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Lost Treasures: The Maxberg Archaeopteryx
from New Scientist
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.
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