‘World’s most famous piece of puke’ discovered as 66 MILLION-year-old dinosaur-era fish vomit found fossilised in rock
A SCIENTIST made a bizarre discovery after breaking open a piece of chalk and finding 66 million-year-old fish vomit.
The find dating back to the age of the dinosaurs was made by fossil hunter Peter Bennicke in Denmark.
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Bennicke found the unusual fossil on the Stevns Klint coastal cliff, on the Danish island of Zealand, and then took it to a nearby museum for further investigation.
At the Museum of East Zealand, expert John Jagt found that hidden inside the piece of chalk was fossilised vomit containing two types of sea lilies that were eaten during the Cretaceous period.
The remaining pieces of the marine invertebrate that could not be digested by the animal give researchers an insight into the food chains and ancient ecosystems that existed tens of millions of years ago.
Researchers are unable to name the exact animal that ate the sea lillies but museum creator at Geomuseum Faxe Jesper Milan told Sky News it was likely a fish, possibly a bottom-feeding shark.
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Milan, who is a member of the Danish Wildlife Committee, said: “It is a truly unusual find.
“Sea lilies are not a particularly nutritious food source, as they mainly consist of calcareous plates held together by very few soft parts.
“But here is an animal, probably a type of fish, that 66 million years ago ate sea lilies that lived on the bottom of the Cretaceous sea and regurgitated the skeletal parts back up.”
Despite not being able to definitively name the animal, Milan has a top “suspect.”
“We have found teeth from sharks that were specialised in crushing hard-shelled prey in the same area,” he explained.
“They are called Heterodontus; it’s a relative of the modern Port Jackson shark.
“That one is high on my list of suspects.”
“This is the world’s most famous piece of puke ever,” he told the BBC.
Bennicke has been credited with finding a rare and natural treasure of Denmark known as a Danekrae, with the fossil being named Danekrae DK-1295.
The fossil will be on display at an exhibition at the Geomuseum Faxe.
Meanwhile, experts in Peru have found the fossil of an ancestor of the Great White shark.
The 23ft, 9-million-year-old shark known as Cosmopolitodus Hastalis was discovered last week 146 miles south of Lima in Peru‘s Pisco basin.
The rare near-complete fossil showed that the beast had flesh-tearing teeth measuring up to 8.9cm in length.
The shark roamed the seas millions of years ago and was likely one of the major predators in its ecosystem at the time.
Read more on the Scottish Sun
Another recent find is that of a Behemoth horned dinosaur that roamed the Earth 95 million years ago.
The discovery came after fossils of the 10metre beast were destroyed.
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