Coprolites, or the Science of Poop

There is a good chance your child came home on Thursday or Friday and talked about learning about "poop".

There is also a good chance you said to yourself "What the heck is Mr. Cable teaching?"

There is a method behind my madness.

A coprolite is fossilized animal dung. Coprolites are classified as trace fossils as opposed to body fossils, as they give evidence for the animal's behaviour (in this case, diet) rather than morphology. The name is derived from the Greek words κοπρος / kopros meaning 'dung' and λιθος / lithos meaning 'stone'. They were first described by William Buckland in 1829. Prior to this they were known as "fossil fir cones" and "bezoar stones." They serve a valuable purpose in paleontology because they provide direct evidence of the predation and diet of extinct organisms.[1] Coprolites may range in size from a few millimetres to over 60 centimetres.

Coprolites, distinct from paleofaeces, are fossilized animal dung. Like other fossils, coprolites have had much of their original composition replaced by mineral deposits such as silicates and calcium carbonates. Paleofaeces, on the other hand, retain much of their original organic composition and can be reconstituted to determine their original chemical properties.[2] In the same context, there are the urolites, erosions caused by evacuation of liquid wastes and nonliquid urinary secretions.--from wikipedia.com

First, a few coprolites were part of our paleo/archaic artifact investigation. Here they are--I apologize for the slightly fuzzy photo.

From 2010-08-20

These are all true fossil coprolites, and all came from the Alabama formation, dated to the Eocene era--about 30 million years ago. They all most likely came from marine animals, but the bottom one is the only one that I have a more accurate identification for. It most likely came from a now extinct soft-shelled turtle like this--



but very similar to this turtle that still lives today--



Most of the kids hypothesized that these example were "poop". On Friday we moved on to do a CBL (Computer Based Lab) in order to do a virtual dissection of some human coprolites (or paleofaeces), found from the paleo/archaic people we are studying.

I love technology. Anson Middle School may not have absolutely state of the art technology (I'd love for every kid to have a netbook with 3G internet), but we come
close. And there is never a better place to incorporate technology than a dissection of "poop".

Here is an example of what we looked at under a "virtual" microscope.



The actual lab we engaged in is located at http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/hinds/detectives.html

We will be using the University of Texas site Texas Beyond History extensively during the course of this unit sequence.