On June 18th, 2026, at the Nopcsa Manor in Săcel, Sântămăria Orlea commune, Hunedoara County, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization organized an international symposium dedicated to Franz Nopcsa (1877-1933) – pioneer of dinosaur research in Transylvania, in partnership with the Deva Museum of Dacian and Roman Civilization.
Palaeontologists from France, Hungary and Romania took this opportunity to evoke the great palaeontologist's scientific work on the very site where he began his research 130 years ago. The symposium is part of a broader project focusing on "Notable cultural and scientific personalities of Țara Hațegului," which the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization is undertaking in partnership with the Romanian Academy as part of a research programme focusing on The academic milieu in sustainable regional development, coordinated by Emeritus Professor Dan-Alexandru Grigorescu.
Franz Nopcsa (1877-1933), to whom the June 18th symposium was dedicated, was a renowned palaeontologist, geologist and albanologist of Romanian origin hailing from the village of Silivaș in Țara Hațegului, whose family was gradually integrated into Hungarian nobility over the centuries. Nopcsa began his self-taught research into dinosaur remains found in the exposed strata near his noble family's manor in Săcel while still in school, and also later, while he was a student in Vienna towards the end of the 19th century – a time when very few people in Europe were knowledgeable about such fossil remains. From these deposits, he identified new species of dinosaurs, crocodiles, chelonians and pterosaurs, and established the characteristics of this fauna hailing from the end of the "Age of Dinosaurs," which differed from their contemporaries found in other regions due to the primitive nature of the taxa, their endemic qualities and small size, all of which Nopcsa interpreted as being the result of prolonged isolation in an insular environment that at the time covered the majority of Transylvania. It was he that named this region "Hațeg Island," a name that has remained well-known to this day.
Nopcsa authored numerous articles on dinosaurs and other reptiles from Transylvania, as well as from other regions of Europe, all of which he published as sole author. Within, taxonomic and systematic aspects are interwoven with details of the anatomy of fossils' cranial nervous system and musculature, along with aspects related to the dinosaurs' evolution and extinction. Through his contributions to reconstructing the anatomical and physiological characteristics of dinosaurs in relation to environmental conditions, Nopcsa ranks among the founders of the new field of palaeobiology. Indeed, Nopcsa's palaeobiological research also extended to other reptiles across Europe and America, as well as to considerations on several fundamental aspects of vertebrate evolution, such as the origin of bird flight; he was a fervent advocate of the "flight by running" hypothesis. In addition to his impressive work in the fields of palaeontology and palaeobiology, which firmly places him among the great figures of the science – Franz Nopcsa is also recognized as one of the most important researchers of Northern Albania, which he studied from various geological, geographical, historical, social, and ethnological perspectives that underpinned his publication of over 40 articles on the region.
After Nopcsa, the fossiliferous dinosaur deposits in the Hațeg Basin were not explored with a view to further discoveries for nearly 60 years. After the First World War and Transylvania's incorporation into Romania, Nopcsa himself suspended his field research; while the communist regime established in Romania after 1947 heavily restricted scientific research without practical applications, such as those carried out in the field of vertebrate palaeontology. To make matters worse, under Communism scholarly correspondence with researchers in the West was subject to heavy surveillance by the state surveillance agency, the Securitate. The scant few dinosaurian remains that were discovered during this period were the result of field research conducted by geologists from the Geological Institute of Romania as part of their mineral prospecting activities.
In this context, although research on dinosaur fossils gained significant momentum globally after 1950, no-one in Romania was apparently interested in these fossils. Aware of the difficulties that lay ahead, Dan-Alexandru Grigorescu, a university lecturer at the time, initiated the resumption of research in Hațeg in 1977. From 1978 until 2012, when he retired, Professor Grigorescu organized annual research camps for student volunteers, first in Sânpetru and later in General Berthelot commune. In this effort, Professor Grigorescu received great assistance from a local resident of Sânpetru, Doenel Vulc, who was intimately familiar with the particular areas where bone fragments would surface following spring snowmelt.
