Transylvanian Dinosaurs Read online




  Transylvanian Dinosaurs

  Transylvanian Dinosaurs

  DAVID B. WEISHAMPEL and CORALIA-MARIA JIANU

  © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press

  All rights reserved. Published 2011

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Johns Hopkins University Press

  2715 North Charles Street

  Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

  www.press.jhu.edu

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weishampel, David B., 1952–

  Transylvanian dinosaurs / by David B. Weishampel and Coralia-Maria Jianu.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0027-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-4214-0027-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Dinosaurs—Romania—Transylvania. 2. Dinosaurs—Evolution.

  I. Jianu, Coralia-Maria. II. Title.

  QE861.9.R62T739 2011

  567.909498’4—dc22 2010047481

  A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All artwork by D. B. Weishampel, unless otherwise indicated.

  Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].

  The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

  The gift of life, it’s a twist of fate

  It’s a roll of the die

  It’s a free lunch, a free ride

  But Nature’s got rules and Nature’s got laws

  And if you cross her, look out!

  Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels (1989)

  What follows is dedicated to Jack Horner.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1. Bringing It All Back Home

  CHAPTER 2. Dinosauria of Transylvania

  CHAPTER 3. Pterosaurs, Crocs, and Mammals, Oh My

  CHAPTER 4. Living on the Edge

  CHAPTER 5. Little Giants and Big Dwarfs

  CHAPTER 6. Living Fossils and Their Ghosts: Being a Short Interlude

  on Coelacanths and Transylvanian Ornithopods

  CHAPTER 7. Transylvania, the Land of Contingency

  CHAPTER 8. Alice and the End

  Notes

  Glossary

  References

  Index

  Color plates follow page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Books like this do not spring fully formed from the forehead of Jove. Rather, they are most often inspired by the work of others, coming together from fragments of old and new ideas that careen from right brain to left, scrambling and unscrambling through international mail systems and e-mails. Parts die and parts survive as the goals of the book become more tangible.

  Little could he have known it, but Franz Baron Nopcsa and his quest to understand the dinosaurs emanating from his backyard have led this American and this Romanian to contemplate how the Transylvanian dinosaurs fit into the Mesozoic scheme of things. Perhaps he’d be pleased by our efforts to ask big questions that demand eclectic and multidisciplinary answers. The Baron had a lot to say in his relatively short life, and we’ve found that it pays to listen to him.

  Our studies have taken us many places as we followed in Nopcsa’s footsteps, investigated new dinosaur material in Europe and elsewhere, and stumbled back and forth through the dust-coated central European evolutionary biology of the early twentieth century and the twists and turns of contemporary systematics, developmental biology, and evolutionary theory. In doing so, we have encountered many friends, fellow sojourners, and mentors, all of whom we would like to thank here.

  We begin by thanking the members of our field crews—especially Cristi and Puiu from Sânpetru, Bogdan Scarlat (Bob), Ovidiu Hebler (Ova), Dan Şuiagă (Şuşu), Cristina Circo, and Sebastian Domnariu; the Italians Fabio Dalla Vecchia, Davide Rigo, and Cezare Brizio; and, of course, the international team, mostly Dutch: Anne Schulp, Remmert Schouten, Matthew Deeks, Moritz von Graevenitz, Jac and Emile Philip-pens, and Roos de Klerk—for their hard work, most excellent partying, and camaraderie. Mulţumim, li ringraziamo, dank u wel! And a special köszönöm to Zoltán Csiki, master of the Bucharest bones, for his exquisite knowledge, his friendship, and his ever-present “yes, but …”

  Mulţumim also to other Romanian colleagues: to Dan Grigorescu from Universitatea din Bucureşti who originally invited the senior author to Romania and shared a few field seasons with him; to Ioan Groza (now deceased) for establishing the dinosaur collections at Muzeul Civilizaşiei Dacice ţi Romane Deva; to Doinel Vulc, the most able paleontologist in Sânpetru; to Nicolae Mészaros (now deceased) and Vlad Codrea from Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca for their own work on the Transylvanian assemblages and also for their help; and to Costin Rădulescu and Petre Samson (both now deceased) from Institutul Speologic “Emil Racoviţă” in Bucharest for making it possible for us to study their spectacular multituberculate material and for their encouragement.

