In 1991, York Archaeological Trust employee and paleoscatologist, Andrew Jones, made international news with his appraisal of the item for insurance purposes: “This is the most exciting piece of excrement I’ve ever seen… In its own way, it’s as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels”.
On a whim, I just searched it and was shocked that it has its own Lloyds_Bank_coprolite Wikipedia page with the priceless quote above. I shouldn’t be surprised as this is media gold and, naturally, they would exploit it everywhere.
I wasn’t sure if I should post on it or not. I finally decided to because it is a subject that gets little discussion. The hardest part is to keep from making stupid jokes and puns but the reality is, there is data gold in crap.
In our samples, the ancient DNA was concentrated in millimeter-sized “hotspots.” These were typically associated with tiny fragments of bone—in effect, microfossils—or fossilized feces.
The DNA revolution makes use of it, as shown above, and it is only going to increase. If you want to find data it is a good place to start. Testing and monitoring for Covid is another example. The list of its uses is long.
Besides the data aspect, it is also a major resource that is usually wasted. When I was taking samples from the harbor bottom years ago, black goop kept coming up. Being young and naive, I asked the researcher what it was and, of course, he said it was hundreds of years of human sewage. That is all too typical. When I was in Boston, they were working on a 10 mile long pipe to flush it to the ocean. An enormous amount of nutrients, especially phosphorus, are being transferred from the land to the ocean doing that. The problem is it is energy intensive to deal with and nobody wants to take it. The same city with the harbor samples tried to send it to a local farmer here. He spread it on his fields but that didn’t last because of the uproar. Chinese peasants have been doing that with “night soil” for a 1000 years, because of necessity, but today its popularity has waned with artificial fertilizer. The stress of too much, and too little, of it on ecosystems has always peeved the ecologist in me.
Edward R. Hewitt, a New York angling author and Catskill stream authority, refused to fight open sewage in the rivers there since he claimed that sewage in moderate amounts increased trout carrying capacity. Likewise, when I fished the Bow River downstream of Calgary, the superior fishing was credited partially to nutrient loads from the city vs the more sterile water upstream. It was less positive for me when I swam to the rocks, at night, to fish striped bass in MA. High coliform counts often made me slightly sick. As mentioned below,
Ok, I admit it, I can’t believe I spent so much time on this.