Fossilized vomit reveals 290-million-year-old predator’s diet

Two hundred and ninety million years ago, in a mountain valley within the central region of the supercontinent Pangaea, an apex predator snapped up at least three other animals and sometime later puked up the bones.

That material hardened over the ages, and is now the oldest fossilized vomit ever discovered from a land-based ecosystem. The cluster of bones and digestive material provides rare information, published January 30 in Scientific Reports, about the behavior of some of the world’s earliest land predators.

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