A piece of fossilized vomit dating back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth has been discovered in Denmark, the East Zealand Museum said on Monday.

A local amateur fossil hunter placed the find on the cliffs of Stevns, a UNESCO-listed site south of Copenhagen.

While out for a walk, Peter Bennicke found some unusual fragments, which turned out to be pieces of a sea lily, in a piece of chalk.

He then took the fragments to a museum for examination, which vomited until the end of the Cretaceous some 66 million years ago.

According to experts, the vomit contains at least two types of sea lilies, which were probably eaten by the fish, which threw away the parts it could not digest.

“This type of find … is considered very important when reconstructing past ecosystems because it provides important information about which animals were eaten by which,” the museum said. announcementwhich also included a picture of fossilized vomit.

Paleontologist Jesper Milan hailed the discovery as a “truly unusual find”, adding that it helped explain relationships in the prehistoric food chain.

“Sea lilies are not a particularly nutritious diet, as they mostly consist of calcareous plates held together by several soft parts,” he said.

“But here’s an animal, probably some kind of fish, that 66 million years ago ate sea lilies that lived at the bottom of the Cretaceous sea and regurgitated skeletal parts.”

According to UNESCOthe Stevens Cliffs offer “remarkable evidence of the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite that crashed into the planet about 65 million years ago,” widely believed to have caused the end of the dinosaur age.

Researchers have previously studied ancient regurgitated remains. Last November, scientists used fossilized feces and vomit samples from Poland to try to determine who ate whom 200 million years ago, Associated Press registered.

In 2018, researchers discovered fossilized vomit during a dig in southeastern Utah, Live Science registered. In a study published in 2022 in the journal Palaiosthese scientists reported finding remains of salamanders and frogs in the vomit.