Ernst Stromer
Encyclopedia
Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach (12 June 1870 – 18 December 1952) was a German paleontologist
.
He described the following Cretaceous
dinosaur
s from Egypt
: Aegyptosaurus
, Bahariasaurus
, Carcharodontosaurus
, and the largest known theropod, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Stromer also described the giant crocodilian Stomatosuchus.
, and his ancestors had been lawyers, courtiers, scientists, architects, and other leaders.
Ernst Stromer was married in 1920 and had three sons, all of whom became soldiers in the German army. Two died, while the third was taken prisoner by the Soviets. Many assumed that he had died, until he was returned to Germany in 1950.
, Egypt, aboard the Norddeutscher Lloyd
steamship Cleopatra. However, Stromer was still aboard the ship two days later because the ship had been put into quarantine; a doctor had revealed a third-class passenger to have a disease he suspected to be cholera
.
Finally, on Wednesday, 9 November, the doctor announced that the passengers could be released and, after a night's stay at a hotel, Stromer and his companions set out by train to arrive in Cairo
the next day.
After checking into the hotel in Cairo, Stromer found a letter of welcome waiting for him from the Director of the Geological Survey of Egypt at the post office. Stromer was a man who observed the formalities, and the second thing he did that afternoon was to visit the office of George Steindorff, a reputable German Egyptologist, as a matter of courtesy and to plan the future expedition.
On 14 November, Stromer went to meet with John Ball, the founder of the Desert Survey Department of the Geological Survey of Egypt. In that year, the Survey had published the first topographic map of Egypt, and was finishing a geological map that was to be published in 1911. Both sources were invaluable to Stromer, now planning his upcoming expedition to Bahariya, an area of the Western Desert that was little known.
On 15 November, Stromer was worried. There was a missing person; Richard Markgraf was a person of European
descent who had fallen in love with the Western Desert and stayed there. Markgraf had lived in a small village just south of Cairo, known as Sinnuris. There is no record of how Markgraf came to Stromer's attention.
Markgraf and Stromer met during the winter of 1901–1902, and got along very well. Markgraf was Stromer's Sammler, or fossil collector, for 10½ years, and became Stromer's friend. Markgraf, however, was often ill. It is unclear whether the cause was malaria
, intestinal bleeding from typhoid, or chronic
amebic dysentery
.
On that morning, Stromer was worried that Markgraf was having another one of his spells, and needed him desperately to help plan the expedition. So far, he had not appeared and all attempts to contact him had failed. However, his worrying vanished the moment he opened the door to his hotel room; for there, sitting on a chair, was Richard Markgraf.
The plan for the expedition contained three parts; first, Stromer and Markgraf would travel northwest from Cairo to Wadi el Natrun. After exploring the area for a few weeks, they would return to Cairo, replenish their supplies, and afterwards head south to Luxor
to explore the eastern slopes of the Nile
Valley.
However, gaining permission to enter the desert was no longer easy. Even in 1910, tension was growing between Germany and Britain
, and both were wary of the other country's activities anywhere in the world. However, Stromer finally got the permits.
s of early mammal
s in North Africa. At the time, it was widely believed that mankind had originated in Europe of the northern continents, not Africa, but Stromer believed otherwise.
Stromer was not to find early mammals on his expedition, though, but something completely different; he was about to make a huge discovery: Egypt's only known dinosaur
s.
Stromer's 1910 journals of his days at Wadi el Natrun reveal that he worked all through the day, hiking for miles, climbing hills, and hammering pieces of rock from outcroppings throughout the valley. Though he worked hard, almost tirelessly, the weeks he spent at Wadi el Natrun were largely unsuccessful. He found endless sharks' teeth, broken shells of ancient turtles, and the occasional jaw of a prehistoric crocodile
, but no mammals. By December, he returned to Cairo, disappointed.
Markgraf, however, was instructed to stay behind and continue the search. Stromer was delighted when, a week or so later, Markgraf presented to their employer the skull of a small monkey. It was named after Markgraf: Libypithecus markgrafi.
