Step into the quirky and captivating realm of the Poozeum, where fossilized feces are not only objects of curiosity but also a cultural phenomenon reshaping our understanding of natural history. Guiding you through this journey is your host Ayla Sparks and Coprolite Captain George Frandsen, who boasts an extraordinary repository of over 8,000 coprolites and holds two Guinness World records.
💩 Unveiling the Secrets of Fossilized Droppings
These coprolites aren't your garden-variety rocks; they're fossilized droppings that offer a unique glimpse into the diets and lifestyles of ancient earthlings. In this episode, we delve into George's remarkable journey—from his first encounter with a coprolite to his ascent as a world record holder.
🦕 VIP's (Very Important Poops)
Witness the transformation of this unparalleled collection from a digital marvel to a dynamic traveling exhibit, breathing new life into museum halls and captivating audiences of all ages. Prepare to be amazed by the tales of these fossil VIPs (Very Important Poops), from specimens bearing evidence of shark bites to the largest coprolite fossil in the world.
🏆 Securing a Guinness World Record...of Feces!
George shares the meticulous process behind earning a coveted spot in the Guinness World Records and extends an open invitation to explore the Poozeum's offerings. Whether you're a seasoned natural history enthusiast or simply someone who appreciates the educational and unconventional, this episode promises a story unlike any other.
Episode Links
Poozeum website: https://poozeum.com
Turtle Shell Impression in a Coprolite by Godfrey, Weems, and Palmer: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10420940.2017.1386662?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Poozeum Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Poozeum
Curator's Choice - A podcast for history nerds and museum lovers
Step into the quirky and captivating realm of the Poozeum, where fossilized feces are not only objects of curiosity but also a cultural phenomenon reshaping our understanding of natural history. Guiding you through this journey is your host Ayla Sparks and Coprolite Captain George Frandsen, who boasts an extraordinary repository of over 8,000 coprolites and holds two Guinness World records.
💩 Unveiling the Secrets of Fossilized Droppings
These coprolites aren't your garden-variety rocks; they're fossilized droppings that offer a unique glimpse into the diets and lifestyles of ancient earthlings. In this episode, we delve into George's remarkable journey—from his first encounter with a coprolite to his ascent as a world record holder.
🦕 VIP's (Very Important Poops)
Witness the transformation of this unparalleled collection from a digital marvel to a dynamic traveling exhibit, breathing new life into museum halls and captivating audiences of all ages. Prepare to be amazed by the tales of these fossil VIPs (Very Important Poops), from specimens bearing evidence of shark bites to the largest coprolite fossil in the world.
🏆 Securing a Guinness World Record...of Feces!
George shares the meticulous process behind earning a coveted spot in the Guinness World Records and extends an open invitation to explore the Poozeum's offerings. Whether you're a seasoned natural history enthusiast or simply someone who appreciates the educational and unconventional, this episode promises a story unlike any other.
Episode Links
Poozeum website: https://poozeum.com
Turtle Shell Impression in a Coprolite by Godfrey, Weems, and Palmer: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10420940.2017.1386662?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Poozeum Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Poozeum
Curator's Choice - A podcast for history nerds and museum lovers
But then when you share that a coprolite isn't just a funny fossil. It actually tells us about prehistoric animal diets, what the animal ate. We can tell you have a big dinosaur bone. That's neat and looks cool, but it doesn't tell you the story that coprolites do.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Aila Sparks and this is Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers, from ancient relics to modern marvels. Each episode of the show features a new museum and a Curator's Choice of some amazing artifacts housed there. These guardians of history will share insights, anecdotes and the often untold stories that breathe life into the artifacts they protect. Thanks for tuning in to this mighty Oak Media production and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of Curator's Choice. Today on the show, I'm excited to share an interview from my days at the Calvert Marine Museum, featuring a topic that's sure to get your curiosity flowing.
Speaker 2:The Poo Zee-um. That's right, folks. It's a museum dedicated to preserving, protecting and, yes, even celebrating fossilized feces, also known as coprolites. Joining us on this delightfully quirky journey is none other than George Fransden, the mastermind behind this virtual coprolite resource center. With an impressive collection boasting over 8,000 specimens and not one, but two Guinness World Records, george is the ultimate poop connoisseur Prepare to delve into the fascinating world of paleontology as we uncover the tales told by these peculiar fossils. We explore the valuable insights coprolites can offer on ancient ecosystems, dietary habits and dinosaur behavior, from poop-munching insects and fossilized bite marks to the largest coprolite in the world. The Poo Zee-um invites us to marvel at the wonders of natural history in ways you never imagined. One poop sample at a time. Without further ado, let's jump right in with George. So you have the largest personal collection of coprolites of anyone in the world. Is that right? That is correct.
