‘Regurgitalite’

Trash is expected inside a garbage bag. On rare occasions, there could be cash or valuables.

A garbage bag found by a resident of Neoi Epivates, outside Thessaloniki, Greece, contained the headless marble statue of a woman, local police said on 22 January.

The police referred the 31-inch-tall statue to archaeologists for examination, and they determined that it was from the Hellenistic era, a period roughly between 320 and 30 B.C.

The 2,000-year-old relic was handed over to the local antiquities authority for preservation and study. Meanwhile, why the statue ended up as trash needed to be answered, so police are looking for the person who threw it away.

An even older “waste” turned up in Denmark.

Geomuseum Faxe, the natural history museum in the Danish town of Faxe, announced on 27 January the discovery of a new fossil at Stevns Klint, a fossil-rich, coastal cliff and a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the island of Zealand, Smithsonian Magazine reports.

Paleontologist Peter Bennicke found pieces of sea lily, which are aquatic, plant-like animals related to sea stars and sea urchins.

Jesper Milàn, a paleontologist and curator at Geomuseum Faxe, said the finding “tells us something about who was eating who 66 million years ago,” according to Smithsonian Magazine.

Paul Olsen, a paleontologist at Columbia University who was not involved with the find, calls the discovery a “regurgitalite” fossil.

Bennicke explained that the sea lilies he found did not reach the stomach of their eater, which spewed them out, so they were actually fossilized vomit.