The reign of the dinosaurs lasted around 180 million years. Where, exactly, is 180 million years鈥� worth of dinosaur poo?
Ron Dippold
San Diego, California, US
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The polite term for a fossilised poop is a coprolite.
We do find the occasional coprolite, and in many instances they are highly prized because if you find them next to a cache of fossils or eggs, you can tell what creatures like dinosaurs were eating, even by accident. Meat, plants, seeds, pollen 鈥� the things we find in coprolites are very important in deciphering what the environment looked like at that place at that time.
Unfortunately, coprolites are relatively rare for the same reason that poop lying all over the place is relatively rare today. Why is that? First, it is a precious food source for insects. As soon as an animal does its business, insects are all over it like flies on鈥� poop. Besides flies, there are many larger insects like dung beetles that also covet it.
If the insects don鈥檛 take care of it, rain usually washes it away. Poop is far more fragile than bone. To turn into a coprolite, a poop needs to be in a very quickly mineralising environment, like a mudflat, in which it sinks down to a point where most insects can鈥檛 get to it and minerals can sink into it to make a rocky crust and preserve it.
So, thankfully, everything conspires against poop hanging around and what survives from that time is now, ironically, precious 鈥� like anything else you hang on to long enough, like flared disco pants. And I am certainly not trying to say 鈥減oop鈥� as many times as I can in the distinguished pages of 麻豆传媒.
Mike Follows
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK
The short answer is, everywhere: in the soil, the atmosphere, all the flora and fauna surrounding us, your furniture, clothes and food. No doubt there are atoms in your body that were once part of many dinosaurs 鈥� and their poo. Every time you drink, you are sampling dinosaur urine, and every breath you take will include air that has been through the lungs of many dinosaurs, and belched and farted by them too.
Every time you drink, you are sampling dinosaur urine, and every breath you take will include air farted by dinosaurs
Living organisms are part of a food chain, web or ecosystem. Most simply, plants are consumed by herbivores, which are predated by carnivores or omnivores, which can become prey in turn. Even if a living organism avoids consumption or predation, it will die of old age.
The dead body decays, broken down by the work of decomposers, so that all the material is recycled as nutrients or biomass for the growth of living organisms, though the material isn鈥檛 always broken down to the atomic level before it is recycled.
In the meantime, any poo (in the case of animals) or other waste (such as leaf litter from trees) will be recycled in the same way. Detritivores, which include millipedes, flies, earthworms and dung beetles, ingest dead organic matter and detritus (including poo) and break it down. Bacteria and fungi like mushrooms are examples of saprotrophs. They excrete enzymes that break down detritus so that they can absorb it.
Imagine if decomposers were all simultaneously wiped out. The rapid accumulation of poo and other waste would be very unpleasant. Our decomposers really do deserve a better press.
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