Our tapeworm episode last week mentioned the remarkable finding of tapeworm eggs in a 270 million-year old shark coprolite, that is, fossilized feces. And this certainly wasn’t the first time coprolites have come up on the podcast; we’ve referenced them several times before, mostly when discussing early histories of parasitic worms. But there is so much more to the world of coprolites than just which parasites were found and when. To help us explore all that coprolites can teach us is the world-renowned paleontologist Dr. Karen Chin, Professor at University of Colorado Boulder and Curator of Paleontology at CU-Boulder Museum of Natural History. In this exciting bonus episode, Dr. Chin takes us on a fascinating tour of the what (what are coprolites?), the why (why are they important?), the how (how do feces get preserved?), and the who (who dung it?) of these incredible trace fossils.
Further Reading:
- Chin, Karen, and Bruce D. Gill. “Dinosaurs, dung beetles, and conifers: participants in a Cretaceous food web.” Palaios (1996): 280-285.
- Chin, Karen, et al. “A king-sized theropod coprolite.” Nature 393.6686 (1998): 680-682.
- Chin, Karen. “Analyses of coprolites produced by carnivorous vertebrates.” The Paleontological Society Papers 8 (2002): 43-50.
- Chin, Karen, et al. “Remarkable preservation of undigested muscle tissue within a Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurid coprolite from Alberta, Canada.” Palaios 18.3 (2003): 286-294.
- Chin, Karen. “The paleobiological implications of herbivorous dinosaur coprolites from the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana: why eat wood?.” Palaios 22.5 (2007): 554-566.
- Chin, Karen, Joseph H. Hartman, and Barry Roth. “Opportunistic exploitation of dinosaur dung: fossil snails in coprolites from the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana.” Lethaia 42.2 (2009): 185-198.
- Daniel, Joseph C., and Karen Chin. “The role of bacterially mediated precipitation in the permineralization of bone.” Palaios 25.8 (2010): 507-516.
