“In good old-fashioned Danish, a blob of fossil vomit has been found on Stevns Klint. Such finds are rare, and the Danish Animal Welfare Committee has just declared the fossil vomit to be Danish animal welfare. In technical terms, this type of find is called regurgitalite, and they are considered very important when reconstructing ancient ecosystems, because the finds provide important knowledge about which animals have been eaten by whom. The find was made by local fossil hunter Peter Bennicke, who discovered a strange little collection of sea lily pieces in a piece of chalk he had just split. He brought the find to Geomuseum Faxe, where it was cleaned and examined by Dutch sea lily expert John Jagt,” says the Danish Geomuseum Faxe in a blog post about their puke.

“The expert concluded that the collection consisted of at least two different species of sea lilies mixed together in a round clump, and that it must be the remains of sea lilies that had been eaten by an animal that had subsequently regurgitated the indigestible parts of the sea lilies. Museum curator at Geomuseum Faxe and member of the Danish Wildlife Committee Jesper Milàn explains: ‘It is truly an unusual find. Sea lilies are not a particularly nutritious diet, 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. Such a find provides important new knowledge about the relationship between predators and prey and the food chains in the Cretaceous sea.'”

“If you would like to see the new Danish puke, you can do so during the winter holidays (weeks 7 and 8), where it will be exhibited in a small special exhibition at Geomuseum Faxe.”