Tilly edinger

Tilly was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She was the youngest child of neurologist Ludwig Edinger (1855–1918) and activist Anna Goldschmidt (1863–1929).

Tilly received her Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt in 1921. Her Ph.D. research was on Nothosaurus, an extinct marine reptile. A natural endocast—or cast of a braincase—was preserved in one specimen that she examined. At that time, endocasts were treated like nothing more than paleontological oddities. However, Tilly realized that endocasts could be used to study the brains of extinct animals. She published a short paper on the endocast of Nothosaurus in 1921.

After finished her Ph.D., Tilly spent the next 17 years working unpaid positions at the University of Frankfurt and the Senckenberg Museum. Still unpaid, she became the museum’s Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1927. She published a major work in 1929, Die Fossilen Gehirne (Fossil Brains), which summarized her early research on the topic of fossil brains.

When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, anti-Semitic violence escalated. As a Jewish academic, Tilly was not safe. Still, she did not want to leave Germany. She once said:

“So long as they leave me alone I will stay. After all, Frankfurt is my home, my mother’s family has been here since 1560, I was born in this house.”

— Tilly Edinger (1938) to family friend Alice Hamilton (quoted in Buccholtz & Seyfarth 1999)

Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe. Tilly’s older brother Friedrich (“Fritz”) died in Sobibor death camp in 1942. Other members of Tilly’s family—Fritz’s wife Dora, Tilly’s sister Dora and her husband Werner, and Tilly’s nephews—fled Germany, most or all of them during the 1930s. They eventually settled in the United States and Israel.

Tilly applied for a United States visa (essentially, permission to immigrate) in 1938. The director of Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Alfred S. Romer, worked to help Tilly. At that time, the United States was operating under a quota system put in place by the Immigration Act of 1924. It capped the numbers of immigrants from many countries. The quota from Germany (including Austria) was set at 27,370 people in 1938, far short of the number of applicants. The situation was made worse by the fact that the United States issued far fewer German visas than allowed per year between 1933 and 1938. By June 1938 (Tilly applied in August), more than 139,000 Germans were on a waiting list for visas. Many were Jews trying to flee the Nazi regime. Tilly received a quota number and had to wait.

Authorities barred Tilly from the Senckenberg Museum after Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938), a night of violent, government-sponsored terror aimed at Jews across Germany. Using her connections in the scientific community, Tilly managed to escape Germany and travel to England in 1939. She left Germany with very little. In 1940, she finally received her U.S. visa and traveled to New York City by ship.

Tilly resumed her research on fossil brains, publishing another major work, Evolution of the Horse Brain, in 1948. She spent the rest of her career working at the MCZ, but never got a permanent staff position. She supported herself financially by teaching at Wellesley College, working for the Geological Society of America, and translating papers. Tilly experienced progressive hearing impairment for most of her life due to a condition called otosclerosis. While she was lauded as a researcher and was also a success as a teacher, there is evidence that Tilly was discriminated against in finding better employment due to her hearing loss.

Even though she sometimes felt isolated, Tilly had warm relationships with many American colleagues. Late in her career, Tilly was working on a project documenting hyperostoses, strange growths or swellings found on the bones of fossil and modern marine (saltwater) fish. Hyperostoses are also called “Tilly bones,” a name probably first coined by a collaborator of Tilly’s in a short article published in 1966. Tilly was also working on an annotated bibliography (essentially, a reference list with notes) documenting the entire published literature on fossil brains. Unfortunately, Tilly died in 1967 before she could complete either of these projects. Her colleagues finished preparing her bibliography of paleoneurology for publication, however, and it was finally published in 1975.

Tilly was known during her lifetime as the founder of paleoneurology, an accomplishment for which she is still remembered today. As George Gaylord Simpson, renown paleontologist, wrote:

“She is a research scientist of the first rank and is favorably known as such all over the world. She is everywhere recognized as the leading specialist on the study of the brain and nervous system of extinct animals and on the evolution of the gross structure of the brain. She is so preeminent in this field that she may really be said to have created a new branch of science, that of paleo-neurology, a study of outstanding value and importance.”

— George Gaylord Simpson’s 1938 endorsement of Tilly’s application to immigrate to the U.S. (as quoted in Buccholtz & Seyfarth 1999)

Paleoneurology

Vertebrate paleontology is the study of fossil vertebrates, or animals with a backbone. Vertebrate fossils are usually bones or teeth of an animal, which are made of hard minerals that do not decay easily. Paleoneurology is the study of fossil brains. Brains are soft and usually break down before they can become fossils. So, how do we learn about the brains of ancient animals?

