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About Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach:
Born into an aristocratic German family, Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach achieved fame shortly before World War I, when he participated in a fossil-hunting expedition to Egypt. In the course of a few weeks, from January to February of 1911, Stromer von Reichenbach located and dug up a series of large bones in the Egyptian desert, which challenged his paleontological skills (as he wrote in his journal, "I don’t know how to conserve such massive species.") After carting the bones back to Germany, he stunned the world by announcing the discovery of a new genus of sauropod, Aegyptosaurus, and two huge theropods, Carcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus.
Unfortunately, subsequent events were not kind to Stromer von Reichenbach. All of his hard-won fossils were destroyed during a raid by the Royal Air Force on Munich in 1944, and two of his three sons died while serving in the German army during World War II. There is a bit of a happy ending, though: his third son, presumed dead, had actually been held prisoner in the Soviet Union, and he was repatriated to Germany in 1950, two years before his father’s death.
