How fossilised poo can tell us a lot about ancient animals that once roamed the earth
Quite simply coprolites is the fossilised faeces of ancient creatures that lived millions of years ago
There is a memorable scene in Jurassic Park where Dr Sattler (actor Laura Dern) plunges her arms into a pile of dinosaur droppings to look for the digested remains of a toxic plant.
Fortunately, palaeontologists don’t need to don rubber gloves to explore the diet of ancient creatures in the real world. Instead, they study coprolites – fossilised faeces that form when droppings are buried and preserved under layers of sediments.
Mary Anning was one of the first people to examine coprolites and she discovered that these coiled fossils contained fragments of bone, shell and even fish scales, illustrating the diets of ancient creatures.
In the 19th century, coprolites were ground down and used as fertiliser to enhance crop production after the Napoleonic wars. In fact, when a rich seam of faecal fossils was discovered in Cambridge, it led to a frenzy of quarrying known as the Cambridge Coprolite Mining Rush.
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