A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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coprolite
A coprolite is fossilized dung. Because it preserves what an animal actually ate rather than what its anatomy suggests it could eat, a coprolite is one of the few direct records of a food web that no longer exists. They hold bone fragments, scales, insect parts, pollen, seeds, and parasite eggs, and they are increasingly cut and CT-scanned rather than broken open.
Etymology
Fossilized feces. William Buckland, a geologist at Oxford University, coined the term in 1829 after the English fossil collector Mary Anning noticed the same odd, oval objects turning up inside the rib cages of fossilized ichthyosaurs—massive marine reptiles from over 180 million years ago. Anning suspected the objects were droppings, and Buckland verified it by grinding one up and finding fish scales still intact inside it. He published his findings that year, making coprolites one of the first windows into the diet and guts of ancient life.
Notes
Buckland went further and had a table top inlaid with polished coprolite sections, which is still in existence. Coprolites were mined commercially in East Anglia in the nineteenth century for phosphate fertilizer, and the industry employed thousands before cheaper sources were found overseas.