In the early years, the excavations were joined by Ion Groza, a geographer at the Deva Natural Science Museum, who painstakingly expanded a collection of dinosaur bones for the museum. News of the resumption of palaeontological research in the Haţeg Basin spread rapidly, with renowned dinosaur experts from Poland, France, the United Kingdom, United States and Canada arriving as part of various projects to visit the fossil sites and examine the new discoveries. In turn, Professor Dan Grigorescu received invitations to a series of international scientific events in Poland, Germany, the United States and China, and in 1985 was appointed as Coordinator for Eastern Europe in the UNESCO project (IGCP 245, Correlation of the Non-Marine Cretaceous of the World), which concluded in 1990 with international conferences held in Bucharest and Haţeg, followed by another conference in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.
In addition to the international impact that the resumption of dinosaur research in Transylvania had, it also helped foster a spirit of competition among students of Geology, who were drawn to a topic of widespread interest and by the chance to rediscover a "lost treasure," since no trace remained in Romania of Franz Nopcsa's vast collection that had been donated to museums in London, Budapest and Vienna. Among the most important discoveries made since the resumption of research were small carnivorous dinosaurs (celurosaurs), the giant pterosaur Hatzegopteryx, the first Mesozoic mammals to be found in Romania, as well as dinosaur nesting sites, marked by nests containing fossilized eggs.
The 1990 international conference gave a strong impetus to research on the Late Cretaceous in the Hațeg Basin. In the years that followed, research was expanded both thematically and geographically to also encompass less-studied regions within the Hațeg Basin, as well as the neighbouring Rusca Montană Basin and other regions of Transylvania. Over 300 scholarly articles, with contributions from approximately 90 authors, have since been published in prestigious scientific journals worldwide in the fields of palaeobotany and palynology, micropalaeontology, vertebrate palaeontology, taphonomy, the evolution and cladistics of dinosaurs and other groups of the Cretaceous fauna of the Hațeg Basin, lithostratigraphy and chronostratigraphy, sedimentology and palaeoenvironment reconstruction, tectonics and volcanology. Moreover, the large number of MA theses and PhD dissertations written in recent years on the Hațeg Basin is indicative of the interest shown by young researchers from Romania and abroad in Transylvania's ancient dinosaur fauna.
A new chapter in the palaeontological history of the Hațeg Basin began in 2000, linked to the application of scientific research findings to regional cultural and socio-economic development. That year, following the launch of the geopark concept by UNESCO in 1998, Professor Dan-Alexandru Grigorescu, working with a large team of collaborators from the University of Bucharest and local authorities, initiated the creation of the Ţara Haţegului Dinosaur Geopark. Based on the broad concept and the recommended UNESCO methodology, numerous geoparks have since been established globally, with over 240 currently in existence; however, the Țara Hațegului Dinosaur Geopark, which was admitted to the UNESCO Network of European Geoparks in 2005, ranks among the first 20 such parks worldwide.
Through the Symposium held on June 18th, 2026, at Nopcsa Manor in Săcel, Professor Dan-Alexandru Grigorescu, who last year participated as a guest of the Hungarian Geological Service in the "Nopcsa 2025" Memorial Celebrations in Budapest – aimed to honour the memory of Franz Nopcsa and to raise awareness among local communities of the importance scientific research into natural and cultural heritage can play in the development of the wonderful region of Ţara Haţegului.
In his message delivered on the occasion of the International Symposium, Emil Constantinescu, the President of the Scientific Council of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization, noted that the event is part of the Institute's efforts to bring to the attention of young people and the general public those notable figures who have made remarkable contributions in various fields of culture and science in Romania and beyond.
REVISITING A SCHOLAR
The international symposium dedicated to the memory of the renowned Hungarian palaeontologist Franz Nopcsa, organized by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization in partnership with the Museum of Dacian and Roman Civilization and with the support of the Hunedoara County Council, is part of the Institute's ongoing efforts to raise awareness among younger generations and the general public about notable figures who have made remarkable contributions to various fields of culture and science. The educational effectiveness of these events is demonstrated by the large number of youths, high school pupils and college students who take part in them and remain engaged in their subsequent development. Indeed, interest in the studies Nopcsa published a century ago was sparked by the popularity of Hollywood films featuring dinosaurs among the younger generations.
Franz Nopcsa pioneered research into dinosaurs at a time when there were very few specialists in the field in Europe; he had to pursue his studies on dinosaurs as a self-taught scholar, as none of his professors at the University of Vienna were qualified to guide his research. Alternating between periods of palaeontological research on his family's estate in Țara Hațegului and studies of the history and ethnography of Northern Albania, Franz Nopcsa established himself in both fields as a leading scientific and cultural figure.
