Warsaw July 10 : It has recently come to light that a group of researchers found fossilized poop of a dinosaur ancestor known as a coprolite, in the village of Krasiej\u00f3w, Poland. What’s really mind-blowing is the fact that these researchers found the first-ever 230 million-year-old beetle species inside the poop after scanning it.<\/p>\n
The findings of the study conducted by researchers were published last week in the journal Current Biology. “We didn’t know how insects looked in the Triassic period and now we have the chance,” says Martin Fik\u00e1\u010dek, an entomologist at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan and a co-author of the paper in a press release.<\/p>\n
He further added, “maybe, when many more coprolites are analyzed, we will find that some groups of reptiles produced coprolites that are not really useful, while others have coprolites full of nicely preserved insects that we can study.<\/p>\n
We simply need to start looking inside coprolites to get at least some idea.”<\/p>\n
These newly discovered beetle species have been named “Triamyxa coprolithica’, which refers to its Triassic age. The name indicates that the beetle species belong to the suborder Myxophaga–whose modern rep-resentatives are small and live on algae in wet environments. This was also found in a coprolite.<\/p>\n
Researchers scanned the coprolite with the help of synchrotron microtomography at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. The method makes it easier for researchers to visualize internal structures in fossils in three dimensions with great contrast and resolution.<\/p>\n
“There are heaps of things you can study based on fossilized droppings but it had been hard to understand what to do with it, hard to recognize what is inside, and hard to draw conclusions from it, but now there are tons of data,” says Qvarnstr\u00f6m. “The ultimate goal is to use the coprolite data to reconstruct ancient food webs and see how they changed across time.”<\/p>\n