Coprolite - What is a Coprolite Coprolite Coprolite The Archaeological Study of Human Fossil Feces called Coprolite Human coprolite from Paisley Cave 5 radiocarbon dated to 12,300 BC. Image courtesy of Dennis LeRoy Jenkins By K. Kris Hirst Updated August 09, 2016. In archaeological terms, a coprolite is the name given to fossil feces, preserved human excrement discovered in an archaeological context. Coprolites are of an extremely important analytical interest to archaeologists, believe it or not, because they contain evidence of diet and subsistence , disease and pathogens, gender and DNA, evidence in a manner not readily available elsewhere. Archaeology of the Coprolite The most important proponent of research into coprolites was Eric O. Callen, a maverick who died doing research at Pikimachay, Peru in 1970. Callen, with a PhD in botany from Edinburgh, worked as a plant pathologist at McGill University.

He began his first coprolite studies at the behest of archaeologist Junius Bird, who had discovered coprolites at the site of Huaca Prieta de Chicama. Callen was restricted to macroscopic studies of the remains, but he invented techniques for the study at a time when he was disparaged for what was considered a bizarre research. continue reading below our video 4 Tips for Improving Test Performance Since Callen's death, coprolite studies have included the investigations of chemical, immunological protein, steroids (which determine sex), and DNA studies, in addition to phytoliths , pollen, parasites, algae, and viruses. Sources What Fossilized Poop Tells Us About Dinosaurs What Fossilized Poop Tells Us About Dinosaurs What Fossilized Poop Tells Us About Dinosaurs A coprolite dating from the Miocene epoch. Wikimedia Commons By Bob Strauss Updated January 04, 2016.

Herbivorous, house-sized dinosaurs like Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus , not to mention meat-eating behemoths like Giganotosaurus , had to eat hundreds of pounds of plants or flesh every day to maintain their weight--so as you can imagine, there was a lot of dinosaur poop littering the ground during the Mesozoic Era . However, unless a giant blob of Diplodocus doo happened to fall on the head of a nearby critter, he was unlikely to complain, since dinosaur feces were an abundant source of nutrition for smaller animals (including birds, lizards and mammals), and, of course, a ubiquitous assortment of bacteria. Dinosaur droppings were also crucial for ancient plant life. Just as modern-day farmers scatter manure around their crops (which replenishes the nitrogen compounds that make soil fertile), the millions of tons of dinosaur dung produced every single day during the Triassic , Jurassic and Cretaceous periods helped keep the world's forests lush and green.

continue reading below our video 10 Facts About the Titanic That You Don't Know This, in turn, produced a near-endless source of vegetation for other dinosaurs to feast on, and then turn into poop, and so on and on in an endless symbiotic cycle of, well, doo-doo. (See also Could Dinosaurs Fart? ) Coprolites and Paleontology As important as they were for the primitive ecosystem, dinosaur droppings have proved equally crucial for modern-day paleontologists. Occasionally, researchers stumble across huge, well-preserved piles of fossilized dinosaur dung—or “coprolites,” as they’re called by polite society. By examining these fossils in detail, researchers can figure out if they were created by plant-eating, meat-eating, or omnivorous dinosaurs—and they can sometimes even identify the type of animal or plant that the dinosaur ate a few hours (or a few days) before going Number 2. (Unfortunately, unless a specific dinosaur is discovered in the immediate vicinity, it's nearly impossible to attribute a particular piece of poop to a particular dinosaur genus.) Every now and then, a coprolite can even help to settle evolutionary disputes.

For example, a batch of fossilized dung excavated recently in India proves that the dinosaur responsible fed on types of grass that weren’t thought to have evolved until millions of years later. By pushing back the flourishing of these grasses to 65 million years ago from 55 million years ago (give or take a few million years), these coprolites may help explain the evolution of the megafauna mammals known as gondwanatheres, which had teeth adapted for grazing, during the ensuing Cenozoic Era . One of the most famous coprolites was discovered in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1998. This gigantic poop fossil (which looks pretty much the way you’d expect) measures 17 inches long and six inches thick, and was probably part of an even larger chunk of dinosaur dung. Because this coprolite is so big--and contains fragments of bone and blood vessels--paleontologists believe it may have derived from a Tyrannosaurus Rex that roamed North America about 60 million years ago.

(This type of forensics is nothing new; as far back as the early 19th century, the English fossil-hunter Mary Anning discovered "bezoar stones," containing fish scales, nestled in the fossilized skeletons of various marine reptiles .) The Coprolites of the Cenozoic Era Animals have been eating and pooping for 500 million years--so what makes the Mesozoic Era so special? Well, aside from the fact that most people find dinosaur dung fascinating, absolutely nothing--and coprolites dating from before the Triassic and after the Cretaceous period can be equally diagnostic of the creatures responsible. For example, the megafauna mammals of the Cenozoic Era left an exquisite assortment of fossilized poop, of all shapes and sizes, which has helped paleontologists tease out details about the food chain; archaeologists can even infer facts about the lifestyles of early Homo sapiens by examining the minerals and microorganisms preserved in their poop.

