Friday scatblogging – gold in that thar dinoscat

A dinosaur coprolite, a mere 130 million years old, sold Wednesday for $960 at auction in New York City, more than twice the starting price of $450.

Buyer Steve Tsengas of Fairport Harbor, Ohio, owns OurPets, a company that sells products to treat dog and cat waste.

Tsengas bought the dung in hopes of motivating his employees and using it as a marketing tool by displaying it at the company's booth at trade shows, he said.

“Poop,” he said, “is a big business in the pet industry.”

No shit?

And, that coprolite looks like petrified wood. I’m even wondering if you couldn’t cut it with a fine-grade masonry saw and polish it up like a flat slab of petrified wood.

Friday Crapblogging – no shit, Indians were here before Clovis

As I blogged yesterday, archaeologists now have convincing proof that American Indians were here in the “New World” at least 1,000 years before spear points were discovered at Clovis, N.M., thus settling the argument on one of the hottest issues in archaeology and anthropology in the last decade or so

The key to, and possibly the most fascinating part of, this discovery, is stuff like



That’s a coprolite, a fossilized bit of excrement, though I don’t know if this particular one is human or not.

The fascinating part is that researchers were able to get enough DNA out of a fossilized turd nearly 15,000 years ago to do radiocarbon dating on it.

It is these things that certainly make science fascinating for a professional like P.Z. Myers, aka Pharyngula. I am certainly not a professional, but definitely a science-interested and science-informed layperson.

Beyond that, consider this my opener to Friday crapblogging, for those of you tired of bloggers foisting pictures of cats upon you every week.