Hyena Poop Fossil Found !

John W. Miller -

Recently, we wrote about an ambitious expansion of Europe’s biggest port, Rotterdam. The Dutch are doing what they do best, replacing water with sand to build new land. The new docks will allow Rotterdam to process an additional 8.5 million shipping containers a year.

All that dirt getting dug out of the North Sea is a treasure trove for historians and paleontologists. They have found unexploded bombs dumped by British bomber pilots on their way back from Germany in the early 1940s, as well as more than 200 animal fossils.

Until 10,000 years ago, what is now the North Sea was once the “Mammoth Steppe”, a cold landscape populated by the great woolly beast, as well as woolly rhino, bison, reindeer and giant deer.

Scientists have suspected that hyena were part of this cast of wildlife, because of their teeth marks left on mammoth bones. Today, in news trumpeted by the Port of Rotterdam, they have proof, in the form of the first positively identified hyena turd from that period and place.

Fossilized excrement, known as coprolites, is a key indicator of where species have lived. Hyena droppings, in particular, “are famous for their ability to fossilize because of their content which is high in calcium because hyenas eat bones,” says Kees Moeliker, a Dutch scientist whose previous work includes a paper on homosexual necrophilic behavior in the Mallard duck.

A full description from the Natural History Museum of Rotterdam: “The fossil has a maximum diameter of 55 mm, a length of 44 mm, and a weight of 85.8 grams; it is almost circular, provided with a depression on one side and a certain roughness on the other. It possesses a groove running around the side, dividing the object into two segments of unequal size. It has a light brown color.”

The conclusion: “Size, shape, texture and the groove unequivocally identify the object as a partial coprolite of the Late Pleistocene hyena, Crocuta crocuta spelaea.” The star turd is between 30,000 and 40,000 years old.

That’s not all. The piece “confirms the new insight that the Late Pleistocene landscape between Britain and Holland was a cold dry steppe, and not the snowy tundra where hungry mammoths had to plough for food.

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