Researches in Argentina have found what they believe could be the world’s oldest toilet after discovering hundreds of fossilized dinosaur poops.
While a common sight in Africa where elephants and other large mammals all poop in the same place to centralize waste and cut down on parasites and infection, scientists now have 220-million-year-old proof that the practice isn’t new.
“Defecation in communal latrines is a common behaviour of extant mammals widely distributed among megaherbivores,” the scientists say in their research paper. “This behaviour has key social functions with important biological and ecological implications.
The implications of the discovery are important in figuring out how dinosaurs interacted with one another — and how they related to modern animals.
“This is the first evidence of megaherbivore communal latrines in non-mammal vertebrates, indicating that this mammal-type behaviour was present in distant relatives of mammals, and predates its previous oldest record by [220 million years],” they write.
This implies that they were herd animals, said Dr. Lucas Fiorelli, of Crilar-Conicet, who discovered the dung heaps.
“Firstly, it was important to avoid parasites – ‘you don’t poo where you eat’, as the saying goes,” Fiorelli told the BBC. “But it’s also a warning to predators. If you leave a huge pile, you are saying: ‘Hey! We are a big herd. Watch out!”
The culprit behind the poo was is the Dinodontosaurus, an eight-foot long animal analogous to a modern rhinoceros. Their main predator was the crocodile-like Luperosuchus, which is about three times as big.
There were 94 poops per square metre across an area of 900 square metres, making it one of the largest such latrines ever found.
It is unusual to find an accumulation as old as this one because feces biodegrades so quickly. In this case, the excrement was preserved by a volcanic eruption.
“When cracked open they reveal fragments of extinct plants, fungi, and gut parasites,” said Martin Hechenleitner, another author on the study told the BBC.
“Each poo is a snapshot of an ancient ecosystem — the vegetation and the food chain. This was a crucial time in evolutionary history. The first mammals were there, living alongside the grandfather of dinosaurs. Maybe with these fossils we can glimpse into the lost environment which gave rise to the dinosaurs.”