The second stage of the expedition took them to a location far up the Nile in December. There was no more luck there than there had been in Wade el Natrun.
To complicate matters, Markgraf had fallen ill again and would not be able to accompany Stromer on the third and most vital part of the expedition: the part that would take them to Bahariya Oasis. Stromer knew little Arabic and was completely unfamiliar with the remote reaches of Egypt's Western Desert. He suddenly felt bereft and abandoned, and his expedition was threatened.
Stromer did eventually find a dragoman
who could function as a guide and translator, however, to make things easier. The permits to explore the Western Desert were not so easily obtained.
On 3 January 1911, he and the rest of his crew boarded a train and set off for the Western Desert. The train line ended at the southern edge of the Bahariya Oasis. They spent the night in a simple canvas tent, eating a simple dinner of chicken and rice. By noon the next day, they were deep in the desert and the expedition to Bahariya was finally beginning.
The caravan was significantly slowed as they had to find grazing areas, a rarity in the desert, for the camels because one of the team members had skimped on buying fodder for the animals. Stromer could do nothing but fume.
The sunlight was so bright reflecting off of the white rocks that Stromer often had to wear his prescription sunglasses, and the air was so cold in the middle of winter that he more often than not walked beside the camels instead of riding, simply to generate some heat to stay warm.
Finally, after more than a week of marching, they arrived at their destination on 11 January 1911. Stromer thought that the rock in the valley came from the Eocene
Epoch, where he would have found the skeletons of mammals, because he, like most other scientists of the time, believed the Eocene Epoch to be just a few million years before, and the end of the Cretaceous
to be just a couple of million years earlier than that.
He was off by tens of millions of years; Ernst Stromer had walked right into the age of the dinosaurs.
Finally, on 14 January, the weather eased and the expedition was able to begin. That first day, Stromer was able to find little more than a fossilized shark vertebrae, fish teeth, and some petrified wood, but his enthusiasm was unhindered—on 18 January, his patience finally began to pay off—while walking around the south flank of el Diest he suddenly found "three large bones which I attempt to excavate and photograph. The upper extremity is heavily weathered and incomplete [but] measures 110 cm long and 15 cm thick. The second and better one underneath is probably a femur [thighbone] and is wholly 95 cm long and, in the middle, also 15 cm thick. The third is too deep in the ground and will require too much time to recover." He also discovered that morning an ischium (one of the pelvic bones of a dinosaur), another vertebrae with "a convex end," and what he described as "a gigantic claw". He cut up his mosquito netting and soaked them in a flour and water paste, covering the two larger bones in this wrapping.
Despite the huge success in el Dist, he still moved the entire team to the area near Gebel Hammad the next day. Several dinosaur, fish, and shark bones were found there, but after little more was recovered, they packed up and, two days later, left again—this time for the village of Ghauraq.
On 18 February 1911, Stromer began his long trip back to Germany. Over the next few years, he would announce a series of surprising and unique finds of dinosaurs from the Bahariya Oasis, which should have made him one of the most famous paleontologists of his era; however, fame was elusive; he would be remembered for what he had lost rather than what he had found.
and Aegyptosaurus
—was destroyed when the museum in which it was held in Munich
was bombed by the Allied Royal Air Force
during a raid.
Paleontology
Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...
.
He described the following Cretaceous
Cretaceous
The Cretaceous , derived from the Latin "creta" , usually abbreviated K for its German translation Kreide , is a geologic period and system from circa to million years ago. In the geologic timescale, the Cretaceous follows the Jurassic period and is followed by the Paleogene period of the...
dinosaur
Dinosaur
Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...
s from Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
: Aegyptosaurus
Aegyptosaurus
Aegyptosaurus meaning 'Egypt’s lizard', for the country in which it was discovered is a genus of sauropod dinosaur believed to have lived in what is now Africa, around 95 million years ago, during the mid- and late-Cretaceous Period . Like most sauropods, it had a long neck and a small skull...
