coprolites

Walking into Karen Chin's office at the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the first things you might notice is that petrified poops are everywhere. They're in shallow boxes covering every surface and filling up shelves, cabinets and drawers. She's a leading expert in the fossils, known as coprolites. They delight her because of what they reveal about the ancient eating habits and food webs of dinosaurs — rare insights for the paleontology world. This episode, she talks with Short Wave co-host Aaron Scott about the lessons scientists can learn from ancient poopetrators.

Interested in learning more ancient or scatological mysteries of science? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we might cover it on a future episode!

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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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices