Earth & SkyGreek → English
Coprolite
/ˈkɒprəlaɪt/noun
Fossilised faeces, studied for what an extinct animal ate.
The Greek roots
κόπρος
kópros
dung
λίθος
líthos
stone
Literally: “dung stone”
The story of the word
Buckland coined the word in 1829 after Mary Anning pointed out that the spiral stones in the Lyme Regis cliffs were droppings. He broke them open, found fish scales and small bones inside, and worked out what the ichthyosaurs had been eating, which is close to the beginning of palaeoecology. Farmers then dug the beds for phosphate: Cambridgeshire had a coprolite boom in the 1850s and 1860s, with its own railway sidings.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1829
Same family
coprophagiamonolithlithographymegalith
In a sentence
A coprolite full of bone splinters tells you the animal crushed its prey.
The museum keeps its largest coprolite in a case labelled with some care.