, Bahariasaurus
Bahariasaurus
Bahariasaurus is a genus of large theropod dinosaur found in the Bahariya Formation in El-Waha el-Bahariya or Bahariya oasis in Egypt and Kem Kem Beds of North Africa, which date to the late Cretaceous Period, , about 95 million years ago...
, Carcharodontosaurus
Carcharodontosaurus
Carcharodontosaurus was a gigantic carnivorous carcharodontosaurid dinosaur that lived around 100 to 93 million years ago, during the late Albian to early Cenomanian stages of the mid-Cretaceous Period...
, and the largest known theropod, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Stromer also described the giant crocodilian Stomatosuchus.
Biography
Ernst Stromer had an aristocratic standing in German society (the "Freiherr" in his name roughly equals "baron" in English); his father had been the mayor in his home city of NurembergNuremberg
Nuremberg[p] is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. Situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it is located about north of Munich and is Franconia's largest city. The population is 505,664...
, and his ancestors had been lawyers, courtiers, scientists, architects, and other leaders.
Ernst Stromer was married in 1920 and had three sons, all of whom became soldiers in the German army. Two died, while the third was taken prisoner by the Soviets. Many assumed that he had died, until he was returned to Germany in 1950.
Arrival
On 7 November 1910, Stromer arrived for a paleontological expedition in AlexandriaAlexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
, Egypt, aboard the Norddeutscher Lloyd
Norddeutscher Lloyd
Norddeutsche Lloyd was a German shipping company. It was founded by Hermann Henrich Meier and Eduard Crüsemann in Bremen on February 20, 1857. It developed into one of the most important German shipping companies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was instrumental in the economic...
steamship Cleopatra. However, Stromer was still aboard the ship two days later because the ship had been put into quarantine; a doctor had revealed a third-class passenger to have a disease he suspected to be cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
.
Finally, on Wednesday, 9 November, the doctor announced that the passengers could be released and, after a night's stay at a hotel, Stromer and his companions set out by train to arrive in Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
the next day.
After checking into the hotel in Cairo, Stromer found a letter of welcome waiting for him from the Director of the Geological Survey of Egypt at the post office. Stromer was a man who observed the formalities, and the second thing he did that afternoon was to visit the office of George Steindorff, a reputable German Egyptologist, as a matter of courtesy and to plan the future expedition.
On 14 November, Stromer went to meet with John Ball, the founder of the Desert Survey Department of the Geological Survey of Egypt. In that year, the Survey had published the first topographic map of Egypt, and was finishing a geological map that was to be published in 1911. Both sources were invaluable to Stromer, now planning his upcoming expedition to Bahariya, an area of the Western Desert that was little known.
On 15 November, Stromer was worried. There was a missing person; Richard Markgraf was a person of European
European ethnic groups
The ethnic groups in Europe are the various ethnic groups that reside in the nations of Europe. European ethnology is the field of anthropology focusing on Europe....
descent who had fallen in love with the Western Desert and stayed there. Markgraf had lived in a small village just south of Cairo, known as Sinnuris. There is no record of how Markgraf came to Stromer's attention.
Markgraf and Stromer met during the winter of 1901–1902, and got along very well. Markgraf was Stromer's Sammler, or fossil collector, for 10½ years, and became Stromer's friend. Markgraf, however, was often ill. It is unclear whether the cause was malaria
Malaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. The disease results from the multiplication of Plasmodium parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases...
, intestinal bleeding from typhoid, or chronic
Chronic (medicine)
A chronic disease is a disease or other human health condition that is persistent or long-lasting in nature. The term chronic is usually applied when the course of the disease lasts for more than three months. Common chronic diseases include asthma, cancer, diabetes and HIV/AIDS.In medicine, the...
amebic dysentery
Dysentery
Dysentery is an inflammatory disorder of the intestine, especially of the colon, that results in severe diarrhea containing mucus and/or blood in the faeces with fever and abdominal pain. If left untreated, dysentery can be fatal.There are differences between dysentery and normal bloody diarrhoea...