Speaker 1:Now, if that's not the coolest title you know you aspire to things when you're young.
Speaker 2:You've made it.
Speaker 1:You know you've made it. When Guinness is reaching out saying, yes, you do have the largest collection of fossilized poop in the world. You really need nothing else.
Speaker 2:Just at the top of anything, whenever you're introducing yourself to new people, just have a business card with the Guinness title right there. I mean like here you go.
Speaker 1:Look, I don't know what you are CEO. You know rock star sports player? Look, I collect fossilized poo and they're usually really jealous.
Speaker 2:And rightfully so. So how did you get started collecting fossilized poop?
Speaker 1:That's a good question. Like I said, I grew up in Utah, which has a very rich fossil record. Right, there are literally fossils everywhere you can go. Break a you know part, some rocks, you'll find little invertebrate seashells and critters and whatnot. But in Salt Lake Valley and kind of everywhere around fossils everything from those to dinosaur bones, of course. So I did a lot of hiking, camping, just being outdoors, and that was kind of my environment. Went to dinosaur national monument as a young kid. You see these dinosaurs in the rock and it's like, yes, that's very cool. But I think a lot of young people are kind of like that. They're drawn to dinosaurs and they're a fantastic thing to be interested in.
Speaker 2:And Jurassic Park sure helped.
Speaker 1:Jurassic Park definitely helped. Years went by and I'm into fossils, I'm into prehistoric life and spending time out doing that kind of stuff in Utah and when I was 18, I went out to a rock and fossil shop in Moab one of the neatest rock and fossil shops in the United States. Been around forever. I'm looking around at all the neat stuff and there's this little, maybe, like you know, two inch, three inch long turd looking thing and it says Carpherlite on. And I didn't know what that was. I had never heard that term. I had no idea what fossilized poop existed. I asked the guy what is this? And he says that's a Carpherlite, it's fossilized poop. You're kidding, You're joking. He said no, it's a thing, it's a real fossil.
Speaker 1:My mind was blown. It was instant. You know when you meet somebody and you have an instant connection and you know that's your person. It was like that. But with this fossilized turd right, this poop, and it was about 20 bucks and I have to have it and I didn't have much money then. So $20 was a lot of money and I spent every bit of it to buy this and I loved it.
Speaker 1:I went and learned everything I could about it. I also had a prehistoric life class at the college at the same time, because it was super fascinating. So I learned more about it, I talked to my professors about it and where I could find it. I learned, learned and then, oh, I'm going to go out in the field and look for it because maybe I've been missing it. So I didn't know it existed, because nobody talks about it. They talk about trilobites, they talk about dinosaur bones, convertibrit fossils, but they don't talk about these great copper lights. And that was it. That was 25 years ago. Since then, I have somehow accumulated over 7,000 individual specimens in my collection and they're all photographed, they're all labeled, I have details on all of them and I had to create a database to track them, and that's that's how, how I got into it.
Speaker 2:Before you know it, you're over there collecting everything you can get your hands on.
Speaker 1:It was and it was anything, anything fossilized poop related. It did a matter for this fantastic small big. I just I wanted it in my collection.
Speaker 2:So we've said it a few times copper light is fossilized poop. Why is it so special, and what conditions need to be present in order for copper light to even form?
Speaker 1:Okay. So copper lights and fossilized dung of animals or poop of animals. It doesn't smell, it's as hard as rock and it usually has this form of the poop when it was made fresh, but now it's a stone form. Most copper lights have a mineral composition of phosphates, calcium and silicates. That's what kind of made them fossilized. How do they get that way?
Speaker 1:So an animal, it's very rare. I, you know, I have a ton of them. So, as people say, well, these must be very prevalent, they must be out there and they're not. They're, they're still very rare.
Speaker 1:Because what has to happen is an animal has to poop right, which that's that's very common, a lot of poop out there. It has to poop, go into a sediment, a soft sediment, and be covered quickly, has to be hidden from the elements, has to be hidden from predators and covered quickly, thank you. And in that sediment it will fossilize over time. So it's rough, because copper lights are soft so they easily break up and things happen to them. So it's a very delicate situation. A lot of them come from marshy areas, which used to be marshy areas, where it's kind of just swampy and the water is would have been very calm and it takes millions of years for it to fossilize up to. I have some from Florida which could be just over 10,000 years. Anything less than that starts getting real sketchy. You really gotta watch some of this newer stuff that you pull up in places like Florida that it could be fresh or maybe only hundreds of years old or a few thousand years old.
