Fish's Unwanted 66-Million-Year-Old Meal Lands in a Museum
Museums tend to show off the remnants of animal meals in the form of owl pellets or coprolites, but fish snacks—especially 66-million-year-old ones—are another story. A rare find from eastern Denmark depicts the immaculately fossilized remains of an ancient fish's meal, which it partially chewed and spat back out. The fossil is now on display at a Danish museum.
Amateur fossil hunter Peter Bennicke found the rejected meal at Stevns Klint, a coastal cliff and UNESCO world heritage site known for its geological and archaeological treasures. Perfectly preserved in a block of chalk he'd split were a "strange little collection of sea lily pieces." Intrigued, Bennicke brought the fossil to Geomuseum Faxe, a natural history museum and research institution, for inspection.
Paleontologist John Jagt determined that the sea lily remnants were once a fish's meal. Sea lilies, known formally as crinoids, are marine invertebrates that look much like the flower-bearing plants we see on land. They've become snacks for fish and fellow echinoderms for hundreds of millions of years—as far back as the Cambrian period—despite a protective mucous coating that makes them toxic to some predators.
Credit: Sten Lennart Jakobsen
This particular bunch of sea lilies had likely been munched by a hungry predator some 66 million years before Bennicke's chalky discovery. The fact that the sea lilies were in pieces suggested that this fish had chewed its snack before rejecting it. Still, the fossil wasn't technically vomit. Based on the integrity the individual pieces had managed to keep, the sea lilies never made it to the fish's digestive tract, and were instead spat out quickly after chewing. As the fish moved on, its unwanted food likely became lodged in marine sediment, where it fossilized over tens of millions of years.
"It's really an unusual find," said Geomuseum Faxe curator Jesper Milàn in a translated statement. "Søliljer (sea lilies) are not a particularly nutrient-rich diet, as they mainly consist of limeplates that are held together by a few soft parts. But here is an animal, probably a kind of fish that 66 million years ago ate Søliljer, who lived on the bottom of the Cretaceous sea. Such a find provides important new knowledge about the relationship between predators and prey and the food chains in the Cretaceous seas."
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