.
On that morning, Stromer was worried that Markgraf was having another one of his spells, and needed him desperately to help plan the expedition. So far, he had not appeared and all attempts to contact him had failed. However, his worrying vanished the moment he opened the door to his hotel room; for there, sitting on a chair, was Richard Markgraf.
The plan for the expedition contained three parts; first, Stromer and Markgraf would travel northwest from Cairo to Wadi el Natrun. After exploring the area for a few weeks, they would return to Cairo, replenish their supplies, and afterwards head south to Luxor
Luxor
Luxor is a city in Upper Egypt and the capital of Luxor Governorate. The population numbers 487,896 , with an area of approximately . As the site of the Ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, Luxor has frequently been characterized as the "world's greatest open air museum", as the ruins of the temple...
to explore the eastern slopes of the Nile
Nile
The Nile is a major north-flowing river in North Africa, generally regarded as the longest river in the world. It is long. It runs through the ten countries of Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt.The Nile has two major...
Valley.
However, gaining permission to enter the desert was no longer easy. Even in 1910, tension was growing between Germany and Britain
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the formal name of the United Kingdom during the period when what is now the Republic of Ireland formed a part of it....
, and both were wary of the other country's activities anywhere in the world. However, Stromer finally got the permits.
Beginning of the expedition
Stromer and Markgraf took the train from Cairo to Giza, where they joined their camel driver, Oraan. At 9:40 am on 19 November, they began hiking across Giza plateau. Stromer was intent on finding the fossilFossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...
s of early mammal
Mammal
Mammals are members of a class of air-breathing vertebrate animals characterised by the possession of endothermy, hair, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands functional in mothers with young...
s in North Africa. At the time, it was widely believed that mankind had originated in Europe of the northern continents, not Africa, but Stromer believed otherwise.
Stromer was not to find early mammals on his expedition, though, but something completely different; he was about to make a huge discovery: Egypt's only known dinosaur
Dinosaur
Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...
s.
Stromer's 1910 journals of his days at Wadi el Natrun reveal that he worked all through the day, hiking for miles, climbing hills, and hammering pieces of rock from outcroppings throughout the valley. Though he worked hard, almost tirelessly, the weeks he spent at Wadi el Natrun were largely unsuccessful. He found endless sharks' teeth, broken shells of ancient turtles, and the occasional jaw of a prehistoric crocodile
Crocodile
A crocodile is any species belonging to the family Crocodylidae . The term can also be used more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia: i.e...
, but no mammals. By December, he returned to Cairo, disappointed.
Markgraf, however, was instructed to stay behind and continue the search. Stromer was delighted when, a week or so later, Markgraf presented to their employer the skull of a small monkey. It was named after Markgraf: Libypithecus markgrafi.
The second stage of the expedition took them to a location far up the Nile in December. There was no more luck there than there had been in Wade el Natrun.
To complicate matters, Markgraf had fallen ill again and would not be able to accompany Stromer on the third and most vital part of the expedition: the part that would take them to Bahariya Oasis. Stromer knew little Arabic and was completely unfamiliar with the remote reaches of Egypt's Western Desert. He suddenly felt bereft and abandoned, and his expedition was threatened.
Stromer did eventually find a dragoman
Dragoman
A dragoman was an interpreter, translator and official guide between Turkish, Arabic, and Persian-speaking countries and polities of the Middle East and European embassies, consulates, vice-consulates and trading posts...
who could function as a guide and translator, however, to make things easier. The permits to explore the Western Desert were not so easily obtained.
On 3 January 1911, he and the rest of his crew boarded a train and set off for the Western Desert. The train line ended at the southern edge of the Bahariya Oasis. They spent the night in a simple canvas tent, eating a simple dinner of chicken and rice. By noon the next day, they were deep in the desert and the expedition to Bahariya was finally beginning.