  For the possibility of examining the Transylvanian dinosaurs and the Nopcsa archives in their respective institutions, as well as for the pleasure of enjoying summertime in Budapest with them, we thank László Kordos and Jozef Hála from the Magyar Állami Földtani Intézet, and István Fözy and Horváth Csaba from the Magyar Természettudományi Muzeum. Nagyon szépen köszönöm!

  Nonetheless, as Nopcsa would have wanted it, the best of all collections of the Late Cretaceous dinosaurs from Transylvania still resides in London, where they were originally presented to the (then) British Museum (Natural History) in 1906 and 1923. At his death, Nopcsa’s paleontological archives were bequeathed to this same institution. Angela C. Milner and Sandra Chapman now mind the Nopcsa fossil and archival collections, and we thank them for the opportunity to feast upon the fossils and memorabilia, including Nopcsa’s “brain.”

  Thanks also go to our French colleagues Jean Le Loeuff, Eric Buffetaut, Marie Pincemaille, Yves Laurent, François Sirugue, and Patrick Mechan, mostly from Espéraza, Montpellier, and Aix-en-Provence, for the best cooking and wine that the great land of southern France offers and for sharing with us the Late Cretaceous riches they have gleaned from the rocks at Bellevue, Corbières, and Le Mas d’Azil. Jean Le Loeuff also provided the inspiration for the title of chapter 5. Merci, tout le monde!

  We especially thank Angela D. Buscalioni and Francisco Ortega from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid for their wisdom on things crocodilian, for their friendship, and for the ride to Dalí’s hometown—muchas gracias y viva Figueres! We also thank Xabier Pereda-Suberbiola from the Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herrikom Unibertsitatea, Bilbao, and the Université Paris VI for his work on Struthiosaurus and other European ankylosaurs and for his interest in the life and times of Franz Nopcsa. Eskerrik asko, Xabier.

  Vienna, Nopcsa’s abode for most of his life, including his university years, is the home of important dinosaur material from the Gosau Beds in eastern Austria. Gernot Rabeder, Norbert Vávra, Doris Nagel, and Karl Rauscher from Universität Wien provided us with the opportunity to study this material and also forged our connections with the various archives in Vienna, which contain the most extensive records of Nopcsa’s life. Vielen dank für alle Ihre Hilfe.

  Last, but certainly not least, we are grateful to Jiři Kvaček at the Národní Muzeum in Prague, Kafka’s city of dark contingency, for enabling us to examine the pterosaurs and other fossil m
aterial in his care. Děkuju mockrát.

  Looking beyond the field and museum collections that immediately relate to Transylvanian dinosaurs and the Baron, there are many people who have helped us to explore the nature of history and to see the tapestry we were constructing from new perspectives. Thanks go to Anne Schulp (again), John Jagt, and Douwe Th. de Graaf (the “Maastricht Guys”), and Marcin Machałski from the Instytut Paleobiologii in Warsaw, for somehow putting up with our demanding, raucous, and often-times unpredictable behavior, all for the honorable sake of creating the traveling museum exhibition called “Dinosaurs, Ammonites, and Asteroids: Life and Death in the Maastrichtian.” We also thank Eric Mulder from the Museum Natura Docet in Denekamp, the Netherlands, for keeping the light shining on the truly Maastrichtian dinosaurs, those from Maastricht.

  To Dave Norman from the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge University, thanks for your dinosaur knowledge. To Jack Horner from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, thanks for your encouragement on the Transylvanian and dinosaurian fronts. To Oliver Kerscher for your ever-patient journey through our translation from German to English of Tasnádi-Kubacska’s biography of Nopcsa, and to Robert Elsie, fellow traveler—but from the Albanian side—regarding Nopcsa’s remarkable life, many thanks to you both.

  We are especially grateful to the Interlibrary Loan staff at the Johns Hopkins University’s Welch Library, especially Ellen Priebe and Tina Avarelli, for handling a bewildering array of requests—in English, Romanian, German, French, Hungarian, and Serbo-Croatian—on subjects ranging from earthquakes in Italy to Albanian ethnography to dinosaur-avian relationships. Arriving at incredibly regular intervals, these materials have proved to be indispensable to this project.

