A roughly 66-million-year-old fossil from Stevns Klint in Denmark preserves a compact cluster of sea-lily remains—evidence, researchers say, of an animal’s meal being brought back up. The animal that ate them is unknown. The find, catalogued as Danekræ DK-1295, offers a glimpse of a marine food web near the end of the Cretaceous, not a revelation about a named dinosaur or predator.
What is the 66-million-year-old “vomit fossil”?
It is a rounded mass of skeletal fragments from sea lilies, also known as crinoids. Experts at Geomuseum Faxe identified remains from at least two crinoid species mixed together and interpreted the clump as prey remains expelled by an animal.
The fossil was found by local fossil hunter Peter Bennicke in chalk at Stevns Klint, eastern Denmark. Geomuseum Faxe, part of East Zealand Museums, holds the specimen, designated Danekræ DK-1295. The museum describes it as about 66 million years old—near the end of the Cretaceous, but not dated to the exact moment of the end-Cretaceous extinction. Jesper Milàn, curator at Geomuseum Faxe, called it “Det er virkelig et usædvanligt fund” (“It is truly an unusual find,” translated from Danish). East Zealand Museums’ announcement describes the find and its designation.
What did the prehistoric predator eat?
The preserved prey were crinoids, marine animals commonly called sea lilies because of their shape. They are animals, not plants. The fossil contains their hard skeletal parts rather than a complete sea lily or any remains that identify the predator.
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Crinoids have hard calcite plates and relatively little soft tissue, so durable skeletal fragments could remain after an animal fed on them. The museum’s interpretation is that the animal ate the crinoids and expelled the indigestible pieces. As Milàn put it to The Washington Post: “Somebody living on the seafloor preyed on the crinoids, ate whatever it could from them, then expelled the pieces.”
Was it a shark or a fish?
No predator has been identified. A fish or shark has been proposed in reporting as a possibility, but the fossil does not establish which kind of animal produced it, let alone a species. The prey fragments and their arrangement support an interpretation of feeding and expulsion; they do not preserve the predator itself.
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Is it really fossilized vomit?
“Fossilized vomit” is an accessible shorthand, but the technical language is more careful. A regurgitalite is fossilized regurgitated material. It belongs to the broader group of bromalites, fossilized digestive remains. A coprolite, by contrast, is fossilized feces.
Paul Olsen, a Columbia University paleontologist who was not involved in the find, has questioned whether these fragments entered the animal’s stomach at all. He told NPR/KPBS that their sharp, clear edges may indicate they did not pass through the digestive system, and calls the process a “gastric ejection.” The headline label is vivid; whether this particular material was vomited from the stomach is not settled by the fossil.
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How can fossilized regurgitated remains survive?
The proposed sequence is that an animal expelled the hard crinoid pieces, which remained clustered and were buried in chalk. Independent reporting relays the view that rapid burial helped protect the material from disturbance. The compact shape, mixture of crinoid fragments, and chalk setting are consistent with the interpretation, but they do not establish every step of preservation or identify the animal.
Such fossils matter because they can preserve behavior rather than just anatomy. As Olsen told NPR/KPBS, “Regurgitalites give us a window into the feeding processes of various members of the ecosystem that were around at the time.” The Danish find is a small clue to an ancient marine food web: crinoids were eaten, and at least some of their hard parts were expelled and preserved.
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What does Danekræ DK-1295 mean?
Danekræ is Denmark’s category for natural objects of exceptional natural-historical value. East Zealand Museums says such finds belong to the state and must be turned over to a state natural-history museum. The designation records the fossil’s recognized significance; it does not mean the predator has been identified.
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