No discussion about fossilized poop would be complete without a mention of England's once-burgeoning coprolite industry: during the mid-18th century (a few decades after Mary Anning's time had come and gone), a curious parson at Cambridge University discovered that certain coprolites, when treated with sulfuric acid, yielded valuable phosphates in demand by the chemical industry. For decades, the east of England was a hotbed of coprolite mining and refining, to the extent that even today, in the town of Ipswich, you can take stroll down "Coprolite Street." Was Six-Million-Year-Old Turd Auctioned for $10,000 a Faux Poo? Was Six-Million-Year-Old Turd Auctioned for $10,000 a Faux Poo? Paleontologists skeptical of "possibly the longest example of coprolite" offered at auction. View Images This item, which an auction house said was a coprolite, or fossilized dung, sold for $10,370. Some scientists are skeptical. Photograph by I.M.

Chait, Rex Features/AP This past Saturday, a private collector paid $10,370 at auction for what was touted as a six-million-year-old turd. Billed in the auction house catalog as fossil feces measuring "an eye-watering 40 inches in length" and believed to be "possibly the longest example of coprolite ever to be offered at auction"—the squiggle certainly looked the part. Related Content Wanted: Fit, Fearless Scientist for Huge Underground Find News services from NPR to the Daily Mail commented on the impending sale of such a singular piece of prehistory. But looks can deceive. The item in a sale held by I. M. Chait in Beverly Hills, California, came from the Wilkes Formation in southwestern Washington State. These Miocene sites preserve what's left of a roughly six-million-year-old swamp, replete with plant material as well as peculiar lumps of mineral that are often appraised as coprolites—the scientific word for fossilized dung—by fossil dealers. They suspect that turtles, crocodiles, and mammals deposited the ancient scat. But the alleged fossils don't show any signs of being produced by animals.

They are, in fact, pseudo-poo, according to an article in the journal Ichnos by Whitman College paleontologist Patrick Spencer published in 1993. Spencer collected and cut open hundreds of so-called coprolites from the Wilkes Formation. He was looking for bits of bone, vegetation, or indigestible residue that would confirm their excretory origins. He found only the iron-rich mineral siderite. This is in line with a 2001 study by Western Washington University geologist George Mustoe, who concluded that the weird wads were definitely not coprolites. Plants and pressure made the coprolite copycats. "We found several pieces of carbonized tree trunks," Spencer says, "and these had the coprolite-looking pieces of siderite injected into them." Spencer suspects that volcanic ash settled into the swamp, turned to clay, and was eventually squeezed so intensely by overlying sediment that it shot through knot-holes of dead trees.

The effect was "like squeezing a tube of toothpaste", Spencer says, creating a "squiggly mass." If the enormous auction "coprolite" were given to him to study, Spencer says, "I'd make a thin section to see if there was any residue in there from the last meal." But that's a long shot. "I've done it with enough of them, and I haven't found a dang thing in there," Spencer says, adding, "I have written more than a few letters to fossil supply houses and asked them to stop selling them as coprolites." Scientists Skeptical Spencer wasn't alone in his skepticism. On the Integrative Paleontologists blog, Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California, pointed out that "the 'coprolites' from the Wilkes Formation are simply mud squirted out under the pressure or burial or perhaps as decaying organic matter produced methane." Furthermore, Farke wrote, the Wilkes Formation "produce many random 'blobs' of similar composition, too; these just aren't picked up and sold as coprolites!" Jake Chait, director of the natural history department at I. M.

Chait, acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding the identity of the Wilkes Formation "coprolites." "None of us were really around" when the objects formed, Chait says, so resolving the identity of the objects relies on "educated guesses and that sort of thing." These coprolite caveats were not included in the original item listing. Nevertheless, Chait insists that the item is authentic. "I stand by everything I sell," Chait says, and if a customer is not satisfied with their purchase, "I happily offer people their money back." When they are done banging their heads against their specimen cabinets at the spectacle of mass media coverage for a presumably pseudo-coprolite, paleontologists can breathe a sigh of relief. If it were a coprolite, the sale to a private buyer would have been a significant loss to science. To paleontologists, coprolites are literally priceless stores of information. Bones are wonderful, but "they leave a lot of gaps in figuring out how those animals lived and how they interacted with other organisms," says University of Colorado, Boulder, paleontologist Karen Chin . "Trace fossils like coprolites provide a different perspective that those body fossils don't answer." Consider Tyrannosaurus rex.

Paleontologists have found over 50 skeletons of the tyrant dinosaur, but the dinosaur's serrated teeth can only provide hints of what and how it ate. The details are in the dino dirt. As part of teams that described two different coprolites left by large tyrannosaurs, Chin found that the carnivores weren't picky eaters. Some people had suggested that tyrannosaurs "would have fed on the soft tissues and avoided the bone," Chin says, "but when we do see bone in there, we can say no, they actually crunched through bone and ate the whole kit and caboodle." Such delicate clues "get at the food web, the process of feeding, and to a certain extent provide clues about digestive processing too." Comment on This Story What Discovery of Oldest Human Poop Reveals About Neanderthals' Diet What Discovery of Oldest Human Poop Reveals About Neanderthals' Diet Fecal fossils reveal meat-loving Neanderthals also ate their veggies. View Images Neanderthals, like the one in this reconstruction, were long seen as strict carnivores. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE MCNALLY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Want the real poop on the Paleolithic Diet?

