Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki Pompeckj, 1919

Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki Pompeckj, 1919 /1920

When visitors to the Museum für Naturkunde enter the great dinosaur hall and turn to the right, they find themselves looking at an approximately four-meterlong, ninety-centimeter-high skeleton of a dinosaur known by the scientific name of Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki . This dinosaur was described in 1919 by Josef Felix Pompeckj, a paleontologist and geologist who served as the director of the Geological and Paleontological Institute and Museum from 1917 to 1930. It was a small, omnivorous, hard-to-catch saurian that ran on two legs, and the genus name reflects this; it is derived from the Greek δυσάλωτος / dysálōtos (“hard to catch”) and σαῦρος / saúros (“lizard”).

The genus contains only a single species. It is called D. lettowvorbecki , and the type specimen was excavated at the Kindope site, near Tendaguru. Pompeckj chose the name to honor Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (1870–1964), a general in the colonial army of German East Africa and the supreme commander of the German armed forces in German East Africa during World War I. For over four years, Lettow-Vorbeck used guerilla tactics to evade the superior allied forces of Belgium and the United Kingdom, thereby avoiding a decisive engagement. It was with his reputation for agility in mind that Pompeckj named the uncatchable dinosaur after him: “The undefeated defender of German East Africa, General von Lettow-Vorbeck, permitted me to dedicate this species to him. It is with the greatest pleasure that I extend my gratitude to him.” 65

While engaged in tactical movements, the German colonial troops traveled through the area that lay between Lindi and the sites where the excavations had been conducted. It was here, near Mahiwa (south of Tendaguru), that the “greatest battle of all the war years in German East Africa” took place in the fall of 1917. 66 Lettow-Vorbeck’s military tactics violated multiple provisions of the Hague Land Warfare Convention. The victims of these violations were primarily the indigenous population: they were forced to work as bearers and their food supplies were seized. 67 Punitive expeditions were sent to any areas of unrest. When the war was over, Lettow-Vorbeck was glorified in Germany as an undefeated general. For monarchists still loyal to the dethroned kaiser, he was a national hero and an icon of the German colonial period. In the spring and summer of 1919, when Pompeckj was studying the remains of the Dysalotosaurus specimen, Lettow-Vorbeck commanded a volunteer division involved in suppressing food riots in Hamburg. Not long afterwards, he and his unit joined the Kapp Putsch in an attempt to overthrow the young Weimar Republic. 68

Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki is also interesting from the perspective of the history of science. Over the last several decades, both scientific and popular accounts have increasingly credited Hans Virchow, a contemporary of Pompeckj and a professor of anatomy at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, with the description and naming of the dinosaur. 70 The actual describer, Josef Pompeckj, was acknowledged as such until the 1970s but has since been virtually forgotten.

This change in narrative was evidently the result of a concatenation of events that illustrates how the reality of writing and publishing species descriptions can at times deviate from the theoretical ideal. In October 1919, Virchow delivered a lecture to an assembly of the Berlin Society of Friends of Natural Science on the cervical vertebrae in turtles. Specifically, he discussed the first (known as the atlas) and the second (the axis or epistropheus) vertebrae. Prior to this, in the same month, Virchow had borrowed a number of items from the collection of the Geological Institute and Museum. According to a borrowing slip preserved in the Tendaguru archives, these included three cervical vertebrae, one vertebral body and one dens epistropheus belonging to “ Dysalotosaurus Lettow-Vorbecki Pomp. from the Kimmeridge (dinosaur marl) of Tendaguru, German East Africa.” 71 A few months later, in December 1919, Virchow’s lecture was published in the society’s annual collection of papers. Toward the end of his paper, Virchow presented a comparative analysis of two of the cervical vertebrae he had borrowed from the museum’s Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki specimen: “Through the kindness of Mr. Pompetzkj [sic], I was given the opportunity to examine the epistropheus of an East African ornithopodous dinosaur, Dysalotosaurus , from the Upper Jurassic (Kimmeridgian) of Tendaguru. This is extremely important in our context, since this epistropheus displays (if I’m interpreting it correctly) characteristics of birds, lizards and turtles—a strange combination, in other words.” 72 At no point did Virchow claim to have chosen the name or written the species description himself. Pompeckj, as indicated by the date on the borrowing slip, had completed the naming and description of the dinosaur before Virchow borrowed the specimens, but he did not take any further action until several months afterwards, perhaps in part because Virchow was late in returning the fossils. Pompeckj gave a reading of his description in March 1920 and published it a few months later in May. In this publication, he asserted his status as first describer by writing “POMP” (an abbreviation of his surname) after the scientific name. This was not questioned until at least the early 1970s, 73 at which point Virchow began to be identified in scientific literature as the author of the taxonomic name.