Prehistoric Puke

Most avoid vomit on the floor of a public restroom or a street sidewalk.

But one man, seeing some on a beach in Denmark, decided to take a closer look.

During a walk on the Cliffs of Stevns, a UNESCO-listed heritage site rich in fossils south of Copenhagen, said he noticed a “strange small cluster of lily pieces in a piece of chalk” while on his stroll, according to the Geomuseum Faxe, a local museum where Bennicke brought the fossil afterward.

John Jagt, a lily expert from the Netherlands, cleaned and examined the fossil, which turned out to be pieces of a sea lily encased in animal vomit dating back 66 million years, reported the Guardian.

Sea lilies are aquatic, plant-like animals related to sea urchins, while sea stars are crinoids. In the fossil, the hard-to-digest bits of the sea lily were encompassed in chalk, making it prehistoric puke, or “regurgitate” to use the scientific term, according to the Smithsonian Magazine.

Jagt said the cluster contains at least two species of lily combined in a round lump, likely the indigestible parts of the plants that were regurgitated by the animal that consumed them, museum officials said.

Jesper Milàn, a curator at Geomuseum Faxe, said that “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.”

“This type of find … is considered very important when reconstructing past ecosystems because it provides important information about which animals were eaten by which,” the museum added.

Fossils such as these help researchers better understand the organization of the Cretaceous period food chain. In the Late Cretaceous period, dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor roamed the land, shortly before their mass extinction by the Chicxculub asteroid, the Smithsonian wrote.

Milàn speculated that a bottom-dwelling shark could be the vomit culprit, one with crushing teeth, similar to the Port Jackson shark currently found in Australia.

Though this may now be the most famous vomit in the world, it is not the oldest upchuck on record: Fossils found in Germany date back 150 million years.