived high in Albania’s Accursed Mountains. Nopcsa hired Doda as his secretary, confiding to his journal that Doda was ‘the only person since Count Draŝković who has truly loved me’.7 His relationship with Doda would last almost 30 years, and in 1923 Nopcsa honoured him by naming a strange fossil turtle after him: Kallokibotion bajazidi—‘beautiful and round Bajazid’.
The turtle’s bones had been found alongside those of dinosaurs on the family estate. At half a metre in length, Kallokibotion was a medium-sized amphibious creature, broadly similar in appearance to the pond tortoises seen in Europe today. But Kallokibotion’s bony anatomy proved that it was very different from any currently living species, belonging to an ancient, now-extinct group of primitive turtles, the last representatives of which were the astonishing Meiolaniforms.
The meiolaniids survived in Australia until the first Aborigines arrived about 45,000 years ago. The last were enormous, land-going creatures the size of a small car whose tails had become bony cudgels while their heads bore large,
recurved horns like those of cattle. It seems likely that the first Australians saw off almost the last descendants of Bajazid’s ‘beautiful and round’ turtle. But a few had drifted across the sea to the warm, humid, tectonically active islands of Vanuatu. Sequestered in their hermit kingdom the meiolaniids survived—until their lands were in turn discovered—this time by the ancestors of the Ni-Vanuatu, the people who inhabit Vanuatu today. A dense layer of butchered and cooked meiolaniid turtle bones dating to about 3000 years ago marks the arrival of humans. And so was lost a last trace of the lands of Modac—almost the last echo indeed, of that vanished archipelago.
Bajazid, Albania and fossils were the great constants in Nopcsa’s life, and of these three he would fall out of love with just one. His involvement with Albania reached its climax just before the outbreak of World War I, when he hatched an audacious, ill-fated plan to invade the country and become its first monarch.* Despite the distraction, Nopcsa remained elbow-deep in his palaeontology and in 1914 he produced a work on the lifestyle of the Transylvanian dinosaurs that revolutionised understandings of early Europe.8 What sets his science apart is that he analysed his fossils as the remains of living creatures that existed in specific habitats and responded to environmental constraints. Nopcsa was, in fact, the world’s first palaeobiologist.
Nopcsa demonstrated that Hateg was inhabited by just ten species of large creatures. These included a small carnivorous dinosaur known from two teeth (both subsequently lost), which Nopcsa named Megalosaurus hungaricus. Megalosaurus is a kind of carnivorous dinosaur whose fossils are indeed common elsewhere in Europe, but in older rocks. Its presence on Hateg looked anomalous, and Megalosaurus hungaricus was soon demonstrated to be a rare error by the young scientist.
It is a strange scientific fact, worthy of a small diversion here, that the earliest scientific name of Megalosaurus is Scrotum. The story starts with the first dinosaur fossil to be described and drawn—by the Reverend Robert Plot, in 1677.9 His The Natural History of Oxfordshire was arguably the first modern natural history in English, and in the fashion of the time it covered everything from Oxfordshire’s plants, animals and rocks to its notable buildings and even famous sermons given in its churches. Plot correctly identified the fossil in question as the end of a femur. Perhaps, he mused, it was from an elephant brought to Britain during the supposed visit of Emperor Claudius to Gloucester when (according to Plot) he rebuilt the city ‘in memory of the marriage of his fair daughter Gennissa with Arviragus, then king of Britain, where he possibly might have some of his elephants with him’. But vexingly, Plot could find no records of elephants closer to Gloucester than Marseille.*
After a long and learned discourse, Plot concluded that the bone, which was found near a graveyard, may have come from a giant. Like many of his contemporaries, Plot believed that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century work The History of the Kings of Britain was solid fact. And so strong is the pull of the great European dreamtime that Geoffrey of Monmouth began his history with a riff on Virgil, in which Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas, arrives on Albion’s shore to intermarry with the island’s original inhabitants, the ‘Giants of Albion’, and so founds the British race.
Plot did not give the relic a scientific name, and there matters rested until 1763, when one Richard Brookes reproduced Plot’s illustration in his own book, A New and Accurate System of Natural History.10 Brookes, who appears also to have believed Geoffrey of Monmouth,* didn’t think that the lump Plot illustrated was part of a bone. Instead, he identified it as pair of prodigious human testicles. With the giants of Albion in mind, and awed, perhaps, at the thought of having discovered the very testicles that begat Britain’s first queen, Brookes named the fossil the Scrotum humanum. Because he had followed the Linnaean system the name remains scientifically valid. And Brookes’s identification was evidently convincing: the French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Robinet claimed that he could discern the musculature of the testes, and even the remnants of a urethra, in the fossilised mass.
By the nineteenth century, belief in the veracity of Geoffrey of Monmouth had waned, and scientific research into dinosaurs had commenced. In 1842 anatomist Sir Richard Owen, a man jealous of the scientific achievements of others and not averse to ignoring earlier names for interesting fossils, coined the term ‘Dinosauria’. Whether he knew of the Scrotum is not clear, but such was the palaver surrounding Owen’s ‘discovery’, that Brookes’s description was lost for more than a century. Even the bone itself vanished. But Plot’s drawing allowed it to be identified with certainty as being from the carnivorous dinosaur Megalosaurus, whose remains are not uncommon in Jurassic sediments in Britain.
