October 24, 2008
How Dinosaur Poop Got Its Name
Earlier this year, Smithsonian published an article, “Where Dinosaurs Roamed,” that touched briefly on the war between the two men who started us down the path to our current dinosaur obsession:
“Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were the two most prominent dinosaur specialists of the 1800s—and bitter enemies. They burned through money, funding expeditions to Western badlands, hiring bone collectors away from each other and bidding against one another for fossils in a battle of one-upmanship. They spied on each other’s digs, had their minions smash fossils so the other couldn’t collect them, and attacked each other in academic journals and across the pages of the New York Herald—making accusations of theft and plagiarism that tarnished them both.”
A reader wrote in the online comments that he thought that we left out one of the best insults: “I was told that after finding fossilized poop, Marsh, in honor of his rival named it coprolite, so that Cope would be associated in perpetuity.”
Really?
While it would have been a good insult, this is, unfortunately, not true. The term “coprolite” has its roots in the Greek language, derived from kopros, which means dung, and lithos, which means stone. The word was coined by William Buckland, an English geologist who was a dinosaur hunter before the term “dinosaur” had been created, before the Marsh and Cope war. Buckland found many coprolites and liked them so much, he even had a table made from a slab of inlaid dinosaur dung. The Lyme Regis Philpot Museum in England, which has the table, calls it “Buckland’s Dinosaur Poo Table”.
Ew.
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The coprolites in the Buckland table are actually from marine reptiles called Ichthyosaurs, which are only very distintly related to dinosaurs. They are not dinosaurs themselves !
I was a volunteer with the California Academy of Sciences and about 8 years ago there was Jurrasic Park display and I showed some children som copralites and some of the smelled it and said it doesn’t stink at all.
[...] like a T. rex? Lumber around gulping party snacks like an Apatosaurus? Stain the carpet like a coprolite? This is the holiday for you, and we want to hear all about [...]
[...] At the beginning of the 19th century, paleontology was a new branch of science. People had been picking up fossils and trying to determine their significance for as long as anyone could recall, but the study of organic petrifactions was something new. Shells and teeth laid down in ancient marine environments were common, but so were strange spiral-shaped bodies. They were often referred to as “fossil fir cones,” as they looked like the cones that fell from pine trees, but geologist William Buckland came to a different conclusion. The fossil “cones” were really petrified dung, which he called “coprolites.” [...]
Hey, my brother gave me a graphic novel about Cope and Marsh for Christmas. I should read it, huh. (It’s called Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards: A Tale of Edward Drinker Cope, Othniel Charles Marsh, and the Gilded Age of Paleontology – kind of the best title ever.)