Discovery of the oldest human fecal fossils , some 50,000 years old, suggests that Neanderthals balanced their meat-heavy diet with plenty of veggies. Related Content Could Climate Change Build Big Business in Kenya? Ancient human cousins of our own species, Neanderthals disappeared from Europe some 30,000 years ago, around the time that modern humans arrived there. Long seen as strict carnivores, they hunted mammoth and reindeer, as evidenced by bones left at their campsites. (Related: " Last of the Neanderthals. ") However, Neanderthal fecal samples reported in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday suggest that they also ate plenty of berries, nuts, and other vegetables. The oldest poop samples turned up at the site of El Salt, a collection of ancient hearths in southern Spain. The researchers were originally investigating the fire pits for chemical traces of fats from cooked meats. Amid the search, they unexpectedly found some fossil feces, or coprolites, in a top hearth layer dated to 50,000 years ago.

"I was quite surprised we found these samples in a place where they would eat," says MIT geoarchaeologist Ainara Sistiaga , who led the study. "We think they were deposited after they stopped using the fire pit." The previous record holder for oldest human coprolites unearthed by archaeologists came from Oregon's Paisley Caves and are dated to perhaps 12,300 years ago . Far older fecal samples from dinosaurs and ancient sharks have also been uncovered by researchers. View Images This fire pit holding fecal fossils was uncovered in southern Spain. PHOTOGRAPH BY BERTILA GALVÁN Dietary Surprise For clues to the Neanderthal diet, lab samples of the feces were pulverized and examined for spectroscopic identification of their chemistry. In particular, the researchers looked for compounds created when bacteria aid digestion of meat and vegetables. (Related: " Hot Stew in the Ice Age? ") The results identified four fats associated with meat. But two cholesterol-related compounds that are an unambiguous fingerprint of plants also turned up. "They were eating a lot of meat," Sistiaga says.

"But we believe they were omnivorous." Although the chemistry analysis cannot specify which plant foods Neanderthals were eating, pollen analysis suggests that berries, nuts, and tubers grew in the region when the archaic humans lived in Spain. (Related: " Bonanza of Skulls in 'Pit of Bones' Changes View of Neanderthals. ") Mammoth, reindeer, and red deer bones widely found at Neanderthal sites had led paleontologists to see them as dedicated meat eaters. But more recent studies that uncovered plant remains at Neanderthal sites , on their tools, and even in their dental plaque had hinted that they were not strict carnivores. The present study is the first to provide direct chemical analysis that Neanderthals ate vegetables—the most interesting part of the study, says paleontologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis, who was not part of the research. "Their results are confirming an idea that is still somewhat new in the field," says paleobiologist Amanda Henry of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

But she cautions that more evidence showing that the fecal samples undoubtedly came from Neanderthals, and not from another omnivorous animal such as bears, would be reassuring. Sisiaga's team argues that the digestive compounds found in their analysis are present in ratios found only in humans. But Henry says by email that their argument would be bolstered with a deeper analysis: "I think the paper would have been stronger if they had used an independent means of identifying the coprolite, perhaps looking for human DNA or proteins." The compounds tested for in the El Salt study are "very stable," Sistiaga says. "We are going to try a two-million-year-old sample from another site next." Neanderthal Extinction Some researchers have suggested that the Neanderthals' meat-centric diet may have left them open to extinction when they were forced to compete for resources after other omnivorous early modern humans entered their territory, bringing more complex tools with them. That story looks a little too simple now, even if Neanderthals did have a "meat-dominated" diet, according to the study. Sistiaga suggests that Neanderthal digestion worked with the help of bacteria similar to the ones at work in our own guts.

The coprolites also revealed that the Neanderthals apparently had parasites, such as hookworms and pinworms, similar to the ones afflicting modern and other ancient people . (Related: "Dangerous Parasites." ) "We were told that people with [as] many parasites as we saw [in the samples] would be very sick," Sistiaga says. Follow Dan Vergano on Twitter . Comment on This Story coprolite | paleontology | Britannica.com paleontology nummulite Coprolite, the fossilized excrement of animals. The English geologist William Buckland coined the term in 1835 after he and fossilist Mary Anning recognized that certain convoluted masses occurring in the Lias rock strata of Gloucestershire and dating from the Early Jurassic Period (200 million to 176 million years ago) had a form that would have been produced by their passage in the soft state through the intestines of reptiles or fishes. These bodies had long been known as fossil fir cones and bezoar stones (hardened undigestible contents of the intestines).

