A Regurgitated Cluster of Bones Reconstructs a Permian Apex Predator's Meal

At the Bromacker fossil locality in the German state of Thuringia, a slab of fine-grained sandstone preserves a tightly packed cluster of small, overlapping bones. It bears no resemblance to a complete animal skeleton, nor does it have the regular outline commonly seen in coprolites. Nevertheless, it records a feeding event that took place approximately 293–290 million years ago.

The specimen, catalogued as MNG 17001, dates to the Sakmarian stage of the early Permian. At the time, Bromacker was part of a fluvial and floodplain environment. It is also one of the few known localities that provides a detailed record of an early Permian terrestrial vertebrate assemblage. The fauna was dominated by herbivorous diadectids of the family Diadectidae, along with a variety of terrestrial tetrapods whose skeletons, footprints, resting traces, and burrows have been preserved. The specimen was recovered from a succession of thin, fine-grained sandstone and mudstone layers deposited under relatively low-energy flow conditions.

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