What Fossilized Poop Can Teach Us About Dinosaurs

Short Wave

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🗓️ 24 November 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

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 all 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 [email protected] — we might cover it on a future episode!

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.0	Hey Shortwavers, Aaron Scott here and today we are going to talk with Karen Chin
0:10.0	about the incredible scientific importance of dinosaur poop.
0:14.8	I became interested in fossilized feces when I was working for paleontologist Jack Horner.
0:22.8	Jack Horner is the renowned Montana paleontologist who discovered a whole bunch of things
0:27.6	about dinosaur growth and behavior and inspired one of the main scientist characters in Jurassic Park.
0:34.0	Mutated the dinosaur genetic code and blended it without a frog's.
0:40.0	I learned that somebody had found fossilized feces and I thought that was just the
0:45.8	weirdest thing so I ran to Jack and I asked to see it. This was the late 80s.
0:51.8	Karen was a grad student and she was responsible for cutting into the fossilized
0:56.0	dinosaur bones to look at things like blood vessels.
0:59.1	So I asked if I could make a thin section of the fossil feces.
1:03.4	And he said, yes, and when I looked through a microscope,
1:07.3	I could see plant cells that were ingested 75 million years ago by a dinosaur.
1:14.7	And it blew my mind because I thought,
1:18.6	man, this is how you can learn
1:21.2	about interactions between dinosaurs and plants and other organisms.
1:26.0	Karen is now one of the leading experts on dinosaur feces.
1:30.0	She's a professor of geological sciences and the curator of paleontology at the University of Colorado,
1:36.0	and she's even the subject of a recent children's book called The Clues Are in the Pooh.
1:41.0	As you mentioned, Jack Horner was famously an inspiration for
1:44.8	Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park in the first movie portrayed mountains of
	...

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