(Image credit: Photo courtesy of the Calvert Marine Museum ) Notice the feeding gouge marks on the sides of the cylindrical burrows. In addition to the fecal-stuffed skull, the scientists also examined other coprolite pellet deposits that were clustered in sandy sediments, stuck to fossilized snail and bivalve shells, and grouped around preserved barnacles at the site.įossilized crocodile poop, broken open showing the burrows made by one or more kinds of poop-eating organism. The skull belonged to the fish Astroscopus countermani, a type of bottom-dwelling ambush predator commonly known as a stargazer, and small, oblong coprolite pellets such as these are known collectively as Coprulus oblongus. Researchers found the coprolite-filled fossil at Calvert Cliffs, a site in southern Maryland that contains fossils dating from about 18 million to 8 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch. When the hungry scavengers were done, they had left behind hundreds of pellets - enough poop to fill the fish's braincase entirely. Small as they were, those pellets added up over time. As they munched the flesh from the skull, the worms pooped out chains and clusters of oval coprolite beads, each measuring about 0.1 inches (2.5 millimeters) long.
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