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 document and essential geologic historical past. Fossil hunter Peter Bennicke found it in a chunk of chalk on the UNESCO World Heritage website and introduced it to Denmark’s East Zealand Museum.
“It is truly an unusual find,” Jesper Milàn, a curator at one of many museum’s reveals, mentioned in a press launch. “Such a find provides important new knowledge about the relationship between predators and prey and the food chains in 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 “especially nice example.”
“This particular fossil, if you look carefully at the image that’s provided, you see that the edges of the fossils are very sharp and clear. And that tells you that this material did not pass into the digestive system of whatever 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 making an attempt to eat sea lilies, additionally known as crinoids. The deep-sea creatures, which might be mistaken for vegetation, nonetheless exist at the moment.
The fossil additionally seems to include bryozoans, Olsen says, very tiny creatures which are additionally known as moss animals, but it surely’s unclear in the event that they have been a part of the fish’s tried meal on this case. Each crinoids and moss animals can be frequent in that space on the backside of the ocean on the time.
Sadly for this fish, crinoids haven’t got a lot diet and have a coating of mucus that may be poisonous to fish.
“It could be that whatever made this regurgitalite was cruising about looking for fish, maybe fairly desperate for food, and picking up crinoids and whatever else it could in its mouth, chewing it up. And this particular mouthful may have been really foul. And that’s why there are still 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 “trace 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 document of “trace 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 various members of the ecosystem that were around at the time,” Olsen says.
Most of these fossils are “a wonderful illustration of things that were going on just before the giant [asteroid] impact, normal life in the ecosystem. It’s a trace of that action. … It’s a trace of the organisms doing their business on a daily basis.”
