COPROLITE

Wow rockpickerforever, spectacular scenery with unique hexagonal structures like basalt columns.

Consider coal, diatomaceous limestone and perhaps Karst formations as being similar formations composed of living organisms. These are massive deposits.

Trace fossils nails the definition for RWA3006's coprolites. That answers my question stephan.

Consider this:
If one to compare the amount of feces of the average human to the average dinosaur and consider the shear volume of a dinosaur's feces output they would find that the quantity is staggering. Then relate this to fossil fuels and ask if we heat our homes with a substance heavily composed of animal excrement Certainly fossil fuels are likely a high percent vegetative matter, but could be a substantial percentage of excrement.

"In the U.S., the average life expectancy for men is about 76 years old, and for women, it is around 81 years old. Therefore, a man living to age 76 would produce about 24,320 lbs. (11,030 kg) of poop over his lifetime, and a woman living to age 81 would produce about 25,920 lbs. (11,757 kg) — so a lifetime of a woman's poop weighs about as much as three adult male hippos."

No wonder RWA3006 finds so much coprolite !
Of course conditions have to be favorable for feces to fossilize.

Say an average human weighs 175 pounds and creates 25,000 pounds of feces over 75 years. 143 times his body weight.
Say an average dinosaur weighs 10,000 pounds he may create 143 x 10,000 pounds = 1,430,000 pounds if he lived to 75.
Even if a dinosaur lives a shorter life he is going to produce extreme amounts of feces.
Certainly most of his feces was processed by some serious organisms that converted his feces into compost.
Ever walked into the small pasture of a dairy farm where a farmer holds his cattle for milking ? talk about needing waders.
Certainly dinosaurs had social areas where they herded together and created great masses of feces.
Add super high temperatures and humidity and consider the stench and increased metabolisms of the living organisms related to breaking down such massive amounts of feces. Related diseases...dino diarrhea OMG, giant 5 foot hard balls due to constipation extruded from a 100 ton dinosaur rolling down a mountain slope at high speed and crashing thru your house ! Or those giant dino birds exhausting say 300 gallons from 3000 feet in the sky. Bird poop is extremely intense chemically. The impact of dino feces may have changed the entire world. Not to be overly dramatic but these are things of nightmares.

related article

www.quora.com/What-s-the-world-record-for-largest-dump-ever-taken-by-a-human

"From this perspective, whales aren't just gardeners, but geoengineers as well. Marine biologist Trish Lavery of Australia's Flinders University estimated that defecation by the Southern Ocean's sperm whales ultimately sequesters some 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year. Prior to their commercial whaling decline, that population alone would have accounted for about roughly the amount emitted by one decent-sized coal-fired power plant."

Is this possible ?



check out this guy's putrid expression



This is

RWA3006's coprolites are without doubt one of the most interesting fossilized items rockpickerforever.
I can't help but believe that dino poop must have been incredibly large.
Perhaps the fossilizing process requires a large specimen to start with and the end product is much smaller.

In the case of mass silicifications like coral down this way the bigger the coral the less chance of it silicifying completely.
The smaller silicifications by far yield more gemmy well silicified specimens.

It seems denser harder materials have a better chance of fossilizing like bone/wood/coral, etc.
Dino poop seems way on the soft end and seems to be on the rare end of the spectrum.

The largest coprolites I've found so far are about the size of a 20 gallon tank. They appear as boulders lodged in steep rocky ravines which discouraged any notions I had of getting them to the truck. I often find broken large ones and it's interesting that they are usually devoid of the beautiful colors and contrasts that I love in smaller specimens. The best colors and patterns seem most prevalent in the sizes ranging from egg to grapefruit size.

I fancy that the texture of the original poo was very coarse and prolific ... much like that shot of the rhino, but on a grander scale. Many of us have heard the phrase "eat like a horse" and it comes from agricultural culture where people who were around horses and cows were well aware of the fact that horses, not being ruminants like cows, required substantially more feed than cows to derive their energy.

I have no idea what kind of digestive tract these hadrosaurs had, but we do know that the variety of their buffet options was quite limited. Most of the literature I've read indicates that primitive plants like conifers, ferns, etc. were dominant and if you can imagine a diet of conifer boughs you can conclude that the texture might have been like the stuff you see shooting out of a chipper/shredder. Take into account that these critters had crude peg-like teeth and it adds to the hypothesis that the material being swallowed was very coarse.

I suspect that the vibrant colors and spider webbing in the sub grapefruit sized specimens are due to them drying out and forming large cracks before whatever burial event covered them up. I think these inconsistencies provided opportunity for the concentration of silica from the ancient beach gravels they were entombed in. It's obvious these coprolites are eroding from a strata of beach gravel and petrified banks of beach sand. When I get a little time I'll post photos relating to these ideas ...

Copralite really present a lot of investigative opportunities about these monsters of the past. Especially if the piles are somewhat in order. Florida is loaded with well preserved fossils and has almost zero tectonic activity allowing many finds that are closely in tact as they were long ago. This may be the case with your hunting grounds. You mentioned the strata and this is telling. The thunder egg like shape seems to insinuate a shape akin to something related to it's fossilization perhaps.

Anyway it is fun to assume the why and whats of particular fossils. You are fortunate enough to see them as found in nature. Collectors are often overlooked for their findings yet they often know more about a given fossil than any well educated geologist. So you do find larger specimens and they are of lower quality but this is important. Betcha there are clues that would lead to important discoveries about dinosaurs.

There is a big difference in the quality of the silicification in many types of fossils depending on their size.
The diatomaceous silica found in limestone can be quite soluble and available in large amount allowing large silicifications.
I would guess the silica involved in making copralite would be volcanic ash. Your imagination must run wild knowing such large and dangerous creatures were crawling all over the areas you collect at. Like finding large shark's teeth while swimming in a river.

In the above photo there are dozens of coprolites in the foreground. They are hard to differentiate in this photo but if you were walking among the stones they would be easily identifiable.

Here's a couple of coprolite slabs. What do you see?