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as I want to believe this is Triassic puke, the coincidence of vomiter and vomit
seems a little too fortuitous. For instance, how did this former meal stay put while
river currents buried its supposed producer?
Nonetheless, I am hopeful that dinosaur regurgitalites are more common than
previously supposed, and paleontologists just need a combination of training and
imagination to find them. So here are some criteria for finding dino-barf. For one,
because the contents of regurgitalites only spent a short amount of time in an anim-
al'sgut,theywillbenoticeablylessdigestedthananythingcomingoutitsotherend.
Still, any solid items, such as bones, may have some acid etching, while also be-
ing more broken, poorly sorted, and chaotically arranged than if they had not been
chewed, swallowed, and partially digested by a dinosaur.
Unless preserved as a pellet, like a tightly packed modern-day owl pellet,
vomit should have contained enough liquids to cause it to spread, especially if de-
livered from a great height. For a moment, just imagine the Late Jurassic sauropod
Brachiosaurus pukingitsgutsout,withitsmouthasmuchas14m(46ft)abovethe
ground.Thislikelywouldhavecausedimmediatepanicamongstanyanimalsinthe
vicinity, which would have tried to escape such a harrowing aerial bombardment,
or at least been spooked by the unusual noises accompanying a purging sauropod.
Trace fossils would thus show the following:
• Large sauropod footprints at a standing position, and behind a crater with
splatter marks radiating several meters around its center;
• A concentration of bigger, more solid items in the middle;
• Run-off marks from included fluids, especially if influenced by slopes on
the former ground surface;
• Trackwaysofotheranimalswithratiosbetweenfootprintlengthsandstride
lengths showing they were moving at high speeds and fleeing in directions
away from the crater;
• The remains of one or two small unlucky theropods knocked out and
drowned by the initial shower of debris;
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