Amateur Fossil Hunting Finds 66 Million-Year-Old Animal Vomitting

The fragments of vomit from the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago. (Source: Sten Lennart Jakobsen)

JAKARTA - Amateur fossil hunters managed to find a piece of animal vomit dating back 66 million years on the Danish coast.

Peter Bennicke saw a "small bowl of strange licor flower pieces in a piece of limestone" on Stevns Klint, eastern Denmark, according to a statement from Geomuseum Faxe, the local museum where the discovery was set to be displayed which was sent to CNN last month.

Bennicke took the fossil to the museum, where the fossil was cleaned and examined by John Jagt, a liyan flower expert from the Netherlands.

Jagt said the group contained at least two species of libricant flowers combined in round clumps, which may have been part of the digested libon flower that was vomited by the animal that ate the plant.

"In technical terms, this type of discovery is called regulatory, and is considered very important when reconstructing ancient ecosystems because it provides valuable information about which animals are eaten by," reads the statement, quoted by CNN on February 5.

Meanwhile, Jesper Milmen, curator at Geomuseum Faxe, said the fossil was "a truly an extraordinary discovery."

"Bunga lilit is not a very nutritious food, because most of it consists of calcium plates that are united by very few soft tissues," he said in the statement.

"But here we have an animal, most likely a type of fish, which 66 million years ago ate a libricant that lived on the seabed of Cretaceous and then vomited the skeleton part," he explained.

Milten added the discovery "provides important new knowledge of the relationship between predators and prey as well as food chains in the Cretaceous sea."