Copenhagen:

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

The find was made by a local amateur fossil hunter on the Cliffs of Stevns, a UNESCO-listed site south of Copenhagen.

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

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

According to experts, the vomit is made up of at least two different species of sea lily, which were likely eaten by a fish that threw up 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 in a press release.

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

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

“But here is 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 the skeletal parts.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A network of nearly 200 dinosaur footprints, dating back to the Middle Jurassic period, has been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire, marking the largest discovery of its kind in the United Kingdom. The trackways, believed to be around 166 million years old, were uncovered at Dewars Farm Quarry by researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham.

They are part of a vast “dinosaur highway” and feature footprints from the 9-metre-long, fierce predator Megalosaurus and herbivorous dinosaurs that were up to twice its size, according to a news release by the University of Birmingham.

Gary Johnson, a quarry worker, first noticed unusual indentations while extracting limestone for roadworks in 2023. His discovery has since drawn attention from palaeontologists eager to piece together a more detailed picture of life in the Jurassic era.

Our palaeontologists worked with their counterparts from @UniofOxford to uncover a huge expanse of quarry floor filled with hundreds of different prehistoric footprints on Britain’s ‘dinosaur highway’ https://t.co/UIWhfbCV8y pic.twitter.com/HbbemtftqH

— UniBirmingham News (@news_ub) January 2, 2025

“It’s like a snapshot into the day of the (dinosaurs’) life, and what they were doing,” said Dr Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist, who was part of the excavation, in a statement.

In June 2024, a team of around 100 volunteers and researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham spent a week excavating and documenting the site. Their findings have been linked to a previously discovered trackway in the same quarry, uncovered in 1997, though that section is no longer accessible.

In the latest find, the longest trackway stretched over 150 metres. While some of the tracks were left by massive sauropods, others belonged to the carnivorous Megalosaurus. Megalosaurus, originally named in 1824, was the world’s first scientifically described dinosaur.

“The general rule of locomotion is that the faster the animal is moving, the farther apart the footprints will be,” Lawrence Tanner, a paleontologist who was not involved in the excavation, told CNN, likening the movement of the sauropods to modern elephants.

It remains unclear exactly where the dinosaurs were headed, but Tanner believes they may have been navigating along a shoreline or seeking food.

The exceptional preservation of the tracks is attributed to the unique conditions of the time. The site’s soft sediment, combined with just the right amount of moisture, created an ideal environment to capture the impressions, according to the CNN report.

“The preservation is so detailed that we can see how the mud was deformed as the dinosaur’s feet squelched in and out,” Dr Duncan Murdock, an earth scientist, was quoted as saying by the University of Birmingham.

Using aerial drone photography, researchers captured over 20,000 images of the site, which will be used to create detailed 3D models of the footprints.

Given the limited time researchers had to document the site before quarry operations recommenced, much of the surface remains unexplored. Dr Edgar expressed optimism that further excavations could reveal even more tracks and insights into dinosaur life. “We’ll be continuously evaluating and working with the quarry workers as new areas are exposed,” she told CNN.

A handout illustration shows the newly identified Jurassic Period flying reptile, or pterosaur, called ‘Dearc sgiathanach’, whose fossil was found on a rocky beach at Scotland’s Isle of Skye, flying alongside a large meat-eating dinosaur.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Scientists have estimated the size of an extinct flying reptile called a pterosaur, based on fragments of a fossil finger bone discovered in southern England in June 2022. These results reveal it to be the largest British pterosaur yet described, and the second-largest Jurassic pterosaur worldwide.

This 149 million-year-old fossil, known as EC K2576 and nicknamed “Abfab” by the researchers, was found in Abingdon, Oxfordshire – and it is fabulous. They have since attempted to work out what type of pterosaur it was – its taxonomy – and how big the animal was.

During the Mesozoic Era, the “age of reptiles” which lasted from 252 to 66 million years ago and which includes the Jurassic period, dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other giant reptiles roamed Earth – with many dwarfing the largest terrestrial animals alive today.

The scientists estimated the body size of this particular species, which has no modern descendants, by collecting data from equivalent fossil bones in more complete fossil pterosaur skeletons for which each animal’s size has been reliably estimated.