  For financial assistance, we thank the generosity of the U.S. National Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Dinosaur Society, the Jurassic Foundation, the Paleontological Society International Research Program (Sepkoski Grants), and Muzeul Civilizaţiei Dacice şi Romane Deva (MCDRD). Together, they made possible ten field seasons in the Haţeg Basin, museum research on additional collections of the dinosaurs from Transylvania and elsewhere in Europe, and research at the many Nopcsa archives. We also thank Adriana Pescaru, retired general director, and Silvia Burnaz, head of Secţia de Ştiinţele Naturii, MCDRD, for providing the institutional basis for the successes of the various field seasons conducted by the Joint MCDRD–Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Dinosaur Expeditions.

  The National Geographic Society also made it possible for us to join Attila Ősi and his important work on the Late Cretaceous of Iharkút, Hungary. The remains of a host of wonderfully preserved dinosaurs, pterosaurs, crocodilians, and squamates are now coming out of the walls of an open-pit former bauxite mine, and, should this locality continue to yield as abundantly as it does at present, it will become one of the most significant in Europe.

  Each of us, of course, has individuals to whom special thanks are due.

  Dave Weishampel: First and foremost, I thank Cora Jianu—for your devil’s advocate role as coauthor, for your considerable insight into the geologic, ecological, and evolutionary dynamics of the Transylvanian region and its fauna, and for inviting me to conduct this Transylvanian research with you. Mulţumesc foarte mult, prietena mea. Thanks also go to Wolf-Ernst Reif (deceased) from the University of Tübingen for his tutelage in constructional and theoretical morphology, as well as in the inherent tension between natural laws and contingency in creating history. To Ronald E. Heinrich, even though you may not know it, for hinting that this should not be just another dinosaur book. To friends at JHU—Ken Rose, Mason Meers, Mary Silcox, Jason Mussell, François Therrien, Amy Chew, Tonya Penkrot, Shawn Zack, Matt O’Neil, Jason Organ, Ben Auerbach, Frank Varriale, and Mike Habib—many thanks for your efforts to answer all those bizarre or picky questions I threw at you over the past handful of years. Finally, special thanks go to Nachio Minoura, who made possible my Visiting Professorship at the University of Hokkaido Museum in Sapporo, Japan. I spent the winter months of 1999–2000 there, sliding on the ice to and from his office, enjoying wayward talks over coffee, and sampling the delights of hometown sushi, all the while exploring the worlds of ancient cultures, the delicacy of the natural world, and historical contingency. Dōmo arigatō, Nachio.

  Cora Jianu: This is the place for special thanks to my family and friends, especially to my parents, my late grandmother, and my son, Ion—for putting up with all my time away conducting fieldwork and on other work-related travels, and for your understanding, support, and encouragement when I needed it. Thanks also to my friend Bert Boekschoten from Vrije Universiteit at Amsterdam for believing in me. To Professor Vlad Codrea at Universitatea Babeş Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca for early encouragement in my career as a paleontologist. To Professor Anton Fistani from the Universiteti i Shkodrës “Luigj Gurakuqi,” Shkoder, Albania, for being such an accommodating host to me and my friends on our unannounced visit to Shkoder, following in the steps of Franz Nopcsa. It took some investigation to find the street named after the Baron, but we were very pleased when we did! Finally, to Dave Weishampel for teaching me about art, music, evolution, contingency, and cladistics. Dave, thank you for inviting me to write this book with you, and for not giving up on this project; it’s been such an enlightening experience! With your superb illustrations, the book is very much enriched and brought to life.

  Ron Heinrich, François Therrien, Zoli Csiki, and Mike Habib read early drafts of this book, and we are especially grateful for their insight, criticism, kindness, and forbearance. Their advice focused our prose, suggested directions, and provided many new contexts for our thoughts. Thanks.

  Laurie Anderson kindly provided permission to reproduce some of the lyrics to “Monkey’s Paw.” Apologies go to Salvador Dalí for our “plagiarizing” a portion of his work, The Temptation of St. Anthony, on the dedication page.

  Finally, we extend special thanks to the Johns Hopkins University Press, particularly to Vince Burke, for taking on this book and allowing us to expand the project in ways we couldn’t have anticipated from the start. Ideas are the important thing, and Vince gave us the opportunity to weave the dinosaurs of Transylvania through the Late Cretaceous contingencies of the Eastern European world, touching upon art, film, and pinball as we proceeded. The challenge was to make our story clear, insightful, and fun, and for that we thank him for all his help.

  Transylvanian Dinosaurs

  CHAPTER 1

  Bringing It All Back Home

  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.