In a first for paleontology, scientists have found hundreds of tiny, fossilized fecal pellets crammed inside a fish braincase dating to about 9 million years ago.
The wee fossil poops, also known as coprolites, were deposited by scavengers – probably worms – that devoured the fish's decaying head, including its brain.As they munched the flesh from the skull, the worms pooped out chains and clusters of oval coprolite beads, each measuring about 0.1 inches long. Small as they were, those pellets added up over time.
When the hungry scavengers were done, they had left behind hundreds of pellets – enough poop to fill the fish's braincase entirely. Researchers found the coprolite-filled fossil at Calvert Cliffs, a site in southern Maryland that contains fossils dating from about 18 million to 8 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch.