July 22 , 2016

by Jacqueline Ronson

George Frandsen holds the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of fossilized poop, with more than 5,000 specimens.

Frandsen curates the Poozeum, an online repository for all things ancient poop. His collection is from all over the world, ranging in size from barely a speck to more than four pounds, from 400 million years old to a very young 10,000. “Much newer than that, they’re too fresh,” he tells Inverse. It’s good to have boundaries.

Frandsen has been collecting fossil turds, or coprolites, since he was in college. He had been instructed to gather a small fossil collection for a natural history class, and came across a specimen in a shop that caught his interest. “I had never heard of them. I had never seen one. I didn’t know they existed. So it just turned something on in me. It was just such a fascinating little nugget. It was funny, it was interesting — everything that 18-year-old guys love.”

Coprolites can tell us fabulous things about animals of ancient history — even dinosaurs. A couple of Tyrannosaurus rex poops were found in Canada with preserved chunks of meat and bone inside. Scientists learned from the fossils that the T. rex, unlike crocodilians, only partially digested its meals, which must have traveled through the animal relatively quickly. This would have meant that the tyrannosaurs must have ingested an impressive volume of flesh to feed their enormous bodies — it would have also been a boon for dung beetles and other scavengers. Ew.

“Over many, many thousands of years, or millions of years, the minerals leach into turd and replace the turd composition with minerals,” he says. “And then you have coprolite. And it also fossilizes the bits within the turd — so if the animal ate a fish and the turd is full of fish scales and fins and that type of thing, the turd will also have those bits of fossilized material in it.”

While eBay claims to have thousands of coprolites for sale for a small chunk of change, the vast majority of those are fakes, says Frandsen. “They’re not coprolites at all. They’re rocks that didn’t have value until someone said, ‘Hey, that’s probably a dinosaur turd.’”

There are probably fewer than 10 true, verified dinosaur coprolites that have been found, says Frandsen. A lot of the fossil turds from the time of the dinosaurs properly belong to crocodilians, and there could be several explanations for that, including perhaps that dinosaur poop was less solid and more attractive to scavengers.

“Dinosaurs were big,” he says. “This is why you don’t find huge coprolites — it has a splatter effect. A giant dinosaur goes poop, it falls, it breaks up, critters come scavenge it, bugs come scavenge it, it washes away. Whereas smaller animals, like a crocodilian, they’re very low to the ground. They’re already low, so when they make a poop, it doesn’t have far to go — a few inches. And they’re, a lot of times, in the marsh, in the muck, so it goes and settles and gets covered very quickly, so it doesn’t get scavenged, it doesn’t break up.”

Frandsen’s collection is on tour and currently on display at the South Florida Museum. He has also donated specimens to museums for scientific study, or to get them on display where people will get excited about them. Some are at the National Poo Museum, which surprisingly had had no coprolite in its collection. What’s the harm in a little potty humor if it gets humans of all ages engaged with science and natural history, right? “I get a lot of messages from young kids wanting to learn more. And that’s really cool.”