Speaker 2:When you said that it has to be buried in the sand and sediment, away from where predators can see it. I think some people might kind of be like what? There's like these animals out there eating poop? Yes, there actually is. There are animals that specific diet is feces, and I don't know if this is the proper term, but I think fecavore is a great term that we should all start using.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. We can do it and you know why and we know how. We know this is because there are copper lights and there's a magnificent one up at your museum and I hope you've seen it. It was maybe a crocodilian copper light of some kind and a prehistoric tiger shark came and took a bite out of it and left perfect teeth impressions on this and then let it go, and there's a term for that, If we want to say it it's aborted caprophagy. So it's, the prophagy is eating poop and you get it aborted to stop. So it tries it, it thinks it's something fantastic, it thinks it's a snack, takes a bite and finds out it isn't released as it falls down and the muck becomes fossilized.
Speaker 1:There was that was the first real one that was ever studied, by Dr Godfrey in history, I believe and shortly after that other started popping up. I have a few in the Pusin's collection. I have one that's actually about the size of it, like a hostess pie, like a cherry pie, and imagine if you were to take your teeth and take a bite into the side of it but not go through the whole thing, then release it. So you see this perfect round impression of the top and bottom teeth, on top on one side, bottom on the other, of this turd and then it fossilizes without this piece breaking off, with each tooth represented in it. That exists, so we know, that's there. And now I think there's probably up to about eight or 10s examples of bitten copper lights out there Very rare there, as Dr Godfrey has the best.
Speaker 2:You have all these really amazing examples and you have created the Pusin. So why don't you tell people what is the Pusin?
Speaker 1:All right, let me give some background on the Pusin so people can kind of understand where I was. So there I was, young person coming up trying to learn about copper lights, and I wasn't. Paleontology did not end up being my degree. I actually went into archeology, anthropology, and then I went into something completely different so I didn't have a lot of access to academic portals where I could go get that information. So I became really frustrated at the amount of publicly available information for copper lights and at the time I got to travel a lot for work so I'd go to these museums all across the United States and I'd get all excited to go to these natural history museums to go look at their fossilized poop. And there's enough. That's like well, these are the most fantastic fossils in the whole world. They tell us so much about prehistoric life, how can there not be one at the museum? I know they have them. Why aren't they out? They're not. They weren't anyway. But I was as upset. And then you go into the internet and there wasn't much there and you'd really have to find specific academic papers on the subject, which is hard and a lot of those. They cost money and if I have money I'm gonna spend it on a turd. I'm not gonna spend it to read somebody's research, unless it's very special. So there I go. I have all these collections, this big collection, and so I thought you know what I'm gonna do. I am gonna make this one stop shop for fossilized poop. I'm gonna use pieces from my collection as examples, as the exhibit. I'm going to have games. I'm gonna have stuff for young people, older people, I'm going to have research papers that were free for people to read, all in one spot so you could go here and just read everything you wanted to know about fossilized poop. So this exhibit, these old fashioned pictures, everything you could put together on fossilized poop, was at this Puseum. Very, very cool, I thought, and it started to pick up some traction over the next year Not huge.
Speaker 1:And then in 2015 is when Guinness, we did the Guinness count of the collection and it was recognized as the largest collection in the world. It was featured in the book. So we just missed the deadline for the 2016 book. So it was actually in the 2017 book and they actually did pictures and it was in it and it was amazing. And it blew up. The Puseum just went nuts and, which was great. People were visiting and learning all about fossilized poop and it became a fun thing. And I don't know if it was because of this, I don't think so. I think it just culture kind of gravitated towards something new and exciting to bring it to the public, and fossilized poop started showing up at museums. People were going to the Puseum website and whatnot, and that's how it started. It started as a strictly online resource center After the Guinness count and ever since then it's been a traveling exhibit.
Speaker 1:So what I do is I take if they want all of them, great. If they want just a nice selection of a variety of copper lexical, I will work with museums to donate these fossilized poops to them for free so they can exhibit them. So everybody in that area can see fossilized poop, and usually when they do it, it's the largest fossilized poop exhibit in the world. Wherever it goes, it's that it's neat. I'll give it to them for free, for it will decide on amount of time. It's three months, six months, a year, whatever. All they have to do is have safe display cases. They're responsible for making the tags and whatnot. I'll give them the information for each piece. They have to ensure the exhibit. They have to ensure the pieces, which is a whole other thing about getting a turd insured. That's. That is not easy.
Speaker 2:I will tell you right now, I can't even imagine.
Speaker 1:So you can insure the agents like wait, you want to insure what?
