He Wanted to Study Dinosaurs for a Living. Somehow, He Became a Spy Who Hijacked a Plane.

6 min readBaron Franz Nopcsa, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat and pioneering paleontologist, murdered his secretary and companion Bajazid Elmaz Doda before taking his own life in Vienna on April 25, 1933, ending a remarkable yet troubled 55-year life.Through self-taught study of dinosaur fossils discovered in Transylvania, Nopcsa developed groundbreaking theories about dinosaur biology, warm-bloodedness, and parenting that remain validated by modern research over a century later.Despite founding paleobiology through his innovative work comparing fossilized remains to living organisms, Nopcsa’s contributions were overshadowed by financial ruin following Austria-Hungary’s defeat in World War I and his unrecognized genius during his lifetime.On the morning of April 25, 1933, at his apartment at Singerstrasse 12, Vienna, Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás approached his sleeping secretary, Bajazid Elmaz Doda, and placed a gun to the man’s left temple. Nopcsa did not suspect the man would awaken; some accounts suggest Nopsca had seen to that by drugging his tea with sleeping powder. The Baron pulled the trigger twice, firing two bullets “at almost the same spot,” killing his longtime companion. He then withdrew to his study, penning the final missive of what had been a prolific writing career before shooting himself in the mouth.The next day, the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna reported on the murder-suicide by noting:“Nopcsa seems to have prepared the deed carefully. A number of sealed messages of farewell were found, as were a sealed will addressed to a Viennese lawyer and a few other documents. That material motives may also have been involved can be deduced not only from testimony from his maid, who had not received her salary for four months and from the fact that Franz Nopcsa, who was devoted to his books and collections, had been planning to sell off his extensive library containing many a unique volume.”It was a sad, shocking, and scandalous end to 55 years that seemed to contain within them a multitude of lives, all now to be overshadowed. Nopcsa’s memoir, finished in 1929, would not be published until 2001 (an English translation not until 2014). His childhood home in modern-day Romania, Sacel Castle, was only opened to the public as a museum in 2025. But if his name was relegated to obscurity, his impact on the world could not so easily fade. An aristocrat by birth, Franz Nopcsa fashioned himself into an adventurer and a scholar, a spy and a historian. Even more remarkably, the brashness with which he pursued one of his earliest passions, dinosaurs, would end up birthing an entire discipline of archaeology: paleobiology.Wikimedia CommonsSacel Castle, the Nopcsa family homeBorn in 1877 in the city of Deva, Transylvania (then Austria-Hungary), Nopcsa would develop a passion for paleontology in 1895, when Franz’s sister Ilona reportedly discovered a dinosaur skull during a walk along a riverbank and brought it back to her brother. The degraded, duck-billed skull intrigued the teenaged boy, who sought out an expert to hand it off to for more information.Science & Society Picture Library//Getty ImagesEduard SuessThanks to his place within the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, Nopcsa had access to some of the finest scholars in the empire when he attended the University of Vienna, and he turned to none other than Eduard Suess, a geologist who three decades prior had made shockwaves when he proposed the hypothesized prehistoric supercontinent of Gondwana.But if Nopcsa thought his dinosaur skull would provide Suess with the materials for another groundbreaking discovery, he was sorely mistaken. The acclaimed geologist instead told Nopcsa to keep the skull and study it himself.“In the library of Sacel Castle, Nopcsa taught himself geology, physiology, anatomy and neurology. He wrote to scientists all over Europe asking for more books,” Smithsonian Magazine says of Nopcsa’s early scholarly efforts. “At the time, very few European dinosaurs had been found. Unable to compare his fossils with others, he relied on his imagination.”As Nopcsa scouted for more fossils throughout his native countryside, he began to study them in detail, endeavoring to infer just why these bones looked the way they did. That is to say, he didn’t just see these remains for what they were, but rather sought to ascertain why they were the way they were, how they fit into the whole being they had once been a part of. From the bones, Nopcsa used his mind and the world around him to theoretically reconstruct the whole organic machine.“From the tiniest scratch on the fossilized braincase, he speculated about the relationship between the pituitary gland, which regulates growth, and an organism’s size, applying what he’d learned of soft tissue and blood circulation,” Smithsonian Magazine describes. “Drawing on the jaw mechanics of lizards and alligators, he rearticulated his dinosaur’s jaw and envisioned its musculature. In this, he was breaking new ground—comparing his dinosaur to living things.”Though Nopcsa wasn’t the first to propose that birds had evolved from dinosaurs (that had first been theorized some decades earlier by the Englishman Thomas Henry Huxley), he took that line of thinking further, developing a theory for how dinosaurs may have parented their vulnerable young based on what he observed in the birds of his day. He even argued that some dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded. Other theories Nopcsa developed in the nascent days of the 20th century—including sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs and the “island rule” that limited available resources would, over generations, reduce the size of animals—have continued to be validated by new research in the 21st century.But brilliant as he was, Nopcsa was also notably brash. He confidently delivered his first lecture on his theories in 1899, when he was just twenty-two years of age. He seemingly had no qualms bucking the academic consensus of the day, nor the academics themselves. In an oft-repeated anecdote, the young Nopcsa boasted to the Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo “how outstanding and important his work was considering his age.” Dollo, in a letter to his colleague Othenio Abel, would brand Nopcsa “un être cometair,” a cosmic being.That extraterrestrial quality Dollo identified grew more extreme as Nopcsa aged; it may, in fact, have been manic depression. The restless Nopcsa was, per Scientific American, “often vacillating between frenetic work and sudden lethargy,” which may have led him to take his other main academic interest to its utmost extreme.Wikimedia CommonsBajazid Elmaz DodaIn 1906 in Bucharest, Nopcsa met Bajazid Elmaz Doda, an eighteen-year-old writer who became Nopcsa’s secretary. Doda was Albanian, at a time when his people were struggling for their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Nopcsa became enraptured by the Albanian people through Doda’s descriptions (he also likely was enraptured by Doda himself, whom Nopcsa would describe as “the only person who has truly loved me and in whom I had full confidence”).Franz Nopcsa wasn’t satisfied with simply hearing Doda’s stories of the old country, however. In 1907, the two traveled to Albania, first to Shkodër and later Mirditë. In this latter excursion, the two found themselves briefly held hostage by a bandit. Nopcsa enmeshed himself in the Albanian nationalist movement, smuggling weapons to the resistance. Later, when the First Balkan War broke out, Nopcsa acted as a spy for Austria-Hungary but, audaciously, when the parliamentary state of Independent Albania emerged in November of 1912, Nopcsa proposed himself as a potential king, offering to marry a wealthy American to secure money for the new nation.Wikimedia CommonsFranz Nopcsa dressed in Albanian military attireThough he was not named king, he did lead the Albanian people in a different way when the First World War broke out. In a move that has drawn more than a few comparisons to T.E. Lawrence’s concurrent activities in Arabia, Nopcsa spent the Great War as both a spy for his native Austria-Hungary and a leader for a force of Albanian volunteers. He even became the first person in history to ever hijack a plane.But the fallout from the First World War had an unexpected impact on Nopcsa. After Austria-Hungary’s defeat, Nopcsa’s native Transylvania became part of the Kingdom of Romania. Suddenly, all of the familial wealth and status that had come with his nobility was wiped out. Financial struggles hounded Nopcsa for the remainder of his life, and as they persisted, his “nervous condition” worsened, until finally, in 1933, he murdered the only person who truly loved him, and then took his own life.The ethnographic work he conducted with Doda endures as a vital record of Albanian history, but it’s his theories on dinosaurs that continue to be discussed in academic journals around the world more than a century after they were first proposed. Nopcsa would call his branch of study “paleophysiology,” but that moniker never caught on, and he wouldn’t be properly recognized for his contributions to the domain of study for some time. Instead, the field of “paleobiology” is credited to other founders, Othenio Abel and his partner Louis Dollo, the men who once corresponded about the curious “être cometair” from Sacel Castle.Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.