Buckland’s conjecture that they were of fecal origin and similar to the excrement of hyenas was confirmed upon analysis; they were found to consist essentially of calcium phosphate and carbonate, and they not infrequently contained fragments of unaltered bone. The name coprolites, from the Greek kopros (“dung”) and lithos (“stone”), was accordingly given them by Buckland. Coprolites often preserve the remains of plants and small animals that would otherwise be destroyed or lost. They are therefore important sources of concentrated information about ancient biota and environments . Learn More in these related articles: Mary Anning May 21, 1799 Lyme Regis, Dorset, Eng. March 9, 1847 Lyme Regis prolific English fossil hunter and amateur anatomist credited with the discovery of several dinosaur specimens that assisted in the early development of paleontology. Her excavations also aided the careers of many British scientists by... 1 Reference found in Britannica Articles Assorted Reference work of Buckland (in William Buckland ) Article History Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. MEDIA FOR: You have successfully emailed this. Error when sending the email. Try again later.

Edit Mode Submit Tips For Editing We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Encyclopædia Britannica articles are written in a neutral objective tone for a general audience. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered. Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources. At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. (Internet URLs are the best.) Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. Submit Thank You for Your Contribution! Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article. Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Uh Oh There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later.

Close Date Published: August 11, 2008 URL: Access Date: January 19, 2017 Share What the Dinosaurs Left Us | DiscoverMagazine.com What the Dinosaurs Left Us What the Dinosaurs Left Us Their fossilized poop shows what they ate. By Karen Wright |Saturday, June 01, 1996 RELATED TAGS: NUTRITION , DINOSAURS The sun has just set over the tranquil Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, and the crisp evening air is redolent of warm sand and eucalyptus. Scores of students are jogging or cycling under the rosy gold autumn sky; a few stroll back from the beach with surfboards under their arms. But in a low white building on the east side of campus, in a cavelike room that smells of wet stone, Karen Chin is hard at work. Chin is hunched over a cluttered bench, her dark hair fanning halfway down her lab coat, her slender fingers holding a small gray rock against the motionless blade of a circular saw.

She has repositioned the rock several times, in search of the right cut, when her concentration is shattered by a colleague entering the lab. Hey, Karen, calls the colleague in greeting. You still messing around with poop? The short answer is yes. Karen Chin was, is, and probably always will be messing around with poop--petrified, prehistoric poop, the poop of ages past. She’s a pioneer in a specialty so peculiar it’s not taught in any university. It doesn’t even have a formal name, though one does suggest itself: paleoscatology. It is safe to say that Chin is the world’s leading paleoscatologist. Also the world’s only paleoscatologist. For the past six years this doctoral student has been analyzing and categorizing hundreds of the fossilized leavings that go by the polite name of coprolites. The specimens come from around the world and across the epochs. They include 300-million-year-old fish feces; dinosaur dung from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous; and a sloth stool issued during the last ice age. Some of the fossils have been ravaged by time and are nearly unrecognizable.

But others have survived more or less intact, their humble morphologies uncannily familiar in spite of their antiquity. It is Chin’s dream to bring order to this exocolonic chaos. In coprolites, she hopes to find evidence of feeding habits and behavior available from no other fossil source. Most important, she expects to discover the diets of ancient creatures so that paleontologists may one day reconstruct ecological webs from the very bowels of prehistory. So far, however, Chin’s results aren’t much more impressive than her subject matter. If she is to tease out the secrets of coprolites, Chin must first devise a way of grappling with the daunting variety and anonymity of her specimens. On this particular evening, she has set out to section a fragment of putative T. rex turd from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. The whole specimen was 15 inches long and this big around, she says, putting the tips of her thumbs and forefingers together in a disconcertingly large O. The fragment, which was cleaved from its fecal parent with a pair of wire cutters, resembles a chunk of light-colored concrete with darker, elongate inclusions that Chin recognizes as bone.

Pieces of bone are common in carnivore coprolites, she says; she’s cutting open the fossil to see what else she can find out. Karen’s the first person in the history of coprolites who’s had the technology and the will to treat them to such a detailed analysis, says paleobotanist Bruce Tiffney, Chin’s doctoral adviser. And she’s only at the very beginning of that. It’ll take her lifetime’s worth of work, plus some other people’s, to make a reasonable picture out of this. But no one else has volunteered. I don’t like to be associated with the nasty aspects of defecation, Chin declares some time later from the carpeted floor of her office, where an assortment of aged scat surrounds her like a most unappetizing picnic lunch. I’m interested in coprolites from a biological standpoint. I’m trying to develop an overview of what they can tell us about the past. And that means that I need to look at all different types of coprolites and all different types of preservation. Hence the protean display on the office floor.

There are fractured loaves of dark gray rocks, chalky palm-size crescents, thumb- shaped orange nuggets, irregular pebbles in stunning aquamarine, and numerous variations on the common brown sausage. Time and geology have bestowed upon these specimens a flamboyance they undoubtedly lacked when they first saw daylight. Yet many still bear a signature of their provenance in the form of faint longitudinal striations. Those are probably marks from the anal sphincter, Chin explains. Coprolites form much the way bone fossils do, when minerals invade the microscopic interstices in organic matter and grow into crystals there. Sometimes mineralization helps preserve the living material itself; other times the crystals replace the organic template. In either case, the more readily a substance decomposes, the less likely it is to remain intact long enough to become fossilized. Dung is at a definite disadvantage there, and because of that disadvantage coprolites are rarer than bone fossils. But they are still plentiful: hundreds have been collected from the field, and millions more languish in fossil beds the world over. Until Chin came along, nobody much cared. Coprolites haven’t gotten much respect, says Chin.

