The ancient environment and its fauna.
Reconstruction by Tibor Pecsics
Normally, creationists seize on any concentration of animal fossils that can be attributed to flooding as supposed “evidence” for their favourite Bronze Age myth of a global genocide. On that basis, they should be delighted by recent news from Romania describing a rich deposit of dinosaur fossils that appears to have accumulated as a result of flooding in the Hațeg Basin.
There is, however, a serious snag. These fossils occur in deposits dated to around 72 million years ago — tens of millions of years before creationists believe the Earth even existed — and the evidence points clearly to repeated local flooding events, not a single global catastrophe.
The discovery of the fossil site is reported in the journal PLOS ONE by the Valiora Dinosaur Research Group, a collaboration of Hungarian and Romanian palaeontologists co-led by Gábor Botfalvai and Zoltán Csiki-Sava of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Department of Palaeontology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Where the Hațeg Basin sits (tectonic setting). The Hațeg (Haţeg) Basin is in south-western Transylvania, Romania, in/around Hunedoara County.[1.1]The discovery itself, and its wider scientific significance, are also explained in a Faculty of Science news item from ELTE.
What it contains (a long sedimentary record)
- The Hațeg Basin is an intramontane basin in the Southern Carpathians region, formed as a post-tectonic depression following a major Late Cretaceous compressional/orogenic phase (often linked in the regional literature to a “Laramian/Laramide” tectonic pulse in the area). In plain terms: mountain-building rearranged the crust, then a local low developed and began to collect sediment. [2.1]
- It developed on/against Carpathian structural units (commonly discussed in terms of the Getic unit and neighbouring nappes/terranes in the regional geology). [3.1]
The depositional environments (why floods matter here)
- The basin fill is thick—on the order of kilometres—and spans multiple phases of deposition. One synthesis figure-captioned summary notes ~4 km of sediments, with the oldest part beginning with Lower Jurassic continental clastics, transitioning into Middle Jurassic marine limestones/marls, then later Mesozoic carbonates before the famous Late Cretaceous continental packages. [4.1]
- For your dinosaurs post, the key units are the Upper Cretaceous continental deposits, especially the Densuș-Ciula Formation and the Sânpetru Formation, which are widely treated as broadly Maastrichtian in age and represent terrestrial settings (rivers, floodplains, soils). [5.1]
The Hațeg Basin’s dinosaur-bearing rocks are important precisely because they record ordinary terrestrial processes:“Hațeg Island” (the palaeogeographic angle)
- Fluvial systems: channels and overbank deposits (sandstones, mudstones), often described as braided river / wet floodplain settings in summaries of the Sânpetru Formation. [6.1]
- Floodplains and palaeosols: soils forming between floods, then being buried by later sediment pulses—exactly the kind of repeated local process that can concentrate bones into “bonebeds” without invoking anything global. [7.1]
- The specific bonebed work you’re citing is explicitly within the Densuș-Ciula Formation and discusses multiple high-diversity bonebeds consistent with repeated depositional events. [5.1]
Dating (why the timescale is robust)
- In the Late Cretaceous, the region is often reconstructed as part of an island setting (“Hațeg Island”) within the Tethyan realm, which is one reason its fauna is so famous (including the long-running discussion of insular effects). [8.1]
- The dinosaur-bearing successions are tied into the global timescale using standard stratigraphic approaches; in addition, parts of the regional Upper Cretaceous record include volcaniclastic material that has been targeted for radiometric dating (e.g., U–Pb work on volcaniclastic deposits in the broader Transylvanian region). [9.1]
- Your cited paper is a Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) study in the Hațeg Basin context; the wider literature consistently places these terrestrial strata in the uppermost Cretaceous rather than anywhere near the Holocene. [5.1]
Paleontoligists have discovered an exceptionally rich dinosaur site in Transylvania
The Hațeg Basin in Transylvania is world-famous for its dinosaur remains, which have been unearthed from dozens of sites over the past century. Despite the high number of fossil localities, dinosaur finds are generally considered rare in the area. An exception is the newly discovered site, where researchers found more than a hundred vertebrate fossils per square meter — with the large dinosaur bones lying almost on top of each other.
