Beijing may have more excrement than any city in the world, and Paris
might have the most interesting sewers, but the world’s leader for
breadth and depth of feces is — wait for it — Albuquerque. That’s the
opinion, anyway, of New Mexico’s top poop scientist, paleontologist
Adrian Hunt of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science
(NMMNHS). “New Mexico is the best place in the world for fossil poop,”
said Hunt at the museum’s special one day “On the Origin of Feces” event
on Sunday, Sept. 1. Because of that special geological distinction the
museum’s fossil feces collection is probably second only to that of the
Smithsonian Institution’s, he added. The New Mexico collection is also notable for the span of
Earth’s history it covers. New Mexico’s mountains and canyons have
yielded coprolites (the polite, scientific name for fossil feces)
from as far back as the Permian period (250-300 million years ago) and
as recent as a few thousand years ago. The latter includes mummified dung of mammoths and ground sloths of
the last ice age. Hunt has spent much of the last 22 years looking in
the middle of that range, specifically at dinosaur feces. “Nobody has looked at more fossil poop than he has,” said
Spencer Lucas, curator of paleontology at the NMMNHS — fully meaning it
as a compliment. Among the many surprising discoveries made as a result of
coprolites is the fact, for instance, that duck-billed dinosaurs ate
conifers; as in pine trees. “Nobody thought that duckbill dinosaurs ate conifers,” said
Lucas. The lesson there, he said, is that there’s only so much you can
deduce about an ancient animal’s diet from from teeth and associated
fossils. “At the end of the day you have to identify the gut contents or
coprolites to know what an animal ate.”. As for how “On The Origin of Feces” went as an event, it appears to have been a hit...more
Finally, NM is #1 at something. Its nice to know our excrement here in NM is being recognized.
Just kidding about Udall...or am I? Here's their chance to control what little private property we have left.
Be on the lookout for a Crap Canyon National Monument.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Here's the poop about "On The Origin of Feces"; NM #1 in Paleo Poop; Udall to introduce Poop Protection bill
Labels:
Monuments,
New Mexico
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