Eberhard Fraas

He worked as a curator at the Stuttgarter Naturaliensammlung and discovered the dinosaurs of the Tendaguru formation in then German East Africa (now Tanzania).

After attending the Gymnasium, he studied at Leipzig University with Hermann Credner and Ferdinand Zirkel, and later in Munich under Karl Alfred von Zittel, August Rothpletz (1853−1918) and Paul Groth.

In July 1888, he received his Habilitation (second Ph.D.) from Munich University, and in 1891 became an assistant at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart.

Trips to Spain, Sardinia, Italy, the Balkans, the west of North America (1901), Egypt and Syria (1897 and 1906) and finally to German East Africa (1907) broadened his view and filled the museum with new acquisitions.

His discovery of dinosaurs in East Africa would spawn many expeditions to the Tendaguru, first by the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, and by British institutions once the Germans had lost control of the colony after World War I. Fraas died unexpectedly on March 6, 1915, in Stuttgart, from dysentery which he had caught while in East Africa.