Let’s be honest here. Vomiting is something you want to get rid of. You don’t want it to hang for a day, an hour, or even a few minutes.
And certainly not for 66 million years.
Yet, scientists say, vomiting that the old one was found in the cliffs of Stevns, the white chalk cliff and the UNESCO World Heritage Site on the Danish island of Zealand.
Sometime in the Cretaceous period, a shark or maybe another kind of fish released food some sea lilies. But the sea lilies “are not so great to eat because they are almost just a skeleton,” said Jesper Milàn, curator Geomuseum Faxe. “So they took what they could and threw the rest.”
And then vomiting was lost to the fog of time. Until last November, when the amateur fossil hunter Peter Bennicke divided a piece of chalk and discovered it.
For Decorum, we now had better to switch to a formal scientific name for fossilized vomiting: Regurgitanite. Oh, no, let’s stick to “vomiting”.
Dr. Milàn speculated that the source of vomiting could be a shark again, one with crushed teeth, not sharp teeth. If this hypothesis is correct, the closest living relative would be the shark port Jackson, located in Australia in modern times, he said.
Although 66 million years old vomiting is very old to vomit, it does not reach the record. Dr. Milàn knows about findings from Germany from 150 million years. But it was the first finding of its kind in Denmark, he said.
Uchckish attracted attention from all over the world, including China, Russia and the Arab world, said Dr. Milan.
And why do they think it has already gained such famous?
“Journalists are big boys,” he said. “They like the story of vomiting.”
And he added, “With the world situation, it’s a funny story to which the world can relate.”
Now you may also laugh. Okay, go ahead. Barf is so funny. Ha-Ha.
However, fossilized vomiting may be informative for scholars because it can reveal who ate what.
And this particular sample of vomiting has been officially classified as “Danekrae”, a designation stored for Danish objects “exceptional natural historical values”. This means that vomiting belongs to Denmark, not to the finder, and must be transferred to the natural historical museum.
This vomiting with an “exceptional value” is displayed in Geomuseum Fax, in the city of Fax, about 48 miles south of Copenhagen, during winter holidays.
As Dr. Milàn, with perhaps more seriousness than you could expect: “This is the most famous piece of twist in the world.”
