I’m back! I’ve been gone from this blog for a while, but
rest assured I’m alive and still fascinated by prehistory. Today we’re coming
back to a Halloween theme, however tenuous it may be. One of the most notorious places in the world
of fiction, the most infamous places in Europe, the home of the vampires and
witches and werewolves, is Transylvania. Transylvania is now part of Romania, north of
Wallachia, west of Moldavia, and southeast of Hungary. It was a battle zone in
the past, as Austrians, Russians, Hungarians, Turks, Wallachians, Moldavians,
Poles, and Germans have struggled over the region. Rich in minerals, it is a mountainous region, consisting of mostly forest-covered hills and
mountains topped with castles. It was
here that the notorious Prince Vlad Dracula imposed his rule with an iron fist
and defied the might of the Ottoman empire.
It is also a place rich for paleontology. This began with
Baron Nopsca in a period from 1899 to the First World War. Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, born of a Romanian
line of Hungarized aristocrats in the Austrian empire, left the University of
Vienna with two goals: The throne of an independent Albania, and the discovery
of Romanian fossils. This colorful, Romantic figure tragically lost his fortune
on his pursuits and ended his life in a suicide pact with his Albian secretary
and lover Bayazid Doda in 1933.
However, in his lifetime, he found a treasure trove of Romanian
dinosaurs from the end of the Mesozoic.
