Experts believe the vomit came from a prehistoric shark or fish that dined on sea lilies before regurgitating the parts it couldn't digest.
Sten Lennart JakobsenThe 66-million-year-old vomit left by a creature from the Cretaceous period.
This week, the scientific world has been abuzz about a pile of fossilized fish vomit discovered on the Danish island of Zealand last November. “This is the most famous piece of puke in the world,” Dr. Jesper Milàn, the curator of Denmark’s Geomuseum Faxe, told The New York Times.
The pile of vomit resulted from one marine creature’s gastrointestinal distress after eating sea lilies 66 million years ago. Now, it’s providing valuable insight into “who was eating who” during the Cretaceous period.
Our World During The Cretaceous Period
The Cretaceous period began 145 million years ago and lasted around 80 million years. The supercontinent Pangea had started to split millions of years earlier, and tectonic plates had shifted the world’s continents across the globe.
The climate was warmer than it is today, and sea levels were hundreds of feet higher. Areas that we know as cold and barren today — such as Antarctica — were once thriving rainforests.
J. McKay/Alfred Wegener InstituteAn illustration of Antarctica roughly 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.
During the Late Cretaceous Epoch, roughly 100.5 to 66 million years ago, much of modern-day Scandinavia was submerged underwater. In Denmark, a shallow tropical sea known as the Western European Chalk Sea supported a rich variety of marine life.
The recent discovery of a fossilized pile of vomit offers a tangible glimpse into this diverse ecosystem — and proof that one creature’s unfortunate meal can become a scientific treasure.
A Self-Proclaimed ‘Fossil Geek’ Finds Prehistoric Vomit
In November 2024, amateur fossil hunter Peter Bennicke was searching the beaches at the Cliffs of Stevns in eastern Denmark when he split open a large chunk of chalk and spotted a bizarre fossil inside.
Bennicke took the fossil to the Geomuseum Faxe, where sea lily expert John Jagt examined it and concluded that it was a collection of sea lilies regurgitated by a marine creature, perhaps a bottom-dwelling shark, roughly 66 million years ago.
“When we first got it in, we could only see a small collection of crinoid (sea lily) plates and stalk fragments. But after careful preparation…we could see there was remains of two different species of crinoids mixed together, and they were concentrated in a small pellet about 35 mm in diameter. This lead to the conclusion that it was regurgitated material,” Dr. Jesper Milàn, a palaeontologist and curator at Geomuseum Faxe, told All That’s Interesting.
Alexander Vasenin/Wikimedia CommonsA sea lily similar to the one the prehistoric shark or fish may have eaten before vomiting it back up.
Dr. Jesper Milàn explained the remarkable finding in a press release from the museum: “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.”
Luckily, the chemical composition of the sea lilies helped preserve this remarkable find for millions of years.
“The pellet consists of the massive skeletal plates and stem fragments of sea lilies, which all consists of massive calcite, which has high preservation potential in the chalk. All the gooey stuff of the puke are not preserved,” Dr. Milàn explained to All That’s Interesting.
Overall, the discovery has provided researchers with a rare opportunity to examine the food chain of a specific region of the planet during the Cretaceous period.
“In technical terms,” the press release reads, “this type of find is called regurgitalite, and they are considered very important when reconstructing ancient ecosystems because they provide valuable information about which animals were eaten by whom… Such a find provides important new knowledge about the relationship between predators and prey and the food chains in the Cretaceous sea.”
After reading about the prehistoric fossilized fish vomit discovered in Denmark, learn all about the nightmarish footballfish. Then, go inside the stories of 11 unbelievable prehistoric animals.
