A piece of fossilized vomit, dating back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth, was discovered in Denmark, the Museum of East Zealand said on Monday.
A local amateur fossil hunter made the find on the Cliffs of Stevns, a UNESCO-listed site south of Copenhagen.
While out on a walk, Peter Bennicke found some unusual fragments, which turned out to be pieces of sea lily, in a piece of chalk.
He then took the fragments to a museum for examination, which dated the vomit to the end of the Cretaceous era some 66 million years ago.
According to experts, the vomit contains at least two species of sea lilies, likely eaten by a fish that threw up the parts it could not digest.
“This type of find… is considered very important when reconstructing past ecosystems because it provides important information about which animals were eaten by which,” the museum said in a press release, which also included an image of the fossilized vomit.
Museum of East Zealand
Paleontologist Jesper Milan hailed the discovery as “truly an unusual find,” adding it helped explain the relationships in the prehistoric food chain.
“Sea lilies are not a particularly nutritious diet, as they consist mainly of calcareous plates held together by a few soft parts,” he said.
“But here is an animal, probably some kind of fish, that 66 million years ago ate sea lilies that lived at the bottom of the Cretaceous sea and regurgitated the skeletal parts.”
According to UNESCO, the Cliffs of Stevns offers “exceptional evidence of the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite that crashed into the planet about 65 million years ago,” which is widely believed to have caused the end of the age of the dinosaurs.Â
Researchers have studied ancient regurgitated remains before. Last November, scientists used fossilized feces and vomit samples from Poland to try to determine who was eating whom 200 million years ago, the Associated Press reported.
In 2018, researchers discovered fossilized vomit during an excavation in southeastern Utah, Live Science reported. In a study published in 2022 in the journal Palaios, those scientists reported finding remnants of salamanders and frogs in the vomit.