SciTechDaily has a story about an extraordinary dinosaur fossils site in Transylvania. The Hateg Basin is famous for its dinosaur fossils. The site dates to the late Cretaceous Period, some 72 million years ago. So far, thousands of fossils have been found, including bones of amphibians, turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and mammals. A recent paper in the journal PLOS ONE documents the site.

“Detailed study of the rocks at the K2 site indicates that a small lake once existed here, which was periodically fed by flash floods carrying animal carcasses. As the flow of the rivers slowed rapidly upon entering the lake, the transported bodies accumulated in the deltaic environment along the shore, producing this exceptionally high bone concentration,” said Soma Budai, researcher at the University of Pavia and co-author of the publication.

The site yielded not only isolated bones but also several partial, associated dinosaur skeletons. These represent the remains of two different herbivorous dinosaur species. Some of the skeletons belong to a roughly two-meter-long, predominantly bipedal herbivore of the Rhabdodontidae family — one of the most common dinosaurs in the Hațeg Basin.