A lot has been published on them, but mostly the authors just described the appearance of coprolites from a given locality, then put them on a shelf in a museum. Paleontologists considered the information coprolites might provide far too dubious to warrant the time it would take to decipher it. And there was a certain stigma attached to the enterprise. Trained as a botanist and ecologist, Chin doesn’t share her colleagues’ prejudice. Where others see ambiguity and guffaws, she sees opportunity. Chin thinks the main problem is that there is no context in which to evaluate coprolites. So she has decided to provide that context, by devising schemes for identifying and classifying the phenomena of interest. In the past, most coprolites have been identified on the basis of shape, she says. Here’s one from Nebraska. Chin offers a pale, slightly bowed cylinder with rounded ends. This is probably mammal, about 31 million years old. It looks like feces, right? I mean, you look at this and go, yeah, this is fecal material. Right? Definitely. This is dinosaur, from Montana, says Chin, handing over an innocuous gray-brown individual with blocky edges.

Darker speckles in the rock give it a heathered texture, but mostly it’s just evocative of other rocks. Now, this lacks an identifiable shape, Chin notes. It’s because I’ve been collecting these for so long that I recognized it easily. These two samples are very different. And that is a problem when you’re trying to interpret paleobiological information from coprolites. How can we recognize coprolites with atypical shapes? How can we compare coprolites from different ages, from different depositional environments, from different animals? Those are the kinds of questions I’m trying to address in my research. In an ideal world, of course, coprolites would be classified and compared according to their organism of origin, just as fossil bones are. Unfortunately, because of what Chin calls the detached nature of feces, it’s almost impossible to match droppings with droppers. You can, however, narrow the range of possible culprits. The criterion of shape does sometimes say a little bit about who did what. Spiral coprolites, for example, are thought to be the exclusive province of primitive fish, which include sharks and lungfish as well as many extinct taxa.

Because their intestinal valves are spiral shaped, these fish produce (and produced) distinctive oblong coils, many of which have turned up in sediments from the Paleozoic (570 million to 245 million years ago) and Mesozoic (245 million to 65 million years ago). But shape isn’t usually a reliable indicator of source. Anyone who’s emptied a litter box or flushed a toilet knows that the issue of a single individual can change shape dramatically over time. Conversely, the droppings of different species can look very similar. Logs, pellets, piles, pinched ends--these morphologies are generously distributed by and among all manner of vertebrate life-forms. The size of a fecal deposit may also suggest something about its maker: many large Mesozoic coprolites are attributed to dinosaurs because paleontologists assume that nothing else alive at the time could have manufactured mounds of such breadth or slugs of such girth. But size, too, can confound. A 1,000-pound moose leaves morsels no more than an inch long. Rodents that share a community latrine can generate heaps of fused waste several feet high.

Even pristine dung in modern ecosystems can be ambiguous, says Chin. And then it gets rained on, stepped on, decomposed--eaten, even. Imagine, then, what confusion can be wrought by a few million years of geologic pressures. In Yorkshire, England, one paleontologist found Jurassic droppings that were nearly two-dimensional. We’re talking soft material, Chin says, and soft material is subject to deformation even under the best of circumstances. So, with a characteristic disregard for appearances, Chin is exploring some of the less obvious features of her specimens. She’s cut them open, sliced them up, and pulverized them. She’s examined their insides with electron microscopes and made exhaustive inventories of their contents--animal, vegetable, and mineral. She’s run geochemical analyses to characterize organic matter in the fossils, and elemental and mineral profiles to examine the processes by which they became fossilized. Her subject matter may lack sophistication, but her methods have it in spades. Chin’s strange scatological journey began in 1989 in Bozeman, Montana, where she had a job making thin sections of fossil bones for paleontologist Jack Horner at the Museum of the Rockies.

Chin had recently turned to dinosaurs after more than a decade studying extant ecosystems. For 15 summers she’d worked as a Parks Service ranger and naturalist. On the job, in nearby Glacier National Park, she’d come to appreciate the informational value of feces. Though she might see elk, mountain lions, and grizzlies only rarely, their stools were comparatively easy to find and much more approachable. From such samples, researchers could deduce the animals’ numbers, territory, and diet. Chin bought field guides to Rocky Mountain scat and began assembling her own personal photo collection. When Horner told her that he’d found some suspected dinosaur coprolites, it seemed fated that she and they should meet. The coprolites came from a site in northwest Montana called the Two Medicine Formation, where Horner was unearthing the bones and nesting grounds of Maiasaura, a duck-billed dinosaur. The first thing Chin noticed about these fossils was that they were not the discrete orbs, pellets, or cylinders commonly described in the literature. These were more indiscrete: vast and seemingly formless, like massive cow pies turned to stone and then broken by a nasty fall.

