Reputation built on a single piece of work turned out to be a more reliable exit from Nazi Germany than any bureaucratic appeal, and the method she catalogued in 1929 still anchors the field.
Tilly Edinger did not leave Germany because someone helped her. She left because a single piece of work, a 1929 monograph on the casts of brains preserved inside fossil skulls, had already made her too visible to lose. By the time the Senckenberg Museum dismissed her in November 1938, her name was already in the citation networks of paleontologists in London, New York, and Cambridge. Reputation turned out to be a more reliable exit document than any bureaucratic appeal.
That monograph, Die fossilen Gehirne, was not a manifesto. It was a cataloguing of every brain endocast then known, the stone or sediment fills left inside a skull after the original tissue decayed. Edinger, a Jewish paleontologist working in Frankfurt, argued that those hollows held readable information about the brains that had once filled them, and therefore about behavior, sensory capacity, and evolutionary relationships in animals dead for millions of years. The book effectively created paleoneurology as a subdivision of paleontology rather than merely contributing to it.
The mechanism of escape is what separates this story from the standard hidden-figure template. After the November 1938 wave of dismissals of Jewish academics, Edinger was barred from the Senckenberg after fifteen years of research there, as documented in the Scientific American profile of her life and work. Within months, an offer arrived from a research post in the United States, brokered by colleagues who had been citing and corresponding with her for years. A position meant a visa. The offer was contingent on the standing her monograph had built. Without that prior visibility, there would have been no one in a position to issue an invitation in time.
What the monograph could not do was carry anyone else with her. Edinger emigrated in 1939, but the family she left behind did not all follow. The losses that came next are part of what the Lost Women of Science feature, published with Scientific American, does not soften. The framing "saved by her science" is accurate in a narrow, literal sense. It is also incomplete. The work bought her passage. It did not retrieve the rest of her life.
What survived the regime was not just Edinger herself but a method. Paleoneurology is now an active international subfield, with researchers using CT scanning and digital reconstruction to read endocasts from dinosaurs, archaic mammals, and early hominins. The technique Edinger pioneered with hand-sectioning and wax models in 1920s Frankfurt is now executed in voxel-resolution imaging labs on several continents. The 1929 monograph still functions as the citation anchor for the field, a working bibliography of every endocast then known, and a reminder that the discipline's continuity runs through one woman, one catalog, and the international network that recognized its value before the institutions that housed her could be taken from her.
Edinger's papers and correspondence now sit in the Ernst Mayr Library and Archives at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard. The archive is not a memorial. It is the documentary base from which later paleontologists have reconstructed the founding of their own subdiscipline. The story of paleoneurology is, in this sense, a story about what rigorous, citational work can carry across a border when nothing else does, and about how thin the margin was between a cataloguing project and an unrecoverable loss. The next endocast scanned, by a graduate student in Berlin or Cape Town, is reading a method she wrote into print before anyone in her government had thought to count her as disposable.