The fossilized chunks of vomit are the oldest known land animal, dating back some 290 million years.

Inside, 41 bone fragments freeze one meal from dinosaurs’ distant past, allowing researchers to redraw early terrestrial food webs.

is buried in Bromacker Sandstone in central Germany contained walnut-sized chunks of small bones packed together rather than scattered over the rock.

On the stone tablet, paleontologist Arnaud Revillard of the Berlin Fur Nature Museum (MFN) I treated the lump as a clue.

Later, Revillard and colleagues published a detailed study that mapped the bones in the lumps and argued that the lumps were regurgitation of stomach contents.

This conclusion made the mass a direct record of the diet, although fossils are usually hidden behind broken skeletons.

How vomit becomes fossilized

Researchers discovered fossilized vomit Regulu guitar lighthardened stomach residue is expelled from the mouth before digestion is complete.

During the bump, sticky mucus and digestive fluids can glue the sharp bones together into a hard mass.

Bury quickly and seal the packet, as sun, scavengers, and running water can pull loose pieces apart.

Since such a possibility is unlikely on land, each preserved regurgitalite could reveal behaviors that would have been missed in the skeleton alone.

Digitally sort bones

To avoid cracking the specimen, the team used micro-CT scanning, a high-resolution X-ray scan of small fossils.

X-rays penetrated the bone differently than sandstone, and the software separated the denser areas into a clean digital model.

After this separation, the researchers rotated each bone and matched its shape to the better-preserved Bromacker skeleton stored in the MfN cabinet.

Nothing was left in the rock during the scan, which was important because some bones can easily crumble in less than an inch.

3 prey species

matches the site fossil Upon collection, the vomit was found to contain the remains of not just one unfortunate victim, but three animals.

one set fit Thuringotyris mahrendorfaethe length is about 3.5 inches, the other one matched Eudybumus cursorisapproximately 4 inches long.

third prey animal derived from an unidentified diaktid related to Diaktesreached about 2 feet in length.

The predator’s name could not yet be determined from the bones, as no tooth marks or skull fragments remained.

Clues from chemistry

Chemistry helped separate vomit Phosphorus is often concentrated in feces, which is fossilized coprolite that hardens into rocks.

In the vomit group, unlike typical fecal fossils, the sediment immediately adjacent to the bones contained very little phosphorus.

The bones still contained their own phosphorous, but the nearby cement looked more like floodplain mud than digested waste.

This chemical pattern supported the idea that the animals excreted the compact pellet early, before it was fully processed in the gastrointestinal tract.

dirty eater

Mixing different prey items in one bite indicates opportunistic feeding. A predator can grab a small reptile, grab another reptile that was nearby, and swallow them both before the acid softens the bones.

The alignment of long bones within the mass suggested that it had left the body as a single piece, rather than as separate fragments. Evidence of such direct predators and prey remains largely absent in early land rocks, and most fossils show post-mortem remains rather than meals.

track down predators

Only two of Blomacher’s large carnivores matched the size of the bone mass and the animal that lived there.

both Dimetrodon Teutonis and Tambacarnifex unguifalcatus It was monoapsidthe branch of vertebrates that later gave rise to mammals.

Neither predator left any teeth in the mass, so the authors treated the producer as the most likely suspect.

Keeping it short is still important because it narrows the way scientists can reconstruct the top of that food chain.

Why Bromacker stands out

Unlike many people, fossil quarryBlomacher revealed a complete land skeleton, along with its orbit, allowing scientists to match its body to its behavior.

Repeated excavations exposed thin layers of sandstone and mud that quickly trapped the animals and limited the distance the bones could drift.

Thomas Martens first removed bones from the quarry in 1974, and teams have returned over the years to expand on the record.

This long-term effort has put MfN in the unique position of being able to compare a single regurgitated mass to many known animals.

The moment you’re trapped

An ephemeral stream once flowed through the Blomacher Valley, and coniferous trees lined the banks where flood mud could bury the ruins.

The chunk recorded a single regurgitation, allowing researchers to determine who ate who without leaving bite marks on the fossilized skeleton.

“It’s like a photograph of the past taken at a specific moment in time,” Revillard said, explaining how rare such direct records are on land.

Finding more regurgitalites will test whether their predators hunt them selectively, but the regurgitalites have already fixed links in the actual food chain.

where does this lead

By linking scattered bones to a single event, the fossil vomit allowed scientists to see networks of predators and prey that were hidden from the remains alone.

Future discoveries from Bromacker and similar sites could reveal how early land predators fed and how often they regurgitated their meals.

This study scientific report.

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