Items that are determined to be "objects of exceptional natural history value" by the Danekræ committee of Denmark's Natural History Museum get bestowed with the "Danekræ" marker. As NBC News reports, that means the recently unearthed Danekræ DK-1295 is one such treasure. It's also a 66-million-year-old vomit fossil. It was discovered by fossil hunter Peter Bennicke in the country's east, where he spotted an unusual collection of sea lily fragments trapped in chalk. He passed the specimen on to Geomuseum Faxe. An analysis found it was a regurgitalite, or fossilized vomit, that held the remnants of at least two species of sea lilies that were eaten during the Cretaceous period.
Geomuseum Faxe curator Jesper Milàn explains the significance in a press release: "It is truly an unusual find. Sea lilies are not a particularly nutritious diet, as they mainly consist of calcareous plates held together by very few soft parts. But here is an animal, probably a type of fish, that 66 million years ago ate sea lilies that lived on the bottom of the Cretaceous sea and regurgitated the skeletal parts back up. Such a find provides important new knowledge about the relationship between predators and prey and the food chains in the Cretaceous sea."
The press release notes that "Danekræ, like Danefæ [historical objects for which ownership can't be proven, like unearthed coins], belong to the state and must be handed over to one of the state's natural history museums." This find was made at Stevns Klint, which Heritage Daily reports is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. UNESCO calls the location a roughly 10-mile coastal cliff on the Danish island of Zealand that offers "exceptional evidence of the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite that crashed into the planet at the end of the Cretaceous." (More discoveries stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
