COPROLITE

I noticed that also, in fact I find a fair number of coprolites that do. I think it's because the void within the specimen fills with agate much the same way as a T-egg. I've concluded that many of the voids are caused by shrinking organic matter or dung beetle activity. The turd petrifies with a cavity inside and then it fills with agate in similar fashion as many other types of nodules.

Have you ever walked on a pasture where the cow chips are abundant? They almost always have a shape like a flying saucer because when they fell they went splat. If you turn a dry one over it has the reverse impression of the terrain it fell upon and that surface tends to be flattened and featureless. The top will have more "character"

Here's a dandy sauropod turd that probably had the same consistency of the bovines I used to raise.

I was thinking of posting a pie picture but you beat me to it.

Randy, silicified coral never had that brecciated appearance. It was so rigid in it's non - petrified state it never probably never experienced shinkage. The fern roots from Texas never had shrinkage fractures either as it is also quite stable in the non-petrified form. Same goes for petrified palm wood, however palm burl and tree root cavities experienced chalcedony fills without brecciation. Whatever the climate was in ancient Texas(probably hot and in some cases dry)brecciation was common in many types of petrifications including petrified soils and clays. Or perhaps tectonic forces caused becciations, don't know. Some stones were brecciated brecciations go figure, as if they petrified in a brecciated state and some force brecciated them yet again only to refill with chalcedony again.
Who knows what happened back in those days.
If hot ash landed on dino poop maybe the heat of the hot ash shrunk the poop balls. Perhaps there were quarterly eruptions that the dinosaur could survive but would cover their dung fields repeatedly. Your "stream bed" photos of poop balls reveals a repeated usage of the poop zones.
The foliage during the dino age was so diverse. There are barely a dozen species of palms in North America. In Texas alone collectors have found over 400 species of fossil palms. Half the petrifications I found in Texas did not even appear to be wood but some strange non-woody vascular plant species. Emphasis - lots of biological diversification back then.
When the settlers first arrived in south Texas it was covered with vast forests of palms. It did not take man long to remove the useless palms and convert it to grazing lands. It is now common to find 1-5-10-larger acre monoculture patches of opuntia cactus 6 feet tall. Let's just say it was enough heavy cactus to feed plenty of dinosaurs. It is bizarre to see so much heavy vascular plant mass in one place. I considered what it would be like to bulldoze to a pile an acre of solid opuntia cactus 6 feet tall being that they are full of pasty liquid. It is easy to grow cherry tomatoes here that produce so many tomatoes that the tractor loses all traction when plowing them down. Crushed tomatoes can generate a lot of slick paste.
Just saying the dino's diet could have been real diverse.

Are there other fossils and particularly fossil sauropod bones in the the area where the coprolites are found ? It would seem likely. An article described how vertebrae were the most common bones found which makes sense considering how incredibly long their tails and giraffe like necks are. Considering horsetail must have grown at least 50 feet tall they needed a long reach for reaching tree foliage. Some of them are massive creatures. There had to be a serious food source and serious loads of large diameter waste.

NPR steps in it.

www.npr.org/2023/11/24/1198908684/dinosaurs-fossilized-poop-utah-dung-beetles-jurassic-park

TURD TUESDAY

Looks like flat bread pizza