A piece of fossilized vomit, dating from the time when the dinosaurs traveled the earth, was discovered in Denmark, the Museum of East Zealand announced on Monday.
A local amateur fossil hunter discovered the cliffs of Stevns, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the south of Copenhagen.
During a walk, Peter Bennicke found unusual fragments, which turned out to be pieces of water lily, in a piece of chalk.
He then took the fragments in a museum for examination, which made it possible to date vomit from the end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago.
According to experts, vomit contains at least two species of water lilies, probably eaten by a fish that vomited the parts he could not digest.
“This type of discovery … is considered to be very important when reconstruction of ecosystems of the past because it provides important information on which animals have been eaten by which animals,” the museum said in a statement. press releasewhich also included an image of the vomit fossilized.
Museum of East Zealand
The paleontologist Jesper Milan praised this discovery as “a really unusual discovery”, adding that it was helping to explain relationships in the prehistoric food chain.
“Water lilies do not constitute a particularly nutritious diet because they are mainly made up of limestone plates maintained together by some soft parts,” he explained.
“But here is an animal, probably a kind of fish, which, 66 million years ago, ate water lilies who lived at the bottom of the Cretaceous sea and regurgus the skeletal parts.”
According to UnescoStevns’ cliffs offer “exceptional evidence of the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite which crashed on the planet about 65 million years ago”, which would have caused the end of the era of dinosaurs.
Researchers have already studied former regurgitized remains. Last November, scientists used fossilized excrement and vomiting samples from Poland to try to determine who ate who 200 million years ago, the Associated Press reported. reported.
In 2018, researchers discovered vomit fossilized during a search in southeast Utah, Live Science reported. In a study published in 2022 in the journal PalaiosThese scientists reported that they had found remains of salamanders and frogs in vomit.
