66-million-year-old fossilized vomit is present in Denmark : NPR


A lump of chewed up crinoid fragments from 66 million years ago is now at a museum in Denmark.

A lump of chewed up crinoid fragments from 66 million years in the past is now at a museum in Denmark.

Sten Lennart Jakobsen/East Zealand Museum


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Sten Lennart Jakobsen/East Zealand Museum

About 66 million years in the past, simply earlier than the mass extinction that worn out the dinosaurs, a fish chewed up and spit out some sea creatures. Unbeknownst to that fish, its rejected meal was preserved in fossil type.

And it is now arrived at a museum in Denmark.

The fossil was discovered at Stevns Klint, a cliff in jap Denmark identified for its fossil report and vital geologic historical past. Fossil hunter Peter Bennicke found it in a bit of chalk on the UNESCO World Heritage website and introduced it to Denmark’s East Zealand Museum.

“It’s really an uncommon discover,” Jesper Milàn, a curator at one of many museum’s displays, mentioned in a press launch. “Such a discover gives vital new data concerning the relationship between predators and prey and the meals chains within the Cretaceous sea.”

Why this meal was spat out

There is a fancy phrase for fossilized vomit: regurgitalite.

Paul Olsen, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia College who was not concerned within the fossil discover, mentioned regurgitalites are usually not uncommon, however this one is an “particularly good instance.”

“This specific fossil, should you look rigorously on the picture that is offered, you see that the sides of the fossils are very sharp and clear. And that tells you that this materials didn’t go into the digestive system of no matter was doing the chewing,” he says. (And to be technical, it is not vomit, as a result of which means meals reaches the abdomen. He calls it a “gastric ejection” as a substitute, likening it to chewing on and spitting out sunflower seed shells.)

The predator was trying to eat sea lilies, additionally referred to as crinoids. The deep-sea creatures, which may very well be mistaken for vegetation, nonetheless exist right now.

The fossil additionally seems to comprise bryozoans, Olsen says, very tiny creatures which are additionally referred to as moss animals, but it surely’s unclear in the event that they had been a part of the fish’s tried meal on this case. Each crinoids and moss animals could be widespread in that space on the backside of the ocean on the time.

Sadly for this fish, crinoids do not have a lot vitamin and have a coating of mucus that may be poisonous to fish.

“It may very well be that no matter made this regurgitalite was cruising about searching for fish, possibly pretty determined for meals, and choosing up crinoids and no matter else it may in its mouth, chewing it up. And this specific mouthful might have been actually foul. And that is why there are nonetheless bits of unchewed crinoid in it,” he says.

There have been 1000’s of species of fish within the space on the time, so it is not clear what kind of fish did the chewing.

Vomit is one among a number of varieties of “hint fossils”

Regurgitalites are one kind of “bromalite” — fossilized digestive materials. There are additionally colonites, the place the meals was discovered contained in the intestines, and coprolites — fossilized poop.

Bromalites are in flip a part of the report of “hint fossils.” They are not the stays of the animal itself, however of the way it lived.

“Regurgitalites give us a window into the feeding processes of assorted members of the ecosystem that had been round on the time,” Olsen says.

A majority of these fossils are “an exquisite illustration of issues that had been happening simply earlier than the large [asteroid] affect, regular life within the ecosystem. It is a hint of that motion. … It is a hint of the organisms doing their enterprise every day.”

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