Speaker 1:Yeah, in my line of, I'll say, in this passion and this I don't want to say hobby, because it's much more than that you learn rejection real good and we're like when you try to get a turd insured, a fossilized poop insured, you hear, know a lot. In fact, when we did the Guinness count, I can't tell you how many times I was turned down or people laughed or didn't even respond when I said, hey, we're looking for a public place to have a copperlight count for Guinness World Records, and they thought it was a joke and they just flat out said, no, this is not something we're interested in. But back to it. So we make these great exhibits, they travel around to all these neat museums that are interested in what's really cool. This is what I love about it.
Speaker 1:Other than people learn about copperlights, they get to see them. It's a great revenue generator or it can be for the museum, because they're not out anything. They're out the cost of labels, they're out maybe a little bit on insurance, but they don't have to pay for the exhibit and they put out news releases about this new exhibit they're gonna have and all these different news outlets come and write articles on and it sends people to their museum and if it's free, great, they just have more people. If it's a museum where they charge for tickets, they get extra revenue based on this, because it's a funny news story in the community and I love that.
Speaker 1:The museum is helping these museums do that and it's helping get these little funny fossils out there in the world. So that's what the museum is now. It also has the website where you can go learn everything you wanna know about copperlights. It also has this exhibit piece to it right now. Currently, some of the VIPs very important poops are at the Orlando Science Center and it's a fantastic exhibit. It's by the restrooms in their dinosaur hall. So it's pretty amazing. It's pretty neat.
Speaker 2:I think it's a fantastic thing that you do. I love it and I appreciate what you said and how kind of like culturally, it seems that they're looking for something new and something exciting. And I think it's one of those things where people are excited about dinosaurs, people are excited about the fossils that they have, but nobody talks about fossilized poo. Everybody knows what poo is, but this whole idea is just so new and so fun and fresh and people can be like, oh, that's so gross, but inside they really enjoy it and I think it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we do at the museum we do chess packs, which is for every fourth grader in the whole county comes through the museum and we have education programs that we walk them through. And we have a fossil cart when we're doing our fossil section of it and I have a crocodile copperlight there and for every single group that comes through I pass around the fossils and I'm like, oh, can you tell what this one is? They have every student hold on to it and then they pass it along the line and everybody's giving guesses and at the very end I'm like, could anybody figure out what this one is? That's my favorite fossil and all the kids are like no, what is it? What is it? And I'm like this is fossilized poo and they just lose their minds and it's just super fun. Everyone's like ew, you touched poo. You touched it too. But it's great because then it opens up this exciting pathway to talk about. This is why it's important. This is what we can learn from it, and so it's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so funny to see young people light up and some older people light up. But then when you share that a copperlight isn't just a funny fossil. It actually tells us about prehistoric animal diets. What the animal ate, we can tell. You can look through and sometimes they're on the surface and they're like I can identify that bone or that tooth. And no, that was from like, for example, a pycnodont fish from the Jurassic. So we know it ate that fish. That's awesome. It talks about behaviors, just like we talked about with the bite marks and whatnot. It talks about prehistoric environments.
Speaker 1:There's a situation there's some copperlates that were found out in Southern Utah that actually had rotted wood through them. So they start looking a little further and they found crayfish and crab parts too. So they learned that there was hadrosaur poop, because there are hadrosaur bones all around that we always thought of as this great herbivore dinosaur Only eight plants. We learned that. Well, wait, hold on. We learned from its poop that it would also go and eat this rotted wood because it had this little protein nuggets in it of these little crustaceans, which is awesome. So it tells us a little bit about that environment. So, yes, I think they're much cooler than say, just have a big dinosaur bone. That's neat and looks cool, but it doesn't tell you the story that copperlates do.
Speaker 2:Speaking of stories told by poop, I have an amazing example of this to share with you. This is from Steven Godfrey, the curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum. Earlier in the show, george has mentioned the rarity of bitten copper lights and that Steven has one of the best examples. I interviewed Steven for this podcast years ago, in episode 10, about this exact fossil and, shamelessly, I am going to include an excerpt of that episode here so you can hear Steven talking about this amazing bitten fossil.
Speaker 3:The most unusual copper lights because you'll notice, on the surface they're tooth impressions. So since they're an impression, it's a negative. So something bit this their tooth impressions on both sides. So some animal bit the fresh feces. They were still pliable and soft and so its teeth penetrated into the body of the fecal mass, but it decided not to eat it Now because this is a negative. What I did was, around the perimeter of the tooth impressions built a little clay wall barrier and then I took some liquid molding and casting compounds, some silicon rubber, and I poured it into the space that was made by the little plaster scