Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this Podcast Will Kill You, and you're listening to the latest episode in our mini series of bonus content that we've been releasing over the past couple of months. We're nearing the end of these bonus episodes for now. We've got just one more planned after this, but that doesn't mean that we
won't come back with more someday. In fact, we'd love to do that because these episodes have been so much fun and they are such a great way to explore even more deeply a topic we covered in our regular season episode. For instance, we've been able to dig deeper into the world of the epstein bar virus after our multiple sclerosis episode, learn about how koalas are impacted by chlamydia, understand more about the stigma and discrimination experienced by some people living with.
Hepatitis B, and so much else. In this week's episode, we're deviating a bit more from.
Our regular episode topic than we usually do, but I think that makes it all the more exciting because this bonus episode covers something that Aaron and I have frequently mentioned and expressed our love for on the podcast, but have never taken the time to explore in more depth, and that is coprolites aka fossilized feces. In our episode last week, we talked tapeworms, mostly about the tapeworms that commonly infect humans, but those tapeworms only represent a teeny
tiny part of the puzzle of these parasites. As we mentioned, tapeworms are an incredibly ancient and highly diverse group of parasites, infecting thousands of animal species all over the globe. We're learning more about these amazing creatures all the time, from the discovery of new species expanding what we know about present day tapeworm ecology, to the identification of tapeworm bits in fossils, filling in some of the gaps in our knowledge of how these parasites and their hosts have evolved.
And it's the second part, the fossil part, that I
really want to focus on for this bonus episode. If you listen to our tapeworm episode last week, you may remember me mentioning a study from twenty thirteen that found tapeworm eggs in fossilized shark feces from two hundred seventy million years ago, which is so incredible, not only for the simple fact that we can look at and examine Pooh from millions of years ago, but also because this finding completely revised what we know about the timeline of
cestode evolution and the history of intestinal parasites. And that's typically how coprolites come up on the podcast when we trace back how far a human parasite relationship extends, or examine how historical distributions of parasites differ from those of today. But coprolites are much much more than a tool for
understanding parasite evolution or host parasite relationships. These magic packages, as my guest for this episode has called them, can yield incredible amounts of information on the typical diet of an extinct animal, the ecological relationships among species, and the environmental conditions near the time of fossilization, among other things.
Although people have been studying copra lights since the first decades of the eighteen hundreds, some of the most impactful discoveries in this field have been made in just the past few decades by doctor Karen Chin, who is one of the world's leading experts and copralites. Doctor Chin has so graciously agreed to let me ask her all kinds of questions about fossilized specs today, and I am incredibly excited to dive in. So let's just take a quick break here and get to it.
My name is Karen Chin, and I am a professor at the University of Colorado and I'm also curator of Paleontology at the cu Or University of Colorado's Museum of Natural History. I study ancient ecosystems, and mostly I focus on Mesozoic ecosystems, which is the time when the big dinosaurs were roaming around.
Awesome, Thank you so very much for joining me today. I have been absolutely fascinated by copralites ever since learning about them during my masters and reading about hookworm eggs and the peopling of the Americas and all the things we can learn from fossilized poop. And I've always wanted to dig in a little bit deeper and explore more, especially of the non parasite side of things. So I am really thrilled for this interview.
Well, thank you, thank you for inviting me.
Of course, So could you start us off by defining the word copralite, Yes.
I can. A copralite is fossilized feces. Sometimes people immediately think it has to be from a dinosaur, but it could be from a fish, or a human or an insect. It just means fossilized feces. And there's oh, there's a whole variety of them. But I would say that since I work on very old fossils over say most of them fossils I work on are over sixty six million
years old. What copralites can be preserved in very what I would call young sediments only a few hundred years or a few thousand or a million years old, And how they are preserved often depends on their age. So what the kind of copralites I work on? Are hard? They're mineralized, Whereas if you talk to an archaeologist, many of the copralites they work on are still they were preserved through drying, through desiccation, and if archaeologists rehydrate them,
they can still have odors. Where most of the material WEAK work on is mineralized.
What do coprolites look like?
I'm sure there's not a one size fits all answer to this question. And so how variable can they be in their shape and size?
They that's a great question. They're highly variable, and their variableness often depends on how big they are. So if you're talking about little feces from insects or shrimp, they often have a very predictable size and shape. But if you're talking about feces from say a duckbill dinosaur, often they just do not hold their shape, either when they're deposited or when they're trampled. And you can see that yourself if you go to the zoo and look at
the elephant dung. One or two of them might be have a nice round shape, but many of them are just kind of trampled and have no recognizable shape. So the shape is usually dependent on the size of the animal, and then within that, when feces are first produced, they can be oh little teeny pellets, They can be ovoid, they can be more like a cowpie, they can be really irregular, and this depends again upon the size and also upon the diet and the kind of animal that produced it.
Copulates are a type of trace fossil, right, So what are some other examples of trace fos foscils and how does the information that we can get from these type of fossils differ from the info we can glean from something like a body fossil for.
Instance, Yes, that's a great distinction. Body fossils are part of what the animal look like or a plant. I shouldn't limit it to animals. Of petrified wood is a kind of body fossil, because that's part of what constituted the structure of the animal. In contrast, trace fossils record
behavior of different organisms. So tooth marks in say bone, or brows in the sediment, or footprints or corpralites, they all record some kind of behavior and they tell us They provide different perspectives because with body fossils we can try to envision what an animal or plant or whatever look like, some kind of organism, what they looked like. But with trace fossils we can see, oh they burrowed here, they burrowed in this manner, what were they doing? What
did they eat? How did they walk? How fast did they run? There's they're different kinds of questions, but they enrich our understanding of ancient life.
Of course, everyone and everything poops, generally speaking, but you know what's in that poop can change substantially from day to day, and so if a trace fossil like a copralite is capturing like a snapshot of an image, a snapshot of what that animal ate and that particular day and what happened to just be preserved, And so how does that affect our interpretation of what we see inside that copra late?
Well, I like that you use the phrase snapshot. We like to use that too, because it's just kind of a single frame in the whole movie of ancient life, and sometimes it can be representative of the past, and sometimes maybe it was an aberrant situation. Maybe it would be like if you looked at my diet on a day that all I wanted to eat was ice cream, that might not be relevant for my normal diet.
So you mentioned, of course that the size of the animal and the type of the animal can really affect what the copralite looks like simply because of what's in the poop.
And so on.
But how does that affect how copraltes form? Well, I guess my first question is how do they form? And then the second sort of add on question is how do things like animal diet or the environmental conditions, how do those things play a role in whether or not that poop becomes fossilized.
Yes, all those factors are super important. If we go back to thinking about archaeological samples that are only maybe hundreds or thousands of years old. Those can preserve in a very dry environment, say in a cave. But if you're talking about older material, the most common method of feces being preserved, and it sounds crazy that we could actually preserve soft material like feces, but if it becomes mineralized,
it can preserve it in three dimensions. So the duet actually plays a major role in whether ancient feces were mineralized or not. Because if you're a carnivore, if you feed on vertebrates that have bones or something that has only soft tissue, either way that they're is phosphorus in bone. There's phosphorus in soft tissue, and that can contribute to the mineral called calcium phosphate, and there's a lot of calcium around, so that's a little easier to come by,
but phosphorus is not so easy to come by. So if you are a carnivore and have a diet that has phosphorus in it, your feces are more likely to be preserved if they are deposited in under the right conditions. So that means that most of the feces throughout the world in museums are mostly from carnivores, which is kind of counterintuitive because they're far more herbivores than there are carnivores.
But herbivore coprolites require an external source of elements that can help them be mineralized, so actually herbivore coprolites are very very rare.
And in terms of the environmental conditions at the time, or maybe environmental conditions nowadays, are there hot spots that we see around the world where there happens to be a lot of copralite deposits.
Yes, indeed, the hot spot would actually be the likelihood of whether something is buried or not. And this also works in terms of preserving body fossils. Most fossils can be more easily preserved if they are rapidly buried, and that goes for feces as well, because what happens is if the feces are left exposed on the surface, they can be subjected to rain, so in any erosion, or animals that step on it or feed on it, or other things that just decay it, it can be decayed
by bacteria. If you bury the feces, you can slow bacterial decomposition, and if the conditions are right, and we're still trying to understand what those conditions are, bacteria can actually facilitate mineralization of the soft material. And again this seems ironic because bacteria. You usually think of bacteria as decaying things, but as bacteria live, they can produce some substances or change the micro environment that actually facilitates mineralization.
And many experiments have been done investigating the role of bacteria in mineralization. And it may be that many, maybe even most processes of mineralization in place, and I'm talking about in sedimentary environment. I'm not talking about volcanics or magmas or anything, but just producing chemical minerals in place seem to be facilitated by the activity of microbes, especially bacteria.
And are those bacteria are they environmental bacteria or like in the soil, or are they internal bacteria as part of like the gut microbiome and shed along with the feces.
We are still trying to figure out which bacteria can do this. The thing about feces is that feces have so much so many bacteria in them, but there's lots so they can be readily preserved if the conditions are right. Which bacteria That's an excellent question. A student that I worked with, doctor Joseph Daniel. He once did an experiment with me where he buried chunks of bone and then dripped a super saturated solution of calcium carbonate over the bone.
But some of the pieces of bone had been treated to reduce the numbers of bacteria. It's hard to get rid of everything, but he reduced a lot of them. In the chunks of bone where the bacterial populations were reduced, there was very little precipitation of the calcium carbonate that was percolating through the sand and around the bones.
Speaking of bacteria, most of the time when we've brought up coprolites on the podcast before, it's been in the context of parasite eggs, specifically human parasite eggs that have been found in certain specimens where and when What does that tell us about human evolution or parasite evolution. But coprolites can tell us a great deal more about the animal that produced that poo than just what parasites they
may have been infected with. So what are some of the other things that we can learn from copralates.
Yes, we can learn several different things, and it usually depends on the kind of preservation of the copralate that you're examining. I think the most common source of information we look for is what was the animal eating? And sometimes we can recognize some very distinctive bits and pieces.
And you have to kind of think three dimensionally because quite often when you're looking at dietary residues in a copra light, they've been chomped, they've been digested with gastric juices, and then they've probably been changed through geological processes, through mineralization or by bacterial decay. So we look for bits and pieces that can give us a glimpse into who
were the victim who was eaten. Sometimes we see pieces of bone, sometimes we see pieces of shell, sometimes we see lots of leaves, and sometimes those things are very very difficult to recognize, but we're getting better and sometimes we can see just a little piece of something and say, well, that's a piece of bone. In most cases, we assume that when we find something in a copral like it
was eaten, it was food. But sometimes we can also see evidence of organisms that were visitors that visited a dung pile after it was deposited, and actually one study that I worked on with colleagues, we found over one hundred and forty I don't know more than that snails associated with copra likes. They were preserved in them, on top of them, and we examined how complete they were and actually found them more Most of them were fairly complete.
So this suggested that these snails were post depositional visitors because snails actually often feed on dung, snails and slugs because they like the bacteria in dung, and sometimes when people are studying snails, they will put it dung out for bait to attract them. So that indicated that in this case, even though we found snails in the cobra light, they were not necessarily eaten. It's possible that some of them were eaten, but it appears that most of them
visited the dung after it was deposited. So this provides another angle of interpreting the ancient environment because this shows how waste materials like dung were recycled in ancient environments. So we have diet, we have recycling. We can also just tell you if something is eaten, it's a contemporary of the dinosaurs, so we can learn who was living with the dinosaurs, whether or not they were eaten. And finally, well, I shouldn't say finally. We're still finding more and more
about what copraltes can tell us. But i'd say of the fourth major category is when we study some copraltes, we can learn how it was preserved. And a good example of this, the best example that I have worked on is when we studied a tronosaur copralite, not t Rex, but a smaller, slightly smaller, and older relative, probably ten million years older than t Rex, and when we examined the copra light we found a mineralized muscle tissue.
This was just.
Was so shocking because you'd expect, wait a minute, this can't be this went through the dinosaur's gut, and then it came out, and you'd think that somewhere along the way it was the muscle tissue was either digested or else decomposed by bacteria. But what this told us was that the gut residence time of the food was rather quick. If the food had just sat in the dinosaur's gut for a long period of time, it would have been
more completely broken down. But if it went through relatively quickly, you wouldn't necessarily have digestive juices actually attacking every little bit of what was eaten. And when I was working on this, I found an article that explained that muscle tissue has been found in the feces of dogs that were fed raw meat. And you figure, if a dog has a skull, that's maybe a big dog maybe has a canner eleven inch long skull, But a tronosaur could have a skull was three feet long, and they could
not chew like a dog could. They could gulp and swallow, So if there was a relatively fast gut residence time, all of those bits of food would not necessarily be digested. And then once it was deposited, we have to mineralize it very quickly before all the bacteria decompose the muscle tissue. But again, as we've learned, bacteria can facilitate mineralization, and there have been scientists who have taken dead animals like dead shrimp and buried them and they have documented mineralization
of the muscle tissue within weeks. So all of these things tell us about a little bit about the digestive track. They tell us about the process of mineralization, and that was not originally why I wanted to study this Toronto's ark for LTE. I wanted to learn about the diet, but it provided such an interesting window on other kinds of aspects of the fossil record.
That must have been so thrilling to see that a muscle tissue. What an unexpected finding it was.
It was such a fun study, but it was it was challenging because when I first saw it, I thought that that doesn't look like plant tissue. Maybe it's muscle tissue. No, it can't be. It can't it just can't be. And I'd go to bed at night thinking it's not muscle tissue. Then I'd wake up in the morning, maybe it could be. Then the next day I'd think, no, it's plant tissue, and I'd wake up in the morning, No, it could
be muscle tissue. And so, because I'm not a specialist in anatomical tissues, I sought out a colleague at Stanford who actually worked on muscle tissues and shared it with him, and doctor Rando said, yes, I think this seems to be the most likely explanation. So it was. It was so surprising, but interestingly as I was making looking at the microscope through thin sections of this specimen, I suspected
that it was muscle tissue. But then one day I happened to make some random fin section and could actually see the mio fibular striations in skeletal muscle tissue. But that was so serendipitous to get just the right angle and the right view, and that really helped seal our interpretation.
And so is that is that one of the major ways that you study coprolites is through, you know, take making this fossil and cutting tiny little slivers, little sections.
And putting them on a microscope.
What are some of the other ways, or if you could talk a little bit more about these methods that you use to study these culporal lights.
Yes, I really like making those thin sections, like you explained, but it is a destructive process, and before you ever do anything like that, you have to first of all ask a museum for permission to destructively analyze some of a sample. And you often don't necessarily want to do too much of this, especially if it's a very unique specimen. So that is one way we do microscopy on broken pieces.
But one thing we are investigating now is looking using computed tomography or CT to examine what's inside, and I and my students have used X ray computed tomography and neutron computed tomography. And one of my colleagues in Europe, doctor Martin Farnstrom, has done exceptional work in using synchrotron radiation and then he's been able to find really cool beetle parts in some of the COPRA lights and other things in some of the material he studied, and that
is really great because it's non destructive. But there's pros and cons to both methods. I think sometimes you can see more in the thin section, but you're only looking at a two dimensional slice and it's destructive. With computed tomography, you're seeing three dimensions, but you may not necessarily see cellular detail that might be preserved. So well, we're throwing is many different techniques at these COPRA lights to learn
as much as we can. And what we are learning these days, I imagine in twenty years people will be able to deduce so much more information.
One of the things that crossed my mind was that you're able to tell so much from this copralight, but how can you use that information to help you determine what animal it might have come from. Is it just from the copra light itself or is it also from what else you find in the area.
Yes, this is another time when we use multiple lines of evidence. The most important line of evidence is what is the age of the sediments. So if I'm looking at Cretaceous age sediments, I know that only a certain number of animals could have produced it. I won't say that was it could have been produced by a wooly
mammo because they didn't live in the Cretaceous. And then you can you can fine tune so that when you find a coprali, you're looking at maybe just what are the contemporaneous organisms that we find in the sediments of the same age. So that is one line of evidence. Another line of evidence is the size. If you find a really large fecal deposits, you know it wasn't produced
by a small rodent size mammal. If you find a small piece, that's a little more difficult because small pieces can come off of a larger fecal mass, and there are we know things like deer and rabbits that often produce pellet groups. The complete pellet mass is different from the mass of one of those little pellets, but size is helpful, and then what is inside. If we find bone inside, we know we're not looking at a herbivore,
So you use all of those different line evidence. And when we actually studied a very likely t Rex copralite, we measured the volume of it and it seemed to be about two and a half liters in volume, roughly two and a half quartz, and this would be a very large fecal mass. So we looked at, well, who else lived who lived in those sediments that was a carnivore since we knew there was bone in there, and we found that many of the animals fell into kind
of two groups. One were carnivores that were, oh maybe a couple hundred pounds roughly, and then there was t rex that was much much larger. So between looking at the animals that lived at the same time, the fact that there was bone in the diet, the size, we were pretty confident that this fecal mass was produced by t rex. But with a cobra light you often will never know. It's quite possible that a large animal that was not t rex passed through the area at the time.
Defecated and did not leave, did not leave any bones behind. So always when we talk about who produced the cobra lte, I always put probable cobralte from such and such an animal in front of it.
I love the idea of a big dino just passing through and just dropping off a copralte and keep going and like leaving. People nowadays like what could that have been besides t rex? Yes, and so that t rex that likely that probable t rex heard is that the largest copralite found.
No. No, We've since found copra lights that are on the order of six to eight liters in volume. And that's just the ones that I have looked at. I know other people keep finding large copralites that may or may not be published at this point, but I'd say those are among the largest we found.
So you've talked about two tyrannosaur copralite stories, which I think are super fascinating. But I wanted to ask you also about another of your groundbreaking findings, which is the duckbill corpralites from the two medicine formation. What did you learn from these copralites about duckbill diet and maybe dung beetles.
Yes, this was one of my favorite studies we found. Well, I should say it was my boss and mentor, doctor Jack Horner, that originally found these weird rocks that had lots of plant tissues in them. So for my doctoral dissertation, I studied what is the that these are actually copralized that like Jack thought they were, And we found good evidence that they were from the geological evidence and the contents. But another aspect of these coprelizes that was so interesting
is that many of them had burrows in them. And I immediately thought, oh, dung beetles, But then I thought, well, I'd never be able to tell a dung beetle burrow from a worm borough, so I can't say that these are dung beetle borroughs. But when I was studying this project, I was contacted by doctor Bruce Gill, who was a dung beetle specialist from Canada, and he asked about the Burroughs and I just said, well, yeah, there's Burroughs, but
we can never tell who produced him. And he said, well, why don't you send me some photographs and I did, and he explained that these burroughs are very distinctive and they're in modern environment, we don't have animals that backfill sediment with dung to provision these these brood masses for the young beetles that will be growing up. And so they the dung beetle burrows have very distinctive features, and he looked at them and said, those are dune beetle burrows.
And so that was really that was a really lot of fun because it linked the dinosaurs not only with the plants they ate, but with the community of recyclers we found. We studied these burrows before we found the snails, but as we keep learning about these animals that are associated with the dung, that actually opens up more and
more intriguing views of the ancient environment. In fact, one of the things not only did we have the dung beetles, but these these cobralites were filled with wood, conifer wood. And I thought my first publication, I thought, well, if these dinosaurs are feeding on conifers, cone bearing trees with very short needles, say like junipers or other kinds of you know, conifers with very little leaves, of course they're
going to eat lots of wood. But after further study, I realized that the pieces of wood did not correspond to the branches that you would expect if they were feeding on the leaves. And after more study of the cellular structure of the wood, it became evident that the dinosaurs had actually ingested rotted wood. And this is it seems surprising. A lot of people will say, well, maybe it just rotted in. Maybe the structure of the cells
occurred in the dinosaurs stomach. But it gets a little complicated. But I'll just say, in order to get the cell structure we found, you have to destroy a component in wood called lignin. But to do that it requires oxygen, so that cannot happen in a vertebrate gut. So the structure that we find in the cobra lights where you find the cell structures are broken apart, could only have been done by a white rot fungus that would have occurred before the dinosaurs ingested it. So then you say, well,
why were they eating wood? It doesn't make sense. But when you decay wood with fungus, you actually make cellulose available, so the wood becomes more nutritious. But still it doesn't seem why would they eat wood when they could go out and eat leaves, Because they're cellulose and leaves, and that seems like an easier source of cellulose. But at this point in time, our best hypothesis is that the dinosaurs were nesting and required sources of protein to help
support when they laid eggs. They needed to add enough protein to those eggs. And if you're a big herbivore, probably the best place that you're going to find a reliable source of protein that you can actually catch since you're not a carnivore, would be something like rotting wood, where there'd be termites and crustaceans and all kinds of
very interesting animals in there. So this built the Again, we have the dinosaurs, we have the conifer wood, we have the white rot fungi, we have the dung beetle activity, we have the snails. And then some colleagues found comparable copra lights in southern Utah, and in those copra lights there were pieces of crustacean. So this really kind of supported the idea that, yeah, these animals, even though they were ergivores, did occasionally eat animals, just like most birds
are tend to be. Even if they're mostly herbivors, they will often change their diet when they are getting ready to reproduce.
That is so incredible.
How you can build this world and paint this picture from one like from these these fossils, this fossilized poop.
It's so beautiful. I love it. I just love that. That's amazing.
I think is pretty cool. Yeah, and oftentimes people will think that copra lights can't tell us that much, and they're right. Some Copra lights do not tell us that much. But some Copra lights, just because of what they're composed of and how they're preserved, can provide incredible snapshots that give us a view on ancient life.
We're going to take a quick break here, and when we get back, I want to hear all about how you were introduced to this incredible world of Copra lights.
Welcome back everyone.
I've been really enjoying hearing all about the science of Copra lights, But now I want to hear about you. How did you become interested in fossils in the first place. Were you one of those kids that just loved dinosaurs or did that love kind of spark later on.
I really thought dinosaurs were cool when I was growing up. I had, like many young kids, I had a dinosaur book. But I never really thought and I never really envisioned myself studying dinosaurs. When I grew up, I was interested in the modern world. You can walk out your door look at plants and animals, and I just thought it would be so frustrating to try to study something that we could never see again. So I was really quite
surprised by my reaction. When I started working for doctor Jack Horner, I was working as a preparator, cleaning and gluing dinosaur bones together, and then I went out and the visited their field camps, and I started also researching researching paleontology to help write texts for the exhibits. And the more I learned about it, the more I was. I was hooked. I just I couldn't get enough of it.
And it was so ironic, because again I never thought that I would study something like that, because I really thought it would be too frustrating. But instead it just different people have different affinities for different subjects, and I found that this studying paleontology really fit the way I think.
And when did coprolates come onto the scene? What was the first cope relate that you remember looking at or studying.
That would be the ones from the to medicine information that Jack found. And I never even thought that feces could be fossilized. It was and until I was reading and writing exhibit text that I learned that people had found it. And so I ran to talk to Jack and I said, did you know that people have found
fossilie species? And he said, well, yeah, and I found some too, and I was just shocked, and so I said, well, at the time, I was working as his histological technician, so I was cutting up bone pieces to look at the patterns of vascular tissue so he could make inferences about physiology and phylogeny of dinosaurs. So I was already used to cutting fossil mineralized samples. So I said, well, can I cut a piece of this and make a thin section? And he gave me permission to do so.
And when I looked into the microscope they looked at that slide, I could see ancient plant cells and it just kind of it was a real thrill because I realized I was looking at evidence of plant dinosaur interactions, and what a cool way to look at how dinosaurs interacted with other organisms and environment and That's when I got hooked.
You are an absolute pioneer in the field of copra lights. How have you seen this field change over the course of your career, either in terms of technology or just generally speaking.
Well, I have found some interesting things. I studied some interesting projects in coprolights, but I don't know. I would like to point out that people knew about fossilized feces before they had ever named dinosaurs, so over one hundred years and there have been many, many people who've done some really cool work on copra lights. So I don't want to claim I'm the only person that studying them. Lots of people have studied them. But I will say
that setting copra lights is not easy. It's really hard, and it can be very frustrating because unlike with a bone, you can pick up a bone and you say, okay, that's a bone and I can figure out who it was, or a shell or wood. But when you pick up something that you think is a cobra light, first you have to say, well, wait a minute, what is the evidence that this is fossil pieces? Some of the material
we look at is and some of it isn't. And then you may look at it and find nothing recognizable in it, and you may not know who produced it. So it's really really challenging. So it helps if you're studying some really spectacular examples, and I have been lucky
to study some of those spectacular examples. But I think that these days now people are looking at some of the even more difficult ones to study, and they have been making conclusions, you know, examining specimens that I may not have started to study before, and finding new things, just documenting things all over the world. People all over the world are studying coprelates, and like I mentioned, my colleague is using synchrotron radiation, and people are looking at
other ways to study them. So I think it's really an exciting time for trace fossils because quite often body fossils get most of the attention because they tell us about great, big or weird animals. But coprelates they're they're interesting, but they are more challenging to study, and I'm so pleased that more and more people are studying them these days.
One of the things that I really admire about you is just how much outreach and science communication that you do. Can you talk about why you feel it is important for scientists to connect with the public and share their work.
I think sometimes people think of science as being a black box, that scientists have these answers to things that maybe some people may not understand how we came to those answers. So I like talking about my work because it's easy for people to get excited, especially kids, about dinosaurs, and when you throw in something like dinosaur feces, it's even a better hook to get people saying, well, that's weird.
You know, how can you learn about that? So then when I talk about my work, they can get an idea of how the process of science works and it might be more approachable for them. And I think this is very important because we all have to We all should know more about the way science works and why we know what we do, so that when we learn, when we get information about changing environments or decisions that have to be made that relate to science, we are
better educated ourselves. So I think it's very important for all of us to get an idea of the critical thinking that goes into conducting science, and that people understand that we're not pulling weird facts out of the air, that we do do evidence based research.
What are some misconceptions about paleontology or paleontologists that the general public might have that you would like to correct.
Oh, I don't know that there's anything really critical. I'd say that a common misconception sometimes as people think that paleontologists and archaeologists are the same, where paleontologists study ancient organisms, non human organisms, and archaeologists study human organisms. But I don't even mind if people call me an archaeologist because they know we study old things and that's fine. Another common misconception and I don't again, I don't think it's
a bad thing. Is that people often think we get to spend all of our time out in the field with our pick in hand and finding new stuff, and that is so much fun to do. And I should say that I have colleagues that can spend months and months out of the year, But for the rest of us, many of us have to spend more time than we'd like to admit sitting in front of a computer trying
to write up or describe our results. So it can sound very glamorous, and some of my colleagues do have a very glass lifestyle, but for the rest of us, sometimes we get to go out in the field for a little while and then spend the rest of the time in front of the computers. But again, I don't mind these misconceptions because I think I just am happy when people are interested in in science.
Do you feel that graduate students in paleontology are getting enough training in communicating their science to the general public.
I do think I see more and more interest in graduate students in learning techniques to communicate the science. I really do think that there is a growing awareness of how important it is to communicate science, and I'm delighted to see many graduate students volunteer to work in museums, to do outreach with people, to go out in the community, and that's a development that I'm delighted about.
I've got just one more question for you before I let you go. Do you happen to have a favorite cobralte pun. I'm sure you've heard many over the years.
Okay, well, I'll tell you my oldest one. And because it's the oldest one, I know some of my friends tend to groan every time they hear it, but I'll risk that if they happen to hearest. Cobra lights are very challenging to study, as I mentioned, and because you often do not know, first of all, if it's a copralte or who produced it. So I often like to tell people that my work is challenging because when I study a copralte, I may not know who done it.
Thank you so much for joining me today, doctor Chin. Coprolites are even cooler than I expected them to be, and I had some pretty high expectations. And I am so excited to do some more reading on the amazing world of fossilized feces. And if you too would like to learn more about the who, the what, the how and the why of copralits, check out the post for this episode on our website, This podcast will Kill You dot com, where I'll link to a few papers by
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We've got a brand new episode on a brand new topic coming out next week, so until then, keep washing those hands.