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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

Age-old hidden ecosystem revealed by trail of poo

Primeval droppings show that some animals that lived in what is now Greenland do not appear in the fossil record.
A large coprolite with a museum label attached.

A piece of fossilized faeces found in modern Greenland contains fish remains and might have been excreted by an ancient shark. Credit: H. M. Byrne et al./Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol. (CC BY 4.0)

Sometimes, the proof is in the poo. By analysing fossilized dung, palaeontologists have uncovered an entire ecosystem of extinct creatures that lived about 360 million years ago, some of which left no known fossils of their bodies1.

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Nature 609, 879 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02985-1

References

  1. Byrne, H. M., Niedźwiedzki, G., Blom, H., Kear, B. P. & Ahlberg, P. E. Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol. 605, 111215 (2022).

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