One way is to study endocasts. An endocast is a copy, or cast, of a brain’s shape. A brain endocast forms inside the skull of an animal. After death, the skull of a vertebrate can fill with sediment, like sand. That sediment can then harden and take on the original brain’s shape.

Paleontologists can create their own endocasts by filling fossil skulls with a rubber-like material, then pulling it out. This is what Tilly Edinger did. Today, fossil skulls can be CT-scanned and digital models of the brain can be created, which is safer for the specimen.

The shape and size of a brain can tell us about how that brain worked. We can learn what parts of the brain were largest, which tells us which senses an animal used most. We can compare the brains of fossil animals to the brains of similar modern animals to infer how extinct animals may have used their brains, and how they might be different from species that lived before or after.

Selected works by Tilly Edinger

Edinger, T. 1921. Über Nothosaurus. I. Ein Steinkern der Schädelhönte. Senckenbergiana 3: 121–129. Link

Edinger, T. 1948. Evolution of the horse brain. Geological Society of America Memoir 25, 177 pp. Link

Edinger, T. 1955. Hearing and smell in cetacean history. European Neurology 129: 37–58. Link

Edinger, T. 1966. Brains from 40 million years of camelid history. Pp. 153–161 in R. Hassler and H. Stephan, eds. Evolution of the forebrain. Springer, Boston, Massachusetts. Link

Edinger, T. 1975. Paleoneurology 1804–1966: An annotated bibliography. Advances in Anatomy Embryology and Cell Biology 46(1–6). Spring-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg New York, 258 pp. Link

Biographical references & further reading

Americans and the Holocaust: How many refugees came to the United States from 1933-1945? United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. no date. Link

Berta, A., and S. Turner. 2020. Rebels, scholars, explorers: Women in vertebrate paleontology. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Buccholz, E.A., and E.-A. Seyfarth. 1999. The gospel of the fossil brain: Tilly Edinger and the science of paleoneurology. Brain Research Bulletin 48: 351–361. Link

Buchholtz, E.A., and E.-A. Seyfarth. 2001. The study of “fossil brains”: Tilly Edinger (1897–1967) and the beginnings of paleoneurology. BioScience 51: 674–682. Link

Fernwen. 2014. Mignon Talbot and the forgotten women of paleontology. Letters from Gondwana, 13 October 2014. Link

Fernwen. 2017. Tilly Edinger vs. the Nazis. Letters from Gondwana. Link

Freidenreich, H. 2009. Tilly Edinger. Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive. Link 

Gould, S. J. 1980. Tilly Edinger. Pp. 218–219 in B. Sicherman and C. H. Green, eds. Notable American women. The modern period. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Konnerth, A. 1966. Tilly bones. Oceanus 12(2): 6–9.

Leibing, A. 2004. The Madame Curie of paleoneurology: Tilly Edinger’s life and work. H-Women in H-Net, Humanities and Social Sciences online. [Book review.] Link

McNeill, L. 2018. The woman who shaped the study of fossil brains. Smithsonian Magazine, 1 March 2018. Link

Schultze, H.-P. 2007. Book review: Tilly Edinger. Leben und Werk einer Jüdischen Wissenschaftlerin. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 27: 772–773. Link

Smith, C.E., and J. Borgman. no date. Deaf scientist corner: Tilly Edinger. Link

Stolperstein-Biographien im Westend: Edinger, Fritz. Stadt Frankfurt am Maim. no date. Link

Stricker, B. 2017. Daring to dig : Adventures of women in American paleontology. PRI Special Publication No. 54. Paleontological Research Institution, Ithaca, New York.

The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act). Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. no date. Link

Tiffany, W.J., III, R.E. Pelham, and F.W. Howell. 1980. Hyperostosis in Florida fossil fishes. Florida Scientist 43: 44–49. Link

Turner, S., C.V. Burek, and R.T. Moody. 2010. Forgotten women in an extinct saurian (man’s) world. In R.T.J. Moody, E. Buffetaut, D. Naish, and D.M. Martill, eds. Dinosaurs and other extinct saurians: A historical perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 343: 111–153. Link

United States Holocaust Museum. no date. Immigration to the United States: 1933–41. Holocaust Encyclopedia. Link

Who is Dr. Tilly Edinger? Time Scavengers. Link

Wilson, L. no date. Tilly Edinger: Rocks for brains. Trowelblazers. Link