{"id":58402,"date":"2025-01-30T19:46:35","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T19:46:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/fossil-hunter-discovers-66-million-year-old-vomit-in-denmark-offering-a-clue-to-the-cretaceous-food-chain\/"},"modified":"2025-01-30T19:46:35","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T19:46:35","slug":"fossil-hunter-discovers-66-million-year-old-vomit-in-denmark-offering-a-clue-to-the-cretaceous-food-chain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=58402","title":{"rendered":"Fossil Hunter Discovers 66-Million-Year-Old Vomit in Denmark, Offering a Clue to the Cretaceous Food Chain"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The fossil find, dubbed Danekr\u00e6 DK-1295, contains regurgitated fragments of sea lilies.
\n Sten Lennart Jakobsen<\/span>
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Sixty-six million years ago, a marine creature, minding its own business at the bottom of a Cretaceous sea, munched on some sea lilies\u2014then didn\u2019t feel too great.<\/p>\n

Now, a fossil hunter in Denmark named Peter Bennicke has found the remains of this Cretaceous snack: fossilized vomit. The discovery was announced Monday in a statement<\/a> from the natural history museum in the Danish town of Faxe, called Geomuseum Faxe.<\/p>\n

The fossil is \u201ctruly an extraordinary find,\u201d as Jesper Mil\u00e0n<\/a>, a paleontologist and curator at Geomuseum Faxe, says in the statement, per CNN<\/a>\u2019s Jack Guy.<\/p>\n

It all started when Bennicke found some strange fragments on the Danish island of Zealand at Stevns Klint<\/a>, a fossil-rich, coastal cliff that\u2019s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He brought the fragments to the Geomuseum Faxe, where experts identified them as pieces of sea lily<\/a>. These aquatic, plant-like animals related to sea stars and sea urchins are formally called crinoids.<\/p>\n

In the fossil, the hard-to-digest bits of sea lily were encompassed in chalk. Essentially, it was prehistoric puke, scientifically called regurgitalite.<\/p>\n

Technically, the sea lily does not appear to have reached the vomiter\u2019s stomach, since \u201cthe edges of the fossils are very sharp and clear,\u201d as Paul Olsen<\/a>, a paleontologist at Columbia University who was not involved with the find, tells NPR<\/a>\u2019s James Doubek. For that reason, he calls it a \u201cgastric ejection\u201d rather than true vomit. But nevertheless, he adds, it\u2019s an \u201cespecially nice example\u201d of a regurgitalite fossil.<\/p>\n

Besides giving millions of people around the world the chance to giggle about vomit like children, the finding \u201ctells us something about who was eating who 66 million years ago,\u201d Mil\u00e0n tells the BBC<\/a>. It helps scientists better understand the organization of the Cretaceous period food chain.<\/p>\n

During the Late Cretaceous, dinosaurs<\/a>\u2014including Tyrannosaurus<\/em><\/a> and Velociraptor<\/em>\u2014roamed the land, shortly before the notorious Chicxulub impactor<\/a>\u00a0nearly wiped them out. Mil\u00e0n, however, suspects the animal that ate the sea lilies all that time ago to be a bottom-dwelling shark with crushing teeth instead of sharp ones, as Victor Mather reports for the New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lilies, however, \u201caren\u2019t that great to eat, because they are almost only skeleton,\u201d he explains to the New York Times<\/em>. \u201cSo, they took what they could and threw up the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sharks survived the Chicxulub impactor, and today, the closest living relative of Mil\u00e0n\u2019s hypothesized shark would be Australia\u2019s Port Jackson shark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The fossilized vomit has been designated \u201cDanekr\u00e6<\/a>,\u201d a unique Danish term for objects discovered in Denmark of significant natural historical value. As of today, more than 1,000 discoveries have been identified as Danekr\u00e6, and finders are required by law to hand them over to a natural history museum in the country.<\/p>\n

While this may now be the \u201cworld\u2019s most famous piece of puke,\u201d as Mil\u00e0n tells the BBC, it\u2019s actually not the oldest. That award goes to 160-million-year-old ichthyosaur<\/a> vomit discovered in England in 2002, according to Guinness World Records<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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