Lost treasures: The Maxberg Archaeopteryx

 

The Maxberg Archaeopteryx was only the third recognised specimen (Image: H Raab)

One of the rarest Archaeopteryx fossils disappeared after its irascible owner died. Was it stolen, is it buried with him, or something else?

Fossils have been forgotten in storerooms, pilfered from digs and sunk in shipwrecks. But none can match the charisma and mystery of the missing Maxberg Archaeopteryx. This skeleton was hoarded for years by a cantankerous quarry manager. When he died in 1991, it vanished.

Only 11 reasonably complete skeletal fossils of Archaeopteryx have ever been discovered, which makes the loss of the Maxberg specimen all the more tragic. Its bones established that birds descended from two-legged predatory dinosaurs and if we could study the fossil today, it could answer big unresolved questions such as whether the fossils all come from the same species.

The Maxberg specimen's story begins in 1956, when two quarrymen were carving out the Solnhofen limestone in Germany and stumbled on a fossil they could not identify. Two years later, quarry owner Eduard Opitsch lent it to a geologist, who in turn sent it to Florian Heller at the University of Erlangen. The skeleton's head and tail were missing, but Heller, a palaeontologist, discerned faint feather impressions and realised it was Archaeopteryx.

It was only the third recognised specimen, so it was big news. Some of its bones were broken, revealing for the first time that Archaeopteryx had the hollow bones that make modern birds light enough to fly. And the orientation of its hip bones identified the "lizard-hipped" saurischian dinosaurs as the unequivocal ancestors of modern birds.

Opitsch allowed the Maxberg Museum in nearby Mornsheim to display the fossil, but initially sought to sell it. The Munich state museum was willing to pay 40,000 deutschmarks, but Opitsch didn't want to pay taxes on the proceeds, and broke off negotiations in 1965, according to palaeontologist Peter Wellnhofer, author of Archaeopteryx: The icon of evolution. In 1974, Opitsch turned down Wellnhofer's request to borrow the fossil for further study and took it home, where he was rumoured to have stored it under his bed.

An increasingly grumpy old man, Opitsch refused access to his specimen. He died at the age of 91 in Pappenheim, where he lived alone. The fossil was never found.

So what happened? It's possible Opitsch could have sold it years before, but there is no evidence to support this, according to Wellnhofer. And although Wellnhofer describes how Opitsch was considered "a queer fellow", no one thought he would have destroyed the fossil. Theft was possible because the house was left unattended for weeks after Opitsch's death, but the two slabs of the fossil were heavy and unwieldy, making for a difficult getaway. Others have suggested that Opitsch hid it, or might have had it buried with him.

"It's been lost 20 years, so it's hard to believe it's been in a private collection without anyone knowing it," says Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Museum. But others continue to hope it was stolen, and may surface one day.

When palaeontologists originally had access to the Maxberg specimen, they made cast copies, and studied it with X-rays. But that was in 1959, and the technology available to them was limited. If the fossil is ever discovered, CT scans could reveal the bones in 3D detail, and synchrotron radiation could record trace elements left by the creature's plumage. According to Phil Manning of the University of Manchester, the fossil was never completely cleaned of sediment and so it's possible the bones would reveal even more secrets.

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