Yet a scholar is not always a model of integrity. Franz Nopcsa was a controversial figure in Romania, just as he was in Hungary. During World War I, he was declared "persona non grata" by the Romanian government, a sanction that was only lifted after the war by King Ferdinand, at the request of Gheorghe Munteanu Murgoci, who recognized Nopcsa's scientific merit in furthering knowledge of the geology of the Southern Carpathians and offered him a position at the Geological Institute of Romania.
Few places in the Hațeg Region today still commemorate the memory of this great scientist – only the manor in Săcel, the venue of this symposium, and the family home in the former village of Fărcădin, now the Romanian Academy's Centre for the Sustainable Development of the Hațeg Region. What has endured, however, passed down from generation to generation, is a series of legends about the "odd baron" and his interest in "giant's bones," as the locals called the dinosaur fossils.
The memory of Franz Nopcsa was revived in 1978, after more than half a century in which palaeontological research on dinosaurs in Transylvania had been interrupted, by Professor Dan Grigorescu, then a lecturer at the Faculty of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Bucharest, who from then on and for three and a half decades spent every summer organizing research camps in Hațeg for geology students. The "fieldwork schools" held during those years provided the participating geology students with a solid apprenticeship in geological research, which left a lasting impression on them throughout their careers, as they themselves have often noted during anniversary reunions.
The student summer camps also provided significant heritage value, owing to the large collection of over 2,000 bones and eggs from dinosaurs and other vertebrates that were catalogued in the Palaeontology Laboratory at the University of Bucharest.
Research conducted between 1978 and 2000 was instrumental in the creation of the "Țara Hațegului Dinosaur Geopark," which was admitted to the UNESCO Geoparks Network in 2005. Through its collection and the associated published scholarly works, Țara Hațegului has strengthened its identity, adding to its reputation as the "land of medieval stone churches" and its distinctive folklore and craftsmanship the title of "land of dwarf dinosaurs" – a phenomenon heretofore unknown in other regions of the world. Together, these factors were decisive in the Hațeg Geopark being accepted among the first UNESCO geoparks in Europe.
The international symposium hosted at the Nopcsa Manor is part of a project on "Scientific and Cultural Personalities in the Hațeg Region," which the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization is undertaking in partnership with the Romanian Academy as part of a broader research programme dedicated to The academic milieu in the Sustainable Development of Romania's Regions.
Emil Constantinescu
President of the Scientific Council
of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization
FRANZ NOPCSA AND THE SPIRIT OF SĂCEL MANOR
The symposium dedicated to “Franz Nopcsa – Discoverer of the Dinosaurs of Transylvania” is the first event organized in Romania dedicated to this great Hungarian palaeontologist of Romanian descent. It is also a token of our esteem for the palaeontological work of Franz Nopcsa (1877–1933), which led us to change the course of our own scientific research twelve years after we had initially set out on a different path: the palaeontology of marine mammals, a field in which we had begun to gain international recognition. We decided instead to focus on the study of dinosaurs, no trace of which had existed in Romania prior to World War I, but whereupon a valuable palaeontological heritage came to lie within Romania’s borders, despite the fact that it had remained unexplored for over 50 years since Nopcsa himself had last departed the manor at Săcel, with no researchers, Romanian or foreign, daring to tackle it in the interim.
A powerful impetus for resuming the field research Nopcsa himself had interrupted after 1918 came from the American dinosaur specialists whom we met during our visit to the United States at the invitation of the Smithsonian Institution in 1975 to attend a conference on the evolution of marine mammals in Corvallis, Oregon. During the visits to major American museums in Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles we undertook on that occasion, we were repeatedly asked who it was that was researching “Nopcsa’s dinosaurs” in Transylvania; a question we did not know how to answer. At the time, we knew that the deposits at Sânpetru in the Hațeg Basin, near Deva – the site of the summer fieldwork program for second-year geology students – contained dinosaur bones, but we knew almost nothing about them or about how to study them in the field. We perused Nopcsa’s own articles in the faculty library, and were glad to receive articles and books from American researchers. This research revealed a particularly fascinating field, but one that was difficult to tackle without a solid foundation in dinosaur osteology – a specialization which we lacked and could not acquire from books alone, given the total absence of comparative material in Romania at that time.
Restrictions imposed on all study trips abroad during the communist era prevented thorough training in any field of science that was not directly related to the practical aspects of the economy; at the same time, the state prohibited access by foreign specialists except under agreements approved by Romanian academic institutions. Despite these difficulties, we decided to begin preparations to resume Nopcsa’s research, pursuing a twofold goal: to establish a fossil collection (since none of the material that Franz Nopcsa had collected remained in Romania), and to train Romanian specialists in the study of dinosaurs, a field of widespread international interest. Neither of these objectives could be successfully addressed individually. Therefore, the first step was to bring together a group of students interested in voluntarily spending part of their summer vacation conducting field research. To this end, with the students’ support, we established the “Circle for the Protection of the Geological Environment,” through which small groups of students, led by a faculty member, conducted field and laboratory research on mineralogical, stratigraphic, palaeontological, and tectonic aspects in areas designated as “geological monuments.”
We incorporated these activities into nature conservation initiatives that were being supported by the Romanian government under international pressure. It was in this way that, for eight straight years, the various thematic groups we formed received funding; and, ultimately, the students published their research findings in the annals of the scientific society thus formed. Many students – more than we could secure travel funding for – wanted to join the group we had formed to study the dinosaur fossil deposits in the Hațeg Basin, drawn in by the prospect of undertaking fieldwork in a field of great scientific interest. From 1978 until our retirement in 2012, every summer, with only two exceptions (in 1991 and 1996, when we worked at volunteer camps at dinosaur sites in Montana and Alberta in the United States) we organized student camps – for the first 12 years in Sânpetru, and, then for 20 further years in the village of Unirea, which, in 2007, regained its previous name of “General Berthelot.” During our first years in Sânpetru, we stayed in tents in the Sibișel River valley; later, we expanded our lodging options to include the school created in the courtyard of the Nopcsa Manor in Săcel.
The manor, albeit in ruin, had long fascinated us; it was the only remaining testament to the great palaeontologist, as well as a striking feature of the region’s architecture, alongside the Kendeffi manor in Sântămăria Orlea, located just a few kilometers away. The latter was still fairly well-maintained at the time, thanks to the restaurant and hotel that had been established there and to the summer camp for students that operated in the manor’s garden. In contrast, the manor in Săcel lay in ruin; older locals recalled the savagery with which the wood furnishings and whatever had remained of the furniture had been stolen, as well as the numerous books that were burned in the years following the war and the entrenchment of communism. Every year, we would take new students past the threshold of the abandoned manor; it was an opportunity to reflect on the important discoveries Franz Nopcsa had made, right in the very places where we were now excavating. we felt that something had to be done to preserve at least what little remained. Alongside history professor Iosivoni, who lived in one of the two dilapidated apartment buildings near the school, in 1980 we submitted a request to the Hunedoara County People’s Council asking for urgent repairs to the manor’s roof, highlighting the importance of this building that had been declared a “historic monument.” Two years later, a sum of 5,000 lei was approved to replace the roof with sheet metal, but not before having to request the intervention of Bujor Almășan, Head of Department at the Faculty of Geology in Bucharest and former Minister of Mining, Petroleum, and Geology. Regrettably, Professor Iosivoni never lived to see the roof repaired, as he had tragically passed away in the interim.
