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
cover caption
toggle caption
Sten Lennart Jakobsen/East Zealand Museum
About 66 million years in the past, simply earlier than the mass extinction that wiped 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 japanese Denmark identified for its fossil report and necessary geologic historical past. Fossil hunter Peter Bennicke found it in a chunk of chalk on the UNESCO World Heritage site and introduced it to Denmark’s East Zealand Museum.
“It’s really an uncommon discover,” Jesper Milàn, a curator at one of many museum’s reveals, said in a press release. “Such a discover supplies necessary new data concerning the relationship between predators and prey and the meals chains within 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, stated regurgitalites will not be uncommon, however this one is an “particularly good instance.”
“This specific fossil, in case you look fastidiously on the picture that is supplied, you see that the perimeters of the fossils are very sharp and clear. And that tells you that this materials didn’t go into the digestive system of no matter 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 an alternative, likening it to chewing on and spitting out sunflower seed shells.)
The predator was making an attempt to eat sea lilies, also called crinoids. The deep-sea creatures, which might be mistaken for crops, nonetheless exist as we speak.
The fossil additionally seems to comprise bryozoans, Olsen says, very tiny creatures which can be additionally called moss animals, however it’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 could be widespread in that space on the backside of the ocean on the time.
Sadly for this fish, crinoids do not have a lot vitamin and have a coating of mucus that may be poisonous to fish.
“It might be that no matter made this regurgitalite was cruising about in search of fish, perhaps pretty determined for meals, and choosing up crinoids and no matter else it may in its mouth, chewing it up. And this specific mouthful could have been actually foul. And that is why there are nonetheless 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 sort of fish did the chewing.
Vomit is one among a number of varieties of “hint fossils”
Regurgitalites are one sort 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 record of “trace fossils.” They don’t seem to be the stays of the animal itself, however of the way it lived.
“Regurgitalites give us a window into the feeding processes of varied members of the ecosystem that have been round on the time,” Olsen says.
All these fossils are “a beautiful illustration of issues that have been happening simply earlier than the large [asteroid] affect, regular life within the ecosystem. It is a hint of that motion. … It is a hint of the organisms doing their enterprise each day.”
