The short answer: the largest fossilized dung, or coprolite, ever found from a meat-eating animal is Barnum, from South Dakota: 67.5 centimeters (about 26.5 inches) long and up to 15.7 centimeters wide, recognized by Guinness World Records. The largest known human one is the Lloyds Bank coprolite, a Viking-age specimen from York about 20 centimeters long, on display at the Jorvik Viking Centre and insured for about $39,000. Coprolites matter because they record what an animal actually ate: a 1998 study of a Tyrannosaurus coprolite from Saskatchewan found it packed with crushed bone. Dung has also funded a country, started a war and, in the Southern Ocean, fed the plankton.
Today: the biggest ones ever recorded. Length, girth, specimens that grown men have spent careers hunting for. The record holder is 67.5 centimeters long and rock hard, and it has been measured repeatedly, by hand, by several different men who each wanted to be absolutely certain. Another sits in a museum in York, behind glass, under a warm light, on its own little cushion, insured for about $39,000. Families queue to lean in for a proper look. It came out of a man in the ninth century and it is the pride of the collection. I am talking about fossilized dung, you absolute degenerate. Every word of that was true. The filth was entirely yours. Now sit still, because dung turns out to be one of the most useful things in science.
What is a coprolite?
A coprolite is fossilized feces, turned to stone over millions of years the same way bone is. The word was coined by the geologist William Buckland in 1829. And before you sneer, it is in some ways better evidence than a skeleton. A skeleton tells you what an animal looked like and almost nothing about what it did. Dung tells you what it ate, what was living inside it, what plants grew around it and sometimes whether it was ill. A bone is a portrait. A coprolite is a receipt.
Source: Coprolite
Who discovered coprolites?
In the 1820s, on the Dorset coast of England, the fossil hunter Mary Anning kept finding odd stones inside the ribcages of the ichthyosaurs she dug out of the cliffs. Collectors called them bezoar stones. She broke them open and found fish bones and scales inside, and worked out that they were fossilized droppings, still holding the animal's last meals. Buckland named them coprolites on the strength of her observation. Anning was a working-class woman. She was not allowed to join the Geological Society of London, and she was routinely left uncredited in papers built on her finds. She effectively founded a field of science by breaking open a rock full of reptile dung, and most people have never heard her name.
Source: Mary Anning
What is the Lloyds Bank coprolite?
In 1972, builders digging out a site on Pavement in York for a new branch of Lloyds Bank found a human one. Ninth century, Anglo-Scandinavian, from Viking-age York. About 20 centimeters long and 5 wide (8 inches by 2), it is possibly the largest preserved human specimen ever found. It is now on display at the Jorvik Viking Centre and has been insured at around $39,000, which means somebody had to fill in a form. It is not just a novelty, either. Inside were hundreds of parasite eggs, whipworm and maw-worm. That man was riddled, and we know it a thousand years later because of what he left in the ground.
Source: Lloyds Bank coprolite
What is the largest coprolite ever found?
Barnum. Found on a ranch near Buffalo, South Dakota, in 2019: 67.5 centimeters long and up to 15.7 centimeters across. Guinness World Records lists it as the largest coprolite from a carnivore ever found. It is named after Barnum Brown, the paleontologist who dug up the first Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in 1902. So a man spends his life unearthing the most famous predator in history, and the tribute is a colossal fossil dropping with his name on it. It is beautiful. I would take it.
Sources: Guinness World Records; Barnum Brown
What did a T. rex coprolite reveal?
The record holder is not the important one. In 1998, Karen Chin and colleagues published a paper in Nature on a different specimen, from Saskatchewan in Canada, about 44 by 16 centimeters. It was full of bone. Not stripped bone, not gnawed bone: pulverized fragments from a young plant-eating dinosaur, a duck-billed or horned one, smashed up and swallowed. That one object helped settle an argument. Tyrannosaurus was not delicately picking meat off a carcass like a man with a chicken wing. It crushed the animal, bones included, and put it away. We know how the most famous predator that ever lived ate because it went to the toilet and the toilet turned to rock.
Sources: Chin et al., Nature, 1998, A king-sized theropod coprolite; American Museum of Natural History
How much did the biggest dinosaurs poop?
Nobody knows, and anyone who quotes you a figure made it up. What we do know is the scale. The sauropods were the largest animals ever to walk on land, some of them well over 60 tonnes. An elephant produces something on the order of 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of dung a day. Now imagine an animal around ten times heavier, in herds, walking across a landscape and doing what every animal does while it walks, for about a hundred and fifty million years. The age of the dinosaurs was not just a world with big animals in it. It was a world being fertilized by them, constantly, everywhere.
Sources: Sauropoda; African bush elephant
Why did Australia import dung beetles?
