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The world's oldest fossilised vomit has been uncovered near the English
town of Peterborough.
But far from turning up their noses, palaeontologists are excited by
the discovery of "copious quantities" of Jurassic puke, says Peter Doyle
of the University of Greenwich. The regurgitations came from the mouths of
ichthyosaurs swimming in the waters that covered England 160 million years
ago and were found by Doyle in a clay quarry.
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Photo: Patrick
Barth/University of Greenwich |
"We believe this is the first time the existence of fossil vomit on a
grand scale has been proven beyond reasonable doubt," Doyle told New
Scientist.
"It shows ichthyosaurs behaved much as sperm whales do today," he says.
The marine reptiles ate their fill of belemnites, a squid-like shellfish,
before vomiting the indigestible bullet-shaped shells. Modern sperm whales
regurgitate the gristly beaks of squid.
"I have been confused for a while that we found the arm hooks of
belemnites in ichthyosaur stomachs, but not their shells. But vomiting
explains it," he adds.
Acid etching
The evidence that the belemnite pile had once been eaten by the
ichthyosaurs is that, when examined under a microscope, the calcium
carbonate shells show distinctive signs of being etched by the dinosaur's
acid digestive juices.
Doyle says that they are unlikely to have been excreted in the usual
way because the sharp shells would have inflicted terrible damage to the
animal's intestines.
In the Jurassic, the Peterborough clays were a shallow-water coastal
feeding ground where belemnites thrived and ichthyosaurs came for a
slap-up feed, before in turn being eaten by pliosaurs, says Dave Martill,
a palaeontologist of the University of Portsmouth.
"Doyle's finding is very interesting, and I think his conclusions will
be proved right," says Martill. "We know that ichthyosaurs ate belemnites.
And if they ate them whole, they would have got horrendous indigestion."
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