They then extrapolated to estimate the wingspan of EC K2576 from its finger bone. The same team of scientists also applied this technique to predict the body size of other pterosaurs, including extrapolating from pterosaur footprints alone.

What were pterosaurs?

More than 110 species of pterosaur have been described. They can be grouped and separated based upon their anatomy – the shape of their bones – which is linked to ecology: where they lived, what they ate and how they behaved. They can also be grouped and separated based on their phylogeny (evolutionary history) and biomechanics (physics of their bodies).

It is not possible to identify EC K2576 to the species level from such limited material. However, by comparing the partial bone against the same skeletal element of other, more complete pterosaur skeletons, the team was able to identify the bone as belonging to a large pterosaur from the group known as the Ctenochasmatoidea. These were similar to pterodactyls, the best known of all the pterosaur groups.

Ctenochasmatoids were mostly aquatic or semi-aquatic pterosaurs. They had a long body with short wing proportions, much like wading shorebirds, and large webbed hindfeet. They were probably not as elegant in flight as other pterosaurs, and they sported a long bony crest on their heads.

All pterosaurs were carnivorous, but within the Ctenochasmatoidea, some specialised by feeding on molluscs (the animal group that includes snails and clams), others were filter-feeders, and some were sweep-feeders (sweeping water with their jaws to catch food), a strategy used by present-day birds such as spoonbills.

Of the pterosaur species that EC K2576 is thought to most closely resemble, Pterodaustro guinazui was a filter-feeder and Ctenochasma elegans was probably a sweep-feeder. So it is possible to infer ecology and behaviour from partial skeletal material.

From a partial finger bone, the scientists estimate the wingspan of EC K2576 to have been between 3.2 and 3.65 metres. This is in the same ballpark as the 3.5m wingspan of the snowy albatross, the biggest living flying bird species, with a wingspan about twice the height of two average humans.

The biggest Jurassic pterosaur based on footprints alone could have been even bigger than that, with a wingspan of up to four metres. The largest known Jurassic pterosaur based on fossils is a specimen belonging to the group Pterodactyloidea that was found in Switzerland and had a wingspan of around five metres.

The paper adds weight to growing evidence that the Jurassic was populated by more large pterosaur species than is thought to have been the case historically.

Pterosaurs have previously been highlighted as an example of Cope’s Rule: that lineages tend to exhibit larger body size over evolutionary time. While the new science behind EC K2576 indicates that Jurassic pterosaurs were larger than we thought, the largest pterosaurs appeared at the end of the Cretaceous, the final period of the Mesozoic Era.

These Cretaceous giants lived between about 77 and 66 million years ago, just before the asteroid that killed off all pterosaurs and non-avian dinosaurs. The pterosaurs Hatzegopteryx and Quetzalcoatlus were the largest living things ever to fly, with wingspans of over ten metres (about six times the height of an average human).

The scientists in the latest study also re-evaluated size estimates of known pterosaurs. This included downsizing one of the most complete Jurassic pterosaurs yet discovered, Dearc sgiathanch from the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Dearc’s wingspan has been revised from around 2.5m to 2.04m. It remains a sizeable animal, similar to a British eagle or swan today.

EC K2576 adds to the growing community of British Jurassic pterosaurs alongside Dearc and the recently described, more modestly sized (1.6m wingspan) Ceoptera, also from Skye.

Why fossils matter

I am an ecologist with a strong interest in anatomy and biomechanics. Bones allow us to infer behaviour via functional anatomy – the shape, size and structure of bones reflects their job. And bones can also inform us about the individual’s life history – for example, via growth and signs of injury and disease.

I have written about inferring parental care in pterosaurs based upon skeletal growth. Occasionally, we get a fossil skeleton that records a particular behaviour – such as a fight, predation, sex, or care of young.

This study is exciting because it applies knowledge and understanding of anatomy and biomechanics to reconstructing elements of morphology (body form and shape) and the life history of an extinct animal.

Extrapolating from isolated bones and fragments can be applied more widely – to reconstruct the size of other extinct animal groups, such as dinosaurs and aquatic reptiles including ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. Re-imagining extinct ecosystems can help us understand how the world and its ecological communities functioned in the past, and differed from the present.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.