Fossilized food from dinosaur era found in Denmark

Experts say the diet of a fish that lived 66 million years ago likely consisted of sea lilies. It is an important contribution to the reconstruction of past ecosystems. The find belongs to the East Zealand Museum. It was made by a local hobbyist fossil hunter at the Stevens Cliffs. This is a UNESCO-listed site located south of Copenhagen, reported by The Guardian.

66 million-year-old find

While walking, Peter Bennicke found unusual fragments in a piece of chalk that turned out to be pieces of a sea lily. He then took the fragments to the museum for analysis, which dated the food to the end of the Cretaceous period. That’s about 66 million years ago.

Experts believe the meal consisted of at least two different species of sea lily, which were likely eaten by a fish that discarded the parts it could not digest. This type of find is considered very important in reconstructing past ecosystems because it provides important information about which animals were eaten.

Paleontologists welcome the discovery

Paleontologist Jesper Milan welcomed the discovery as a truly extraordinary find, adding that it helped explain the links in the prehistoric food chain. He stressed that sea lilies are not a particularly nutritious food, as they consist mainly of calcareous plates held together by several soft parts. But this animal, which was probably a fish, 66 million years ago ate sea lilies that lived on the bottom of the Cretaceous sea and regurgitated parts of its plates.