And the broken pieces were big: some of the blocks measured more than a foot on a side. The Two Medicine specimens were full of fibrous bodies large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Chin sectioned them, just as she had Horner’s bone fossils. Under the microscope the dark fibers revealed themselves to be the mineralized remnants of shredded wood. The fossils, Chin decided, were the by-product of a large vegetarian--most likely the herbivorous Maiasaura. They didn’t look like the coprolites she’d seen in the literature, because the majority of those were the more firm and robust doings of carnivores. Chin visited the Two Medicine site again and again, gathering samples with various compositions from different locations. She wanted to find a way to characterize the members of her 76-million-year-old suite, to tease them apart, expose their contents, and force them to yield information. Her preoccupation soon took on the proportions of a doctoral dissertation. She found a sponsor in Tiffney, whose theories about the role of herbivory in the evolution of plants were in need of empirical substantiation.

When she first came to me with the idea of this project, Tiffney remembers, I said, ‘Coprolites?’ My basic response was ‘Prove it.’ It seemed like a reasonable request. But as it happened, very few dinosaur coprolites had ever been demonstrated unequivocally to be in fact what they appeared to be. Chin carefully amassed the evidence for the scatological nature of her Two Medicine specimens. First, she argued, the presumed coprolites occurred as scattered aggregations rather than as one continuous layer, a distribution inconsistent with geologic deposition but consistent with the cow-pie hypothesis. Second, they occurred in the same sediments in which the duckbills had been preserved--so a connection between the two was chronologically kosher. Third, angular breaks in the woody fibers suggested that the plant material had been chewed up rather than stepped on or weathered by water. And then there were the dung beetle burrows. Chin had noticed that several of her fossils were riddled with smooth channels, some measuring more than an inch in diameter. On a hunch, she’d shown these specimens to a noted dung beetle specialist in Ontario. I had a look at these things and it was like, ‘Wow.

I don’t know anything about paleontology or fossil rocks, but these look like the perfect soil trace of a modern-day dung beetle,’ says Bruce Gill, an entomologist at Agriculture Canada who became her collaborator. What clinched the ID, says Gill, was the presence of backfilled burrows: tunnels in the shadowy black rock that had been plugged with sand-colored sediments. Any number of invertebrates can dig through a dung pile, but only dung beetles fill their tunnels back up, using the soil displaced from brood cells hollowed out in the ground beneath the flop. And when you find a dung beetle backfilling, you know you’ve found dung. They wouldn’t go to just any old rotting plants, says Gill. They’d go to the rotting plants that had passed through the gut. Very rich. Very enticing. The presence of dung beetle burrows also revealed something of the perpetrator’s toilet habits: the animal had simply left its waste where it landed, rather than burying it as a cat would. It just kept getting better and better--I mean, if you’re into this kind of thing, says Chin.

We were able to say that what we were looking at in the Two Medicine Formation was the largest verifiable dinosaur coprolite. And now we had evidence for an ecological relationship between dinosaurs and some of the insects that lived at the time. We had the beginnings of a Mesozoic food web. Chin had proved that her coprolites could live up to their name. She had discovered the oldest evidence of dung beetle activity. She had found the only evidence of dinosaur-insect interactions. In her Two Medicine fossils, Chin could even look forward to finding some dung beetle dung. After the beetle breakthrough, Chin broadened her mission. She scouted museums for coprolites from other animals and other eras. She talked up her vision of a grand classification scheme at diggers’ meetings. As word got around, other researchers started sending their suspects to Chin. As always, she would do the dirty work. Truth be told, the work isn’t all that dirty. The thin-section lab is a bit dusty, but that’s because it’s full of rocks getting cut up and ground down. Chin uses saws with diamond-studded blades and grinding wheels with abrasive slurries to reduce her samples to slices thousandths of an inch thick.

Mounted on square glass slides, the sections project the semiopaque jumble of a kaleidoscope image. What I’m trying to do now is classify the fossils in terms of fabrics, says Chin. I’ve looked at so many of these slides, I’m beginning to recognize patterns. You can have fabrics full of bioclasts--fragments of organic origin, such as bits of plants or clamshells--and you can classify the kinds of mineral grains, their size and distribution. Chin picks up a slide in comely tones of gray, brown, and off-white. The victim was one of her Two Medicine fossils. I could say, for example, that this type of fabric has larger bits of woody material in a fine-ground mass. Now, that fine-ground mass, under magnification, is a series of disaggregated tracheids--water-conducting plant cells. Chin has been able to group the coprolites from 14 Two Medicine sites into four distinct categories based on the proportion of woody fibers and the type and quantity of plant cells they contain. Those categories, she believes, represent diets with different fiber contents and probably different nutritional values as well.

