South Africa: Ancient Poop Offers Unusual Insight Into Animal Behaviour

Ancient Poop Offers Unusual Insight Into Animal Behaviour TC_Africa: SouthAfrica

By Charles Helm

Over the past decade, our research team has identified more than 300 vertebrate tracksites in aeolianites and cemented beach deposits on the Cape south coast of South Africa. They date back to the, which started about 2.6 million years ago and ended around 11,700 years ago. But it took us a long time to realise that we shouldn't just be looking for depressions in the rock surfaces we study; we should also be on the lookout for raised features. These, it turns out, are often coprolites.

It was our first coprolite site and it was an unprecedented finding. Bovid coprolites are extremely rare and an open-air site even more so. In southern Africa, coprolites are usually found in caves and rock shelters, in scavenger dens or archaeological deposits. Remarkably, close by we found a second site, but with very different characteristics. In this case we noted about 50 small tracks on a rock surface, on which were plastered about 30 raised features, many of which were cylindrical and hollow . In the low cliffs immediately above this surface we found similar coprolites in six layers in a vertical height of 2.6cm.

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