The world's oldest communal toilet
Argentina is famous for its fossils, including dinosaurs, a location with many of their nests and the best record of the Triassic on Earth (see http://tinyurl.com/kzv2byl). Now the oldest communal loos have been found at los Chanares in La Rioja province, where fields of up to 30,000 coprolites testify to the animal habit of doing their business together in particular places , both for hygiene, communication about health within a herd and warning off predators.
235 million years ago in the mid-Triassic, the dominant life forms were dicynodont synapsids, animals with both mammalian and reptilian features. The animal thought to be responsible for the eight coprolite fields found so far, spaced around 1.5km apart and with a density of up to 94 coprolites per square metre, is thought to be Dinodontosaurus, due to the size of the specimens and the presence of several skeletons at the sites.
They vary from half a cm to 35cm in diameter, and occur in all shapes and sizes, from sausages to pats, varying from pale grey to violet. The fields were preserved by a layer of volcanic ash that covered them before nature recycled them to release their nutrients. They contain remnants of wood, leaves, moss, fern spores and no animal remains, proving that their source was herbivorous. The previously oldest coprolite field was a mere 10 million years old, so an important animal habit has been proved to already exist around the time of the appearance of dinosaurs and mammals.
The photo shows 2 snaps of the items in the field, and one in the lab after a clean up.
We previously covered Buckland's coprolite table and unpassed fossil dung at http://tinyurl.com/nx3cc5h and http://tinyurl.com/kvedg7f
Loz
Image credit: Scientific Reports and the authors of the paper.
Original paper free access: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/131128/srep03348/full/srep03348.html
