The Story Behind An Unusual Poop

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Behavior, Nature, Wildlife, Biological Evolution

Many of you either have field guides to animal tracks  (and thier poops) or have used one. 

Mine is old, almost as old as preserved fossil prints and/or fossilized poops. It is "A Field Guide to Animal Tracks " by Olaus J. Murie (Houghton Miflin,The Peterson Field Guide Series). It includes their poops, too, aka scats. Fossil scats are known as coproliths or coprolites.

I like Murie's field guide. The illustrations were drawn by him, most of them while in the field. So it is also a work of art which I still thumb through for pleasure and sometimes to check a scat I've seen. Murie was a native son who was born in Moorhead, Minnesota.

There is a You Tube video on wombat scats which are unique among animals. A real signature.

Here it is (6m 35s) which tells how wombats make such unique poops - a scoop on their poops and other aspects of their biology.