An Ancient Croc Stepped in Poop and Created a Portal to the Past – Atlas Obscura
Thirty-three million years ago, give or take, a crocodile stood on a shallow riverbank in what s now Vietnam and took a dump. Then, it stepped in its own poop, leaving imprints of its long scaly fingers stamped on the turd, which was enveloped by the soft muddy ground and eventually became a fossil. To bring this ancient scene into focus, scientists had to push a car through a muddy coalfield, pop into an enclosure at a crocodile farm, and contemplate the difference, print-wise, between a foot and a penis.
The fossil itself just looks like a piece of poop, but made out of rock. It s a couple inches long and vaguely American-football-shaped; to the untrained eye, the crocodilian footprint is barely visible. But if you hold a lot of shit, says Kazim Halaçlar, the lead author of an upcoming paper describing the fossil, you notice something different.
The glamorous life of scientists.