Posted on Categories Discover Magazine
Rosary, fir tree and bump-headed lace… you might think those classifications refer to different shapes of seeds or butterfly wing color patterns, or something else that inspires a touch of poetry. Nope. We’re talking excrement.
Researchers working with hundreds of samples of fossilized feces — coprolites — from a site in Spain were able to reconstruct a rare picture of biodiversity within a freshwater wetlands system more than 125 million years ago.
Coprolites are not uncommon in t