Early life and family Ernst Stromer was born on 12 June 1871 in
Nuremberg,
Bavaria in Germany. He came from an aristocratic family who had produced several architects, lawyers, judges, scientists and politicians for Nuremberg since the 1400s. The "
Freiherr" in his name roughly equals "baron" in English. Stromer's father, , had served as the
Mayor of Nuremberg from 1867 to 1891. He had an older brother, (1867 - 1940), who became a historian. Stromer originally studied medicine before switching to geology and palaeontology at the
University of Munich. His mentor and thesis adviser was palaeontologist
Karl Alfred von Zittel. Stromer theorised that
Spinosaurus' spines formed a fatty hump akin to a
bison.
World Wars and the Interwar period of
Spinosaurus With the onset of
World War I, travel restrictions meant Stromer couldn't return to Egypt and Markgraf couldn't ship any fossils to Germany. Markgraf died in 1916, and it was only in 1922 that Stromer received Markgraf's fossils. They were however broken due to being repackaged multiple times. After piecing the fossils back together, Stromer published a series of papers in the 1930s describing three new dinosaurs: the
sauropod Aegyptosaurus, and the
theropods Bahariasaurus (1934) and
Carcharodontosaurus (1931). As a critic of Nazism, Stromer's career suffered under
Nazi Germany. Since he came from an aristocratic background, the Nazis avoided arresting or publicly attacking him, but still sought to make his life difficult. In 1937, Stromer was forced to retire. During
World War II, his three sons were conscripted and fought on the
Eastern Front. Two of them were killed in 1941 and 1944, whilst the remaining son, Wolfgang, was captured and sent to a Soviet labour camp where he remained until being repatriated in 1951. On 25 April 1944,
Munich was bombed by the British
Royal Air Force. Much of Stromer's specimens from Egypt were on display at the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology, and were destroyed. This included the only known (though incomplete) skeletons of
Spinosaurus and
Aegyptosaurus. Stromer had attempted to convince the museum director to relocate the fossils, but was declined as the director believed the
Luftwaffe would protect German cities. His drawings and notes survived the war. In 1995, Wolfgang donated photographs of his father's destroyed Spinosaurus specimen to the
Palaeontological Museum Munich. Stromer died on 18 December 1952 in
Erlangen,
West Germany. ==References==