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How to Identify a Coprolite
Imagine you’re a paleontologist hunting for coprolites. How do you know when you’ve found one? The first clue is appearance. Coprolites can have poopy shapes, such as pellets, sausages, balls, and blobs. The surface can have folds, insect burrows, and even tooth marks. But you might find a shapeless fragment. And some inorganic rocks look like poop too, so you need more clues. Another is context. Where did you find your rock? Were there other fossils nearby? Next, check what’s embedded. Are there bits of bone, shells, feathers, or other undigested food visible on the surface? What about inside? Paleontologists can examine their find with tools like microscopes and x-ray scanners. Finally, what’s the rock made of? Certain chemicals are more common in coprolites than other rocks.
Pronunciation: COP-ro-lite
Name origin: the Greek words kopros, meaning dung, and lithos, meaning stone
Age: the oldest known coprolite is from an animal that lived in the Early Cambrian, more than 480 million years ago
Size: from less than 0.25 inch (0.6 centimeters) to more than two feet long
Characteristics: animal dung that turned into rock over millions of years as minerals replaced organic material; often contains fossils of bones, shells, or other food remains
Significance: by studying coprolites, we can learn about an animal's habitat and diet when it was alive
What animal did this coprolite come from?
saber-toothed cat
shark
Triceratops
Correct!
The shape of the coprolite is a clue to the animal that made it. Sharks and their relatives have a corkscrew-shaped area in their lower intestines. It helps them absorb nutrients from their food. When they gotta go, the poop comes out as a spiral!
What animals did these tiny coprolites come from?
marine worms
Stegosaurus
cockroaches
Correct!
Those little bumps filling this fossil fish’s skull are fecal pellets! After the fish died, marine worms ate its brain and left poop behind. Scientists have found worm coprolites inside ancient clam shells, crab claws, barnacles, and other fossils.
Which of these was NEVER found in a coprolite?
coins
eggs
feathers
Correct!
Coprolites can contain anything an ancient animal pooped out, like feathers, if it ate birds. Or parasite eggs, if something was living inside its digestive tract. Coins were invented less than 3,000 years ago. Usually, if an animal ate a coin, there wouldn’t be enough time for its poop to fossilize.
This Tyrannosaurus rex coprolite is full of:
seashells
leaves and flowers
crushed bones
Correct!
This coprolite from Saskatchewan, Canada, is the size of a football. Up to half of it consists of crushed bone of its prey. T. rex was one of the few meat-eaters around that time that was big enough to produce such a large poop!
Coprolites smell like poop.
Fiction
Ancient poop may have been stinky when it was fresh, but coprolites just smell like rocks.
The earliest known butterfly fossils were found inside a coprolite.
Fact
Scientists found teeny, tiny scales from a butterfly’s wing inside a coprolite of an extinct animal called a dicynodont. This big herbivore lived 236 million years ago. It likely swallowed a butterfly that landed on a plant it was eating.