Buckland’s coprolite table.This lovely early Victorian pine and walnut table (89x77Cm) is

Buckland’s coprolite table.This lovely early Victorian pine and walnut table (89x77Cm) is a famed piece of geological history, whose surface is inlaid with 64 sliced nodules of fossil poo. Made for the reverend William Buckland, the first professor of Geology at Oxford University and later Dean of Westminster, it was given to the Lyme Regis museum in England by his grandson Frank Gordon in commemoration of Buckland’s nearby origins in Axminster.He scoured the Jurassic cliffs of Lyme for fossils in the company of Henry de la Beche (http://tinyurl.com/knk7bx) and Mary Anning (http://tinyurl.com/n737jqj), and was the first to recognise the significance of coprolites in reconstructing ancient environments. He gave them their name, which translates as dung stone. Due to their high phosphate content, coprolites were mined as fertiliser at his suggestion, and Ipswich in Norfolk still has a Coprolite Street. He apparently used to delight in serving tea on it to prim and proper Victorians, who would have been aghast to discover they were enjoying their Devon cream tea off prehisto-poo. The nodules were collected by Buckland at Wardie, near Edinburgh in Scotland, and were probably cut and mounted there. The source animal is thought to be large fish from a early Carboniferous freshwater environment around 330 million years old. The central part of each concretion (aka beetle stones) is the coprolite, containing brown stained phosphatised bone, with septarian minerals (either calcite or barite) radiating out through a clay ironstone matrix. Some of the coprolites have been replaced by metallic sulphides, probably marcassite. The minerals are uncertain as a non destructive analysis cannot be performed.Buckland famously tested fresh hyena dung in order to compare it to fossil versions found in a Yorkshire cave, reconstructing a prehistoric hyena den in one of the first ever scenes from deep time. He also studied the bezoar stones, marine dinosaur coprolites from Lyme Regis, drawing conclusions about their diets, finding both bone and belemnite parts. He also injected cement into fish intestines to see what shape their coprolites would be.The scientific study of coprolites has come some way since then, and, corny jokes aside, they are used to reconstruct past environments and ecological interactions such as parasitism. Some surprising feeding habits have emerged too, such as herbivorous dinosaur poo from the Two Medicine formation that revealed that these particular saurians ate wood. Grass phytoliths have also turned up in dino poo, implying that they may have been around longer than thought.LozImage credit: Disillusioned Taxonomist blog, http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/images/stories/research/buckland.pdfhttp://geologyinart.blogspot.com.ar/2010/12/coprolite-time.htmlhttp://www.earthmagazine.org/article/its-dirty-job-someones-gotta-do-ithttp://subhumanfreak.blogspot.com.ar/2009/08/sea-dragons-of-avalon.html -- source link

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