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                               1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer- Verlag. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your work, please use the accepted author’s version for posting to your own website or your institution’s repository. You may further deposit the accepted author’s version on a funder’s repository at a funder’s request, provided it is not made publicly available until 12 months after publication. 1 23 Authors personal copy Naturwissenschaften DOI 10.1007/s00114-012-0917-1 ORIGINAL PAPER A drowned Mesozoic bird breeding colony from the Late Cretaceous of Transylvania Gareth Dyke Mátyás Vremir Gary Kaiser Darren Naish Received: 14 March 2012 /Accepted: 11 April 2012 # Springer-Verlag 2012 Abstract Despite a rapidly improving fossil record, the re- components of this lens were deposited in a single flood event, productive biology of Mesozoic birds remains poorly known: and we conclude that it represents the drowned remains of a only a handful of undisputed, isolated Cretaceous eggs (some larger enantiornithine breeding colony, swamped by rising containing embryonic remains) are known. We report here the water, washed a short distance and deposited in a shallow, first fossil evidence for a breeding colony of Mesozoic birds, low-energy pond. The same fate often befalls modern bird preserved at the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Oarda de Jos