The caravan was significantly slowed as they had to find grazing areas, a rarity in the desert, for the camels because one of the team members had skimped on buying fodder for the animals. Stromer could do nothing but fume.
The sunlight was so bright reflecting off of the white rocks that Stromer often had to wear his prescription sunglasses, and the air was so cold in the middle of winter that he more often than not walked beside the camels instead of riding, simply to generate some heat to stay warm.
Finally, after more than a week of marching, they arrived at their destination on 11 January 1911. Stromer thought that the rock in the valley came from the Eocene
Eocene
The Eocene Epoch, lasting from about 56 to 34 million years ago , is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Palaeocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the...
Epoch, where he would have found the skeletons of mammals, because he, like most other scientists of the time, believed the Eocene Epoch to be just a few million years before, and the end of the Cretaceous
Cretaceous
The Cretaceous , derived from the Latin "creta" , usually abbreviated K for its German translation Kreide , is a geologic period and system from circa to million years ago. In the geologic timescale, the Cretaceous follows the Jurassic period and is followed by the Paleogene period of the...
to be just a couple of million years earlier than that.
He was off by tens of millions of years; Ernst Stromer had walked right into the age of the dinosaurs.
Discoveries
The expedition team lived in a small town called Mandisha for the length of their stay. The day after Stromer's arrival, his plans to start exploring were stopped by worsening weather that included, of all things that could have hindered them in the desert, rain. He commenced to plan exploring the morning after, but around midnight a huge sandstorm blew into Mandisha that continued to rage on through the next day, forcing everyone to stay in the tent.Finally, on 14 January, the weather eased and the expedition was able to begin. That first day, Stromer was able to find little more than a fossilized shark vertebrae, fish teeth, and some petrified wood, but his enthusiasm was unhindered—on 18 January, his patience finally began to pay off—while walking around the south flank of el Diest he suddenly found "three large bones which I attempt to excavate and photograph. The upper extremity is heavily weathered and incomplete [but] measures 110 cm long and 15 cm thick. The second and better one underneath is probably a femur [thighbone] and is wholly 95 cm long and, in the middle, also 15 cm thick. The third is too deep in the ground and will require too much time to recover." He also discovered that morning an ischium (one of the pelvic bones of a dinosaur), another vertebrae with "a convex end," and what he described as "a gigantic claw". He cut up his mosquito netting and soaked them in a flour and water paste, covering the two larger bones in this wrapping.
On 18 February 1911, Stromer began his long trip back to Germany. Over the next few years, he would announce a series of surprising and unique finds of dinosaurs from the Bahariya Oasis, which should have made him one of the most famous paleontologists of his era; however, fame was elusive; he would be remembered for what he had lost rather than what he had found.
Destruction of Stromer's collection
In 1944, towards the tail end of World War II, Stromer's entire fossil collection—including the only known (though incomplete) skeletons of SpinosaurusSpinosaurus
Spinosaurus is a genus of theropod dinosaur which lived in what is now North Africa, from the lower Albian to lower Cenomanian stages of the Cretaceous period, about 112 to 97 million years ago. This genus was first known from Egyptian remains discovered in 1912 and described by German...
and Aegyptosaurus
Aegyptosaurus
Aegyptosaurus meaning 'Egypt’s lizard', for the country in which it was discovered is a genus of sauropod dinosaur believed to have lived in what is now Africa, around 95 million years ago, during the mid- and late-Cretaceous Period . Like most sauropods, it had a long neck and a small skull...
—was destroyed when the museum in which it was held in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
was bombed by the Allied Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
during a raid.
Sources
- Nothdurft, William and Smith, Josh. Book. The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt. Cosmos Studios, New York. 2002.
- A Tribute to Ernst Stromer: Hundred Years of the Discovery of Spinosaurus aegypticus: Saubhik Ghosh: EKDIN, 11 and 12 July 2011 (www.ekdin.org)