A high-fiber diet, full of stems and bark, might keep an animal regular, but the animal would have to eat a lot to meet nutritional needs. The low-fiber samples may correspond to nutritionally rich diets of ferns, young leaves, and flowering plants, which would require more selective foraging. At one time Chin thought that her low-fiber coprolites might be the work of juvenile duckbills, because they seemed to be concentrated in a Maiasaura nesting area. Later excavations turned up a specimen too big to have come from a juvenile, and Chin went back to the drawing board. While the Two Medicine investigation is still in progress, Chin has been examining coprofabrics from other locations. She’s found that coprolites offer a cornucopia of intestinal itinerants in addition to wood and shellfish. Sections of specimens have revealed whole and fragmented teeth, bones, seeds, leaves, stems, spores, fish scales, snail shells, and shards of volcanic ash. Some of the inclusions represent the animals’ intended diet; others were probably passengers therein. Some people say, well, you wouldn’t get all that coming through the digestive tract, says Chin.

But we all know that some things go through us, and you can see them if you look: tomato seeds, corn, lettuce. In bear scat, whole berries will come out. Still, Chin concedes, some of the items she finds in her specimens may have arrived ex post facto. She’s begun examining some of the bioclasts in her samples for signs of gastric etching, evidence that they had passed through the gut. Other techniques have helped Chin reconstruct the original composition. With organic geochemist Simon Brassell at Indiana University, Chin has used biogeochemical analysis to detect the carbon skeletons of organic compounds that can persist in coprolites even when gross structures such as plant cells have degraded. Some of the compounds isolated in this way implicate a particular source. Oleanane, for example, indicates the presence of angiosperms, or flowering plants; certain diterpanes are peculiar to plants called gymnosperms (which include conifers, such as pine trees). Biogeochemical analysis has provided the only evidence that Maiasaura ate flowering plants, since all the plant material in the Two Medicine coprolites that could be identified under the microscope was coniferous.

Chin also relies on X-ray diffraction to determine the mineral content of her fossils. Mineral analysis can reveal the preservational environment of a coprolite as well as what manner of manure was preserved. Carnivore leavings, for example, tend to be high in calcium phosphate, or apatite, a principal constituent of bone. Meat eaters’ dung fossilizes more readily than plant feeders’ because it is richer in minerals from the get- go. I still can’t say for sure which animal did what, says Chin. But these techniques release you from the confines of size and morphology as criteria for classification. You’re not dependent on having an intact specimen anymore. It’s a place to start. In time, Chin says, she may try to develop bile-acid markers that could help her match species with feces, and imaging techniques that would disclose a coprolite’s contents without its having to be sliced up first. She might even discover unknown species among the bioclastic mélange of her specimens. But in spite of the progress she’s made and her ambitions for the future, Chin hasn’t yet inspired a larger movement. And there’s only so much one woman can do.

There’s no renaissance in paleoscatology at the moment, says Adrian Hunt, director of the Mesalands Dinosaur Museum in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and a former collaborator of Chin’s. But maybe there will be. The laughter’s subsided. ADVERTISEMENT Fossilized Feces Reveal Origins Of Puerto Rican Natives | The Huffington Post Fossilized Feces Reveal Origins Of Puerto Rican Natives 05/14/2014 10:17 am ET | Updated May 14, 2014 660 Sara Reardon Wikimedia Commons The answer to a Caribbean mystery could lie in fossilized feces. An analysis of the microbial and plant DNA contained in a set of these fossils, or coprolites, sheds light on the origins of two ancient indigenous peoples who inhabited the islands of Puerto Rico before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1493. Microbial clues bolster the theory that the cultures had different origins and maintained distinct customs while sharing the island for hundreds of years. Archaeologists have long suspected that two cultures called the Saladoids and the Huecoids had colonized Vieques, a small island just east of Puerto Rico’s largest island.

It has been unclear, however, whether these populations were related or shared a common origin. Because of their distinctive style of pottery, the Saladoids are thought to have come from Venezuela, whereas the Huecoids may have come from the Andes of Bolivia. But experts based this supposition largely on differences in the styles of craftsmanship between the two peoples, including the discovery of carved Andean condors — which have a distinctive head crest — that have been found in Puerto Rico. Researchers wanted a way to tell a more complete story. Both cultures left coprolites, so microbiologists Jessica Rivera-Perez of the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras and Raul Cano of the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and their colleagues decided to inspect them for clues. They collected 10 samples of coprolite ranging in age from 1,000 to 1,600 years old, and extracted DNA. Using sensitive genetic-sequencing techniques, they were able to identify numerous bacterial, fungal and plant species. Dietary differences After analysing about 3.4 million DNA fragments, the researchers uncovered several dietary differences between the two peoples.

The Huecoids’ stools contained DNA from maize (corn; Zea mays), which grows in the Andes, as well as from the yeast Saccharomyces. The traditional Bolivian fermented drink chicha includes yeast and maize. The Saladoid faeces contained no maize DNA. Rivera-Perez says that it had been unclear how maize first got to Puerto Rico; the fossil findings suggest that the Huecoids may have brought it with them. And whereas the Saladoids’ stools contained a parasite that infects fish, those of the Huecoids contained one that infects marine invertebrates, highlighting another possible distinction between the two cultures. When the researchers compared the bacteria in both populations’ coprolites with the stools of modern indigenous tribes in the Amazon, they found that the modern stools had very different microbial compositions. Rivera-Perez says that this could reflect differences in ancient and modern environments' as well as how well organisms were preserved in the coprolites. The researchers will present their results at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, next week.

