On a Danish beach, an amateur fossil hunter discovered a fragment of 66-million-year-old animal vomit.
According to a statement issued to CNN on Wednesday by the local museum, Geomuseum Faxe, where the discovery will be on display, Peter Bennicke saw a “strange small cluster of lily pieces in a piece of chalk” near Stevns Klint in eastern Denmark.
John Jagt, a Dutch expert on lilies, cleaned and inspected the fossil after Bennicke presented it to the museum.
According to Jagt, the cluster includes at least two different types of lilies grouped together in a circular lump. This is probably the indigestible portion of the lilies that an animal that consumed the plants regurgitated.
The statement read, “In technical terms, this type of find is called regurgitalite, and they are considered very important when reconstructing ancient ecosystems because they provide valuable information about which animals were eaten by whom.”
Jesper Milàn, curator at Geomuseum Faxe, said the fossil “is truly an extraordinary find.”
He said in the statement, “Lilies are not a particularly nutritious food, as they are mainly made up of calcium plates held together by very few soft tissues.”
“But here we have an animal, most likely some kind of fish, that 66 million years ago ate lilies that lived on the seabed of the Cretaceous Sea and then vomited up the skeletal parts,” he added.
Milàn further added that the discovery “provides important new knowledge about the relationship between predators and prey and the food chains of the Cretaceous seas.”
