Brandon researcher helps discover vomit from 290 million years ago

Maralee chats with Brandon University’s Mark MacDougall about the recent discovery of the oldest-known sample of fossilized vomit from a land predator.

A new discovery in central Germany is giving rare insight into the feeding behaviour of prehistoric animals.

Brandon University paleontologist Mark MacDougall helped discover fossilized vomit that’s believed to be about 290 million years old.

MacDougall explained the vomit was from an animal even older than the dinosaurs, describing it as an “older vertebrate animal with a backbone.”

“It comes from an animal that we’re interpreting as having been the apex predator of its ecosystem,” he said in an interview with CTV News on Thursday.

“One of the potential candidates is an early vertebrate that we call Dimetrodon.”

MacDougall said that within the vomit were several smaller animals, noting that the apex predator likely threw up because it couldn’t digest the bones.

“So it probably wouldn’t have sat very well in the stomach of this larger predator,” he said.

“And then it would’ve just thrown those bones up, as it wasn’t able to digest them.

Watch the video above to find out more about the work MacDougall did to make the discovery and what we can learn from it.

• With files from CTV’s Maralee Caruso