There are roughly 6,000 species of dung beetle. They bury it, eat it, lay their eggs in it and roll it across the ground in balls. Australia's native dung beetles had spent millions of years evolving to handle marsupial droppings: small, dry pellets. Then Europeans arrived with cattle, which produce large, wet pads, and the local beetles took one look and declined. So the dung sat there, fouling pasture and breeding bush flies in numbers that made parts of the country genuinely unpleasant. From 1965 the government science agency, CSIRO, ran the Australian Dung Beetle Project and imported beetles from Africa and Europe, species that already knew what a cow was. A whole nation had to bring in foreign beetles because nobody had asked who was going to deal with it.
Sources: Dung beetle; Australian Dung Beetle Project
How do elephants spread seeds?
An elephant eats in one place, walks for miles and deposits it somewhere else, seeds included, packed in fertilizer and ready to grow. Some trees' seeds germinate better after passing through an animal's gut than they do straight off the branch. That is a partnership millions of years old, and one half of it is an animal there are fewer of every decade. It is the same point as the giants that died: a large animal is not decoration. It is infrastructure, and this, unglamorously, is the infrastructure.
Source: Seed dispersal
What were the guano wars?
For much of the nineteenth century, one of the most valuable substances in the Pacific was bird droppings. Seabird guano, piled meters deep on rainless islands off Peru, is extraordinarily rich in nitrogen and phosphate, and before industrial fertilizer existed it was the best there was. It was mined, shipped and fought over, and for decades it funded the Peruvian state. In 1856 the United States passed the Guano Islands Act, which let American citizens take possession of any unclaimed island with guano on it. That is a real law. In 1864 Spain seized Peru's guano-rich Chincha Islands, which led to the Chincha Islands War. Nations fought over bird droppings, because whoever held them could feed their crops. So no, you are not above it.
Sources: Guano Islands Act; Guano Era; Chincha Islands War
How does whale poop help the ocean?
Now the one that ought to change how you think. Whales feed in the deep and come up to the surface to go. Their feces are liquid and buoyant, so they stay up in the sunlit water where the plankton live, and they carry iron, at concentrations measured at around ten million times that of the surrounding Antarctic seawater. The Southern Ocean has plenty of everything plankton need except iron, and the whales deliver it, free, from below. One study estimated that around 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean release about 50 tonnes of iron a year, and that the plankton growth it feeds locks away over 400,000 tonnes of carbon a year. In the twentieth century we killed most of the whales. We did not just remove the animals. We switched off a pump that had been running since long before anybody was there to notice.
Sources: Ratnarajah et al., PLOS ONE, 2014; National Geographic; The Conversation
So now you know
The joke was that this is disgusting. The joke is on you, as usual. Everything that lives has to move nutrients around, and almost none of it is moved by the things you find impressive. It is moved by beetles, by guts, by whales going to the toilet in the dark, and by an elephant walking somewhere with a stomach full of seeds. The forests you like and the ocean on your screensaver are downstream of exactly this, and always have been. Nature has never once been embarrassed about it. That part is entirely you, you decorative gourd.
What is the strangest thing you have ever seen in a museum? Tell us under the video on Facebook.
Now get out. And wash your hands.
Questions people ask
What is the largest fossilized poop ever found?
Barnum, a coprolite found near Buffalo, South Dakota, in 2019. It is 67.5 centimeters (about 26.5 inches) long and up to 15.7 centimeters wide, and Guinness World Records lists it as the largest coprolite from a carnivore.
What is a coprolite?
Fossilized feces. The name was coined by William Buckland in 1829 after Mary Anning recognized that stones found inside fossil reptiles were droppings containing fish bones and scales. Coprolites show what ancient animals ate and what parasites they carried.
What is the largest human coprolite?
The Lloyds Bank coprolite, found in York in 1972 and dated to the ninth century. It is about 20 centimeters long, contains hundreds of parasite eggs, and is on display at the Jorvik Viking Centre.
Why did Australia import dung beetles?
Australia's native dung beetles evolved for small, dry marsupial droppings and would not process the large, wet pads of cattle, so dung built up on pasture and bred bush flies. From 1965 the CSIRO's Australian Dung Beetle Project brought in species from Africa and Europe.
How does whale poop help fight climate change?
Whale feces are rich in iron, which the Southern Ocean's plankton lack. Released at the surface, it feeds plankton blooms that take carbon out of the atmosphere. One study estimated that Southern Ocean sperm whales alone help lock away over 400,000 tonnes of carbon a year.
Sources
Every claim above was sourced before the episode was narrated. Two specimens are easy to confuse, so to be clear: Barnum is the biggest, and the Saskatchewan coprolite is the one that showed how Tyrannosaurus ate. No figure is given for a sauropod's daily output or for Barnum's volume, because no reliable one exists. The main papers:
- Chin, Tokaryk, Erickson and Calk (1998). A king-sized theropod coprolite. Nature 393.
- Lavery et al. (2010). Iron defecation by sperm whales stimulates carbon export in the Southern Ocean. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277.
- Ratnarajah, Bowie, Lannuzel, Meiners and Nicol (2014). The biogeochemical role of baleen whales and krill in Southern Ocean nutrient cycling. PLOS ONE 9.
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