The science of taxonomy builds on its own history, and, in terms of valid scientific names, the loss of an actual specimen counts for naught. At the heart of the science is a small green book known as The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.11 Like the laws of succession, taxonomy is governed by a rule of primogeniture, which states that the first legitimately coined scientific name takes precedence over all others.* Regrettably for those who do not like the idea of calling dinosaurs scrotums, the code does not forbid the use of names of body parts. Indeed, the great Linnaeus himself named a tropical flower Clitorea for the shape of its bright blue pea flowers. A clause in the bylaws of the code, however, states that if a name has not been used since 1899, it can be considered a nomen oblitum, or a forgotten name, and so discarded. Such a designation, however, is discretionary.**
When, in 1970, palaeontologist Lambert Beverley Halstead pointed out that Scrotum is a scientifically valid name and the first ever proposed for a dinosaur, a shudder went through the normally stolid taxonomic community. Things may not have been helped by the fact that Halstead seems to have been obsessed with dinosaur sex. His most memorable work is an illustrated compendium of dinosaurian copulatory positions—a sort of reptilian Kama Sutra—that includes a ‘leg over’ manoeuvre by the sauropods, the largest dinosaurs of all—that many consider highly dubious. On at least two occasions Halstead took to the stage, where, with his wife, he demonstrated some of the more arcane postures.*
At the end of World War I, Transylvania was ceded by the Austro-Hungarian empire to Romania, and Baron Nopcsa lost his castle, his estates and his wealth. As compensation he was offered the position of director at the magnificent Geological Institute in Bucharest. But the loss was too much, and he spent most of his time lobbying the government to reinstate his fiefdom. In 1919 it acceded, but when Nopcsa returned to Sǎcel his ex-serfs beat him severely, forcing him to relinquish, for a second time, his patrimony.
Nopcsa was for a time confined to a wheelchair and, feeling his powers slipping away, he had himself ‘steinacherised’. The operation, which involved an extreme form of unilateral vasectomy, had been developed by Dr Eugene Steinach as a cure for fatigue and waning male potency.** While Nopcsa revelled in its marvellous effect on his sexual performance, it did not rejuvenate the rest of the body, as was evident at the 1928 meeting of the German palaeontological society, when Nopcsa delivered a ‘brilliant address’ on the thyroid gland of various extinct creatures. Tilly Edinger, who attended the meeting, recalled: ‘He was pushed among us, reclining in a wheelchair paralysed from head to toe…ending with the words: “with a weak hand I have today tried to pull a heavy curtain, to show you a new dawn. Pull strongly, particularly you younger ones; you will see the morning light increase, and you will witness a new sunrise.”’12
Unable to reform his institute, Nopcsa resigned as director and became ever more impoverished. He sold his fossil collection to the British Museum and began travelling Europe on his motorcycle, with Bajazid riding pillion. The end came while Nopcsa was studying earthquakes, and he and Bajazid were living in a flat at Singerstrasse 12 in Vienna. As the great dinosaur expert Edwin H. Colbert described it:
On the 25th of April 1933, something cracked inside Nopcsa. He gave his friend Bajazid a cup of tea heavily laced with a sleeping powder. He then murder
ed the sleeping Bajazid, shooting him in the head with a pistol.13
Nopcsa wrote a note, then shot himself, so putting an end to his noble lineage. His note explained that he was suffering from ‘a complete breakdown in my nervous system’. Idiosyncratic to the end, he left the police instructions that ‘Hungarian academics’ should be strictly forbidden from mourning him. Dressed in his motorcycling leathers, his cremation was fit for a Viking chieftain.14 Bajazid, in contrast, was buried in the Muslim section of the local cemetery.
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* Albania had been incrementally freeing itself from the dying Ottoman Empire, and in 1913 Europe’s great powers held a congress in Trieste to decide who should be appointed king. Nopcsa wrote to the chief of the general staff of the Austro-Hungarian army in Trieste, requesting 500 soldiers clad in civilian garments, along with artillery. He would purchase two small, fast steamships and invade Albania, establishing a regime friendly to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The campaign, Nopcsa told the general, would be swift and would culminate in a triumphant parade through the streets of the capital Tiranë, led by Nopcsa on a white horse. Not all of Nopcsa’s motives appear to have been honourable, as he confided in his diary: ‘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.’ The British Foreign Office did not see eye to eye with Nopcsa on the issue, and at their behest the congress chose the German Prince William of Wied to be Albania’s first king. When World War I broke out and Albania refused to send troops to support the Austro-Hungarians, King Willie’s funds were cut off and he was forced to flee. Albania remained kingless until 1928, when the indigenous King Zog I ascended the throne. The bitterly disappointed Nopcsa wrote to Smith Woodward, his palaeontological colleague at the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum), saying, ‘My Albania is dead.’