The Valiora Dinosaur Research Group, consisting of Hungarian and Romanian paleontologists, has been conducting research for more than five years in the western part of the Hațeg Basin, an area famous for its dinosaur fossils. The Upper Cretaceous continental deposits studied here provide a glimpse into the final few million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs. During the excavations, the team collected assemblages containing thousands of vertebrate remains, including fossils of amphibians, turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and mammals. Among these, the K2 site stands out as the richest locality, yielding more than 800 vertebrate fossils from an area of less than five square meters. The detailed paleontological results of the site have recently been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.In 2019, during our first field survey in the Hațeg Basin, we almost immediately came across the K2 site. It was a defining moment for us — we instantly noticed dozens of large, exceptionally well-preserved black dinosaur bones gleaming in the grey clay layers exposed in the streambed. We immediately began our work, and through several years of excavation we collected an extraordinarily rich vertebrate assemblage from the site.
Assistant Professor Gábor Botfalvai, Co-lead author
Department of Paleontology
Eötvös Loránd University
Budapest, Hungary.
Around 72 million years ago, the area now known as the Hațeg Basin was dominated by ephemeral rivers formed in a subtropical climate. These rivers flowed from elevated regions toward the basin, and during heavy rainfall, they frequently flooded, overflowing their banks. As they moved toward lower-lying areas, they picked up carcasses lying on the surface, as well as living animals or their remains that happened to be in their path.
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
Soma Budai, co-author
Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra e dell’Ambiente
Università degli Studi di Pavia
Pavia, Italy.
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. The other type of skeleton, however, represents a major discovery: they belong to a titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur, of which no such well-preserved skeletons had previously been found in Transylvania. The study of these new fossils will provide valuable insights into the taxonomy of this long-necked dinosaur.
Several associated partial dinosaur skeletons were also recovered from the site
Besides the remarkably high bone concentration, another key significance of this newly described site is that it represents the oldest known vertebrate accumulation in the Hațeg Basin. Studying this fossil assemblage allows us to look into the earliest composition of the Hațeg dinosaur fauna and trace the evolutionary directions and processes leading toward the dinosaurs known from younger Transylvanian sites — revealing how these Late Cretaceous ecosystems were similar or different from one another.
Associate Professor Zoltán Csiki-Sava, co-lead author
Department of Geology, Mineralogy and Palaeontology
University of Bucharest
Bucharest, Romania.
The fossil assemblage described in this publication, along with other finds from ongoing excavations in the Hațeg Basin, will help scientists gain a more precise understanding of the evolutionary and ecological processes that shaped the composition of (Eastern) European dinosaur faunas during the Late Cretaceous.
Publication:
Taken together, the geology of the Hațeg Basin leaves creationist flood apologetics with nowhere to hide. What we see is not a chaotic jumble of life swept together in a single, planet-wide catastrophe, but a well-ordered succession of terrestrial sediments laid down over long periods by rivers, floodplains, and repeated local flooding events in a Late Cretaceous landscape. The fossil assemblages, sedimentary structures, and palaeosols all point to normal geological processes operating exactly as modern geology predicts.
Crucially, this fossil site sits firmly within the uppermost Cretaceous, around 72 million years ago, in the heart of the Hațeg Basin. That alone is fatal to any attempt to conscript it as evidence for a biblical flood supposed to have occurred just a few thousand years ago. No amount of rhetorical hand-waving can compress tens of millions of years of stratigraphy, tectonic history, and ecological succession into a single Bronze Age myth.
As so often happens, a discovery that creationists might initially welcome turns out, on closer inspection, to reinforce exactly the opposite conclusion. Far from supporting the idea of a global deluge, the Hațeg fossils add yet another clear, well-documented example of deep time, local environmental change, and the ordinary processes by which life is preserved in the geological record—processes that render the creationist narrative not merely unsupported, but fundamentally incompatible with the evidence.
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