Permian Regurgitalite

Early Permian terrestrial apex predator regurgitalite indicates opportunistic feeding behaviour by Arnaud Rebillard, Andréas Jannel, Lorenzo Marchetti Mark J. MacDougall, Christopher Hamann, J.-Sébastien Steyer & Jörg Fröbisch

A fascinating paper in many ways!

First and foremost, a regurgitalite is fossilized chunder. I was unaware of this word until I read the title of this paper.

Most of the paper appears to be the authors ensuring that everyone believes them about their specimen being a regurgitalite. Every imaginable method to validate this is brought to bear.

Once you accept that the specimen is a regurgitalite, a bromalite egested through the mouth, the conclusions are pretty mild. There are two apex predators known from the same formation that are big enough to have ejected something of this size, a Dimetrodon species, and a varanopid. Both are considered to be synapsids. One member of these two species probably hurled after a meal or two of scavenged meat.

This 11 page pager has a 55 item bibliography. I think the authors felt they needed to justify the regurgitalite diagnosis, but also because the regurgitalite itself consisted of 41 bones. The authors identified 4 different species from the bones, but there were a lot of bones they could fit to a species, or even a genus. This necessitated a lot of bibliography entries for the identification.

There’s also three entries about circular or directional statistics, another topic I was unaware until reading this paper. The authors used techniques from directional statistics as part of the effort to justify concluding their specimen was a regurgitalite.

Best Timeline in the World

dates of regurgitalites in literature

Above, dates of regurgitalites described in scientific literature. This paper describes the oldest terrestrial one.

Best Life Reconstruction Ever

This paper features a reconstruction of a Dimetrodon ralphing in the underbrush. Scientific papers do not get any better.

Vocabulary Words for Today

Paleontology papers transcend the boundaries of mere human vocabularies. This paper is no exception.

  • bromalite
  • regurgitalite
  • consumulite
  • coprolite
  • cololite
  • fluvial

I suppose the famous fish (within a fish) constitutes a “consumulite”. Fascinating!

Official Citation

Rebillard, A., Jannel, A., Marchetti, L. et al.
Early Permian terrestrial apex predator regurgitalite indicates opportunistic feeding behaviour.
Sci Rep 16, 1087 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-33381-0