Of all the colorful figures in early paleontology, a special place has to be made for Franz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas. This Hungarian nobleman lived a truly bizarre life around the turn of the century: a traveler who spent years among the Balkan peoples, a spy for the Austrian government, a political adventurer who once tried to have himself named King of Albania. He was a dashing homosexual, surprisingly open about his sexual preferences for his time and place, traveling everywhere with his secretary and partner Bajazid Doda. And also a self-taught lover of dinosaurs, with a truly remarkable (but also deeply bizarre) body of work.

It all began in 1895 when Nopcsa’s sister Ilona discovered a strange reptilian skull in a riverbank near the family estate at Sacel. Nopsca took the skull to his professor at the University of Vienna, who dismissed the find and told his pupil to learn about it himself. Learn about it he did: Nopsca spent the rest of his life researching the nascent science of paleontology, asking fellow researchers for books and advice, doing archaeological excavation around the Transylvanian countryside in his spare time. He also dabbled in natural history and geology, convinced that paleontology was an interdisciplinary science that needed a broad base of knowledge. Fortunately for Nopsca, a wealthy and determined European nobleman had the time and money to follow his dreams, even into revolutionizing science.

Very few dinosaurs had been discovered in continental Europe at that point, but here was a young Hungarian ne’er-do-well, pulling out specimen after remarkable specimen, which he crudely restored with glue and kept in a private collection. Using his newfound research (he discovered how to date dinosaur fossils by studying their cell structure under a microscope), Nopcsa compared dinosaurs to extant creatures – birds, reptiles and others – and began submitting scientific papers advancing theories about the evolution of dinosaurs into modern creatures. Nopsca was the first major paleontologist to draw a clear connection between dinosaurs and modern birds, and used his observations of reptile locomotion to theorize how birds developed the ability to fly.

By age 22 Nopsca was well-known enough to present his findings to the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He wasn’t universally lauded – the professors found him curt, dismissive and arrogant – but his sound research and impressive body of specimen work convinced them that he’d indeed uncovered something of worth. In particular, he made a remarkable discovery of 25 unique reptilian species, all “dwarf” versions of extant species (such as the M. dacus, a horse-sized sauropod). Known as the Hateg Dinosaurs after the town in Romania where they were found, these creatures proved the longstanding theory that the Balkan states had once been islands – and that the dinosaurs Nopsca discovered were distinct species, restricted to those islands, that only grew to the limits of the environment.

Nopsca’s findings were truly revolutionary, and he exhibited a sound and thorough understanding of dinosaur science and behavior (proposing that dinosaurs had warm blood, and raised and protected their young, again like modern birds). He also however expended time and energy on theories that might be judged eccentric. Notably, he blamed dinosaur extinction on a disproportionate expansion of their pituitary glands, which caused them to become oversized, sluggish and even worse, unable to have sex. Yes, it was Nopsca who inspired Puma Man to claim that “dinosaurs went extinct because they forgot how to love each other.”

Eventually, Nopsca became more focused on Albanian ethnography, spending much of his later years among tribesmen in that Balkan country while engaging in geological work and occasional espionage. Like Lawrence of Arabia, he enjoyed mixing with “primitive” peoples in native garb and tooling around the countryside on a motorcycle, using his fame and notoriety to pursue his personal interests. But Nopsca lost much of his family estate in the upheavals after World War I, and spent the last decade-plus of his life barely avoiding poverty, with Admiral Horthy’s Hungarian government refusing to sponsor his work. In 1933, after a particularly dire financial crisis left him destitute, he killed his lover Doda and then himself, a tragic end to a most remarkable and productive life.