WHAT ARE COPROLITES?

Bernard O'Connor 2001

The word coprolite was coined in 1828 by Rev. William Buckland, professor of Botany at Oxford University. It came from the Greek word 'kopros' meaning dung and 'lithos' meaning stone and was used to describe fossilised droppings. Although the academics got it right, it was rarely spelt correctly by local people and census enumerators. Local accent and dialect gave rise to twelve different recorded spellings!!! They were coproilite, copperlight,  copper light, copperlite, coupperlite, copralite, corporolite, coprelite, coperalite, coperlite, coparlite and coprolithe. There were also three other spellings for fossil - fossle, fosel, and fossel.

When Rev. John Henslow discovered a fossil bed in the Red Crag at Felixstow on the southeast Suffolk coast in the summer of 1842 he described the long, brown and smooth objects as coprolites. Rich in phosphate they were a valuable raw material in Great Britain's manure industry for the manufacture of superphosphate, the world's first artificial fertiliser. They were mined from opencast pits between 1846 and the turn of the century. Similar fossil beds were exploited from the base of the Upper and Lower Greensand in parts of Essex, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Kent, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Locals thought they were fossilised droppings of dinosaurs, fish, lizards, bears and even wildebeest.

Whilst some are the fossilised contents of intestines or rectums, flat-bottomed lumps have been found which resemble sun-dried droppings that splashed onto sand. However, the bulk of the deposit included the teeth, bones and claws of such dinosaurs as dakosaurus, dinotosaurus, craterosaurus, megalosaurus, scelidosaurus and iguanodon. There were also remains of marine reptiles like ichthyosaurus, pliosaurus and plesiosaurus as well as the bird pterodactyl. There were fossils of shark, whale, dolphin, walrus, crocodile, turtle, crayfish, crabs, rays, fish and a host of marine organisms. The most common was ammonite - a member of the squid family but the dominant species were molluscs with barnacles, brachiopods, cirripedes, corals, crinoids, echinoids, foraminifera, ostracoda, polyzoa and sponges. Land animals including elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bear, deer, horse, tapir, armadillo, hyena, beaver, pig and ox were also found in the diggings as well as unrecognisable lumps of inorganic phosphate.