Who has seen the first fecal fossil?
If you are a dinosaur fan, you won't be interested in William Baekeland.
Buckland) is very strange, because he described and named the first dinosaur, and he was one of the first scientists to study dinosaurs. However, you may not know another important identity of buckland-"the first generation of fecal fossil hunters".
182 1 year, when buckland conducted an investigation in a prehistoric hyena cave in North Yorkshire, England, he found some white balls scattered among hyena bones and teeth fossils everywhere, which were suspected to be hyena feces fossils.
To confirm this conjecture, buckland went to the zoo to observe the feces of African spotted hyenas. Because modern hyenas like to eat the bones of other animals very much, they consume too much calcium and phosphorus, resulting in white feces. It happens that the main chemical composition of the white ball in the cave is also calcium phosphate. So, buckland published a paper, won the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, and scientifically recognized the first stool fossil.
After coming out of the prehistoric hyena cave, buckland turned his attention to the seaside town of Lyme Regis.
There are a lot of Jurassic marine fossils buried in the coastline here. Mary anning, a famous fossil collector, found the first batch of complete ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils here, and noticed that there were many small dark gray stones in their abdominal cavity, occasionally mixed with bones and fish scales.
Although the small stone was called "Niuhuangshi" by the local people and was widely used as an antidote in16th century, on the basis of mary anning's research, buckland thought that the small stone in the abdomen of ichthyosaur was actually feces, and soon he created a word "dung stone" to contain all ancient feces.
Since then, the research field of dung fossils has officially opened.
The shapes of fecal fossils are various, because no one in this world can pull out two identical feces. Moreover, normal feces are soft and fragile, and will be deformed again in the process of burial, even destroyed by dung eaters and baptized by wind and rain, resulting in spherical, oval, conical, cigar-shaped, irregular and so on. Among them, what fascinated buckland most was the spiral dung fossil.
What's the use of fecal fossils?
A fossil of animal bones can really make us feel the wonder of ancient life, which is incomparable to a pile of dung fossils. So why did buckland indulge in it?
Because fecal fossils can provide "alternative" paleontological information.
Taking spiral fecal fossils as an example, it can directly reflect the internal structure of the digestive tract of excretors, indicating that the intestines of ancient fish also had spiral valves, which was beneficial to absorb nutrients; It can also be used as a basis for fish classification, because the spiral lines on the surface of fecal fossils are related to the number and density of spiral valves in the intestine. For example, the spiral valve in the intestine of modern sharks is dense, followed by lungfish, and cartilaginous scleroderma is sparse; It can also reflect the upper limit of excretion, such as the number of spirals.
Due to the limitation of the times, the first reconstruction of food web is not perfect.
Today, we can use new science and technology to spy on the world in feces. From June 5438 to 2020 10, scientists from the University of Bristol in England scanned hundreds of fecal fossils through CT, identified various bones, scales and teeth, and rebuilt the shallow-sea food web in Bristol more than 200 million years ago: marine reptiles and sharks eat small fish, small fish ate smaller fish and lobsters, and ichthyosaurs even ate oysters.
As for this shark, it is searching for the body. Or do you chew the head of a fish alive and then bite the tail of a marine reptile? We don't know.
Layers of fecal fossils will also form phosphate rocks with economic value.
/kloc-In the mid-9th century, the British realized that phosphate could increase crop yield, so fecal fossils with high phosphate content began to be developed as fertilizers. For decades, dung fossil mining areas have sprung up like mushrooms after rain, forming a large-scale industry, and catering facilities, houses and churches on the side have also developed one by one.
Finally, if you want to have your own fecal fossils, please eat meat, eggs, milk, calcium and phosphorus first; Secondly, choose a good natural toilet, such as lake or deep sea and other sedimentary environment; Then ensure the feces to land safely and enter the burial stage; Finally, leave it to luck. I hope that after millions of years of geological changes, your feces will emerge in the form of fossils and be picked up by future generations.