Around 110 million years ago, an apparent dinosaur ate two pterosaurs and four fish and, for whatever reason, threw them back up. A rare mix of geological conditions preserved this dinosaur vomit for human researchers to dig up—only for said researchers to catalogue it as a blob of fish remains, nothing special.

It wasn’t until Aline Ghilardi , a paleontologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, and her colleagues took a closer look that they realized the fossil was too strange and detailed to be just fish. Their suspicions were correct. The fossil contains the remains of an entirely new pterosaur—the first extinct species to ever be discovered inside, well, fossilized vomit.

The pterosaur, named Bakiribu waridza , had a “distinctive combination of jaw and to

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