Anthropologist Christina Warinner of the University of Oklahoma in Norman says that she is excited by the study because well-preserved DNA samples from the region are rare; DNA often degrades in the hot and humid climate of the Caribbean. Ancient DNA could be of further help in teasing apart the mystery of how the Caribbean was peopled, she says. She is currently studying the microbes and viruses preserved in ancient Mexican coprolites and tooth tartar in an attempt to understand how epidemics swept through the New World and decimated the native peoples. Rivera-Perez says that the group next wants to start looking at specific genes in the microbes they found, such as those that help facilitate antibiotic resistance. Advances in DNA-sequencing technology, she adds, will allow researchers to extract even more information from the rare preserved samples. ”You can basically see what's in there and start playing,” she says. This story originally appeared in Nature News .

Also on HuffPost: Fossilized human feces hints at long-lost, 13,500-year-old West Coast culture | Fox News Fossilized human feces hints at long-lost, 13,500-year-old West Coast culture Published July 12, 2012 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 Email Print Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, holds a human coprolite (dried feces) taken from Oregon's Paisley Caves. The sample dates to about 13,000 years ago. (Jim Barlow) Displayed in the hand of University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins are three bases for Western Stemmed projectiles from the Paisley Caves in Oregon. The bases date to some 13,000 years ago. (Jim Barlow) Previous Next Maybe the 1992 movie Brendan Fraser film Encino Man wasn’t too far from the mark? Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday.

The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear. “Coprolites are as good as a human skeleton,” Dr. Thomas Stafford, Jr. of Stafford Research Laboratories said during a briefing for science journalists. This particular one left him stunned. Archaeologists and paleontologists had long thought that a culture called Clovis once inhabited New Mexico, basing that belief on evidence from arrowheads and spear points carved in a certain way. Clovis was long regarded as the New World’s first inhabitants. Stafford believes the newfound coprolite suggests that the Oregon cave dwellers who lived here so long ago and the other, pre-historic humans at Clovis were “contemporaneous and parallel” -- a finding that rewrites history in North America. Parallel Lives [pullquote] Dr.

Dennis Jenkins, lead author of the paper and an archaeologist with the University of Oregon, said that four years ago, when he and his team first published its research on the Paisley Caves, they had “very few artifacts” as evidence for the existence of the Western Stem People, the name researchers have given to the Oregon cave dwellers. “That raised questions about the veracity of our findings,” he said. “We were looking at human life, but we wondered if it was possible the DNA reached us through contamination or leaching.” In a 2011 dig, he set out to recover more artifacts and prove that DNA evidence there was not contaminated by water, rodents or other means, Jenkins said. The team conducted a stratographic and chronological analysis of the cave and its contents. “We separated any extraneous carbon that may have attached itself to the artifacts,” said Jenkins. Another researcher on this project, Dr. Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, noted that during the first dig, scientists did not wear rubber gloves. So this time, they also screened for the possibility that their own DNA from sweat, hair and skin may have contaminated the site. Researchers then dated each fiber they found containing human DNA.

“We did that 12 times,” Jenkins said. “In general, the coprolite was younger than the extraneous carbon. We also demonstrated that by taking radio carbon dates at four centimeter intervals.” Radiocarbon dating is highly precise, and determined that the humans lived in the cave 13,000 to 13,500 years ago. In addition to the human DNA remains, archeologists found arrowheads used for hunting by the cave dwellers. Camel and horse remains were found in the caves too, as was duck’s blood. This group is a unique techno-culture, the researchers said, who had their own style of arrowhead making different from that used by the Clovis people. Scientists still have a long way to go in discerning the way these cavemen lived, as they do not know what language they spoke, or how they socially organized their culture. The scientists plan to examine the fossilized feces further to determine the diet of the cave dwellers, and to examine the intestinal bacteria preserved within it, which will give additional clues to the cave puzzle. From this data, science may be able to determine if these people were hunters or gatherers.

“At this moment, we have no baseline of what their gut flora was like,” Willerslev said. “This is a brilliant opportunity to explore this.” Gut flora aid in human digestion -- they're known in medicine as “good bacteria.” Searching through fossilized feces in the Snake River next to Hell’s Canyon may not sound like fun for many, but that sort of work is a trusted technique for archeologists. “What archeologists deal with mostly is garbage,” said Jenkins. Advertisement Coprolites | Article about Coprolites by The Free Dictionary Coprolites | Article about Coprolites by The Free Dictionary Coprolites the fossilized excrement of fossil animals. Study of coprolites makes it possible to determine the food of extinct animals and details of the structure of their intestines. The existence of certain extinct animals (for example, non-skeletal invertebrates) has been established only through the discovery of the coprolites of these animals in deposits of previous geologic periods.

Question: Coprolite is the name given by archaeologists to fossilized ………..what?
Answer: Faeces