Stories of the manor and its “odd baron,” of the festivities organized when guests from the local area or abroad arrived (notably, Arthur Smith Woodward from the British Museum in London came to Hațeg with his wife in 1906), and of the villagers’ customs were relayed to us by the father of “Nea Doinel,” one of the last people still alive in the village who had known the “baron” and who, as a child, had seen the manor in its heyday, with its garden and a beautiful fountain out front. He told us about the villagers’ obligation to gather “giant bones” from the slopes of Sibișel, after spring snowmelt had exposed them from the adjoining rock, and to bring them to the castle. “Nea Doinel” accompanied us on our excavations, pointing out the spots bearing representative local names where he had found bone fragments. One by one, we excavated at Râpa Mocioconilor, Cânepiş, Gârjobel, Mereuță, Coasta Luncuței, as well as identifying new sites, which we named La Cărare, La Groapă etc., situated on the right bank of the Sibișel Valley; fewer sites were identified on the left bank: La Scoabă, Ograda pustie. At these sites, we encountered “fossil-bearing pockets” – accumulations of heavily fragmented bones that, as we would later realize after comparing them with illustrations from Nopcsa’s articles and other osteological field guides, came from different species and individuals of varying ages. The more-or-less inclined plane of the strata prevented the bones from being extracted in plaster casts, as was customary; the bones had to be extracted individually after their positions were measured and photographed. The students worked with great enthusiasm; some dug with pickaxes and shovels, using iron bars to break up the hard rock, while others levelled the ground around the excavation with shovels or loaded the finer detritus into bags to wash it in the river and sift out the coarser material; fine sifting and microscopic analysis were to be performed by the students back at the university. The sifted material yielded the first remains of mammals and of small carnivorous dinosaurs, as well as numerous other microvertebrates that substantially enriched the list of vertebrate fauna from the Late Cretaceous found in the Hațeg Basin. In the field, we used to take students individually aside in order to explain the sedimentological significance of the various rock types within the stratigraphic sequences formed in a fluvial system to them. Following their research back at the university, students from various thematic groups presented their findings at the scientific society’s meetings, and their articles – prepared in accordance with the guidelines of international scientific publications – were published in the society’s collected volume titled “Geological Monuments of Nature.” Three of the students who worked at Sânpetru – the late Emil Știucă, Dan Simionescu, and Carmen Panaitescu – went on to publish an interesting article that was later broadly cited by professional researchers. The “field school” conducted between 1978 and 2012 in the Hațeg Basin by geology and geophysics students from over 30 graduating classes was, as they themselves would reminisce during anniversary reunions, a proper apprenticeship in geological research, which left a lasting mark on them throughout their subsequent careers. However, the educational and formative significance of these “summer camps” ought not overshadow the scientific importance of the discoveries made during these expeditions, which resulted in a collection of over 2,000 bone specimens from more than 60 species of vertebrates identified to date. This collection includes numerous dinosaur eggs, as well as remains of the giant pterosaur Hatzegopteryx.
The research conducted between 1978 and 2000 was instrumental in the creation of the “Ţara Haţegului Dinosaur Geopark,” which was admitted to the UNESCO Geopark Network in 2005. In 1998, when the new concept of a geopark was first introduced to the public, some of the fundamental criteria and conditions for establishing a UNESCO geopark had already been identified in Hațeg over the course of the research conducted during our student field camps. This research had documented the existence of a geological heritage of exceptional value, which, taken together with the region’s already well-known biological and cultural heritage, laid the groundwork for tourism as a primary driver of regional development. With the support of several colleagues – geologists and biologists from the University of Bucharest – and with the backing of the Hunedoara County Council and the Ţara Haţegului Intermunicipal Association (which was expressly created for this purpose), we coordinated the creation of the Țara Hațegului Geopark, whose administration the Ministry of the Environment entrusted to the University of Bucharest. This laid the groundwork for the geopark to become an active driver of the socioeconomic development of the region, while also promoting scientific research in the fields of geosciences and life sciences – both fundamental criteria for a UNESCO geopark.
Unfortunately, those who succeeded us to the geopark’s administration after 2012 abandoned many of these achievements; communication with the County Council and the close collaboration with the Intermunicipal Association were gradually diminished until ceasing entirely; the research camps for geology students were discontinued, and, in order to mark a “break with the past,” the very name of the geopark was changed from “Dinosaur Geopark” to “UNESCO International Geopark” – a change that attempts to justify the takeover of dinosaur research by teams from other countries. We do not wish to end this article on a pessimistic note, as the significance of the Ţara Haţegului Geopark for the Haţeg community and for geology is too important to be treated superficially. We continue to strive to deploy our extensive experience in coordinating major projects for the development of higher education and to further the role of the academic community in sustainable regional development in order to help restore the Ţara Haţegului Geopark back onto the right track it had started out on. It is our hope that the recently renovated Nopcsa Manor will reinvigorate the spirit of creativity and regional development that years ago inspired us in the creation of the Dinosaur Geopark in the first place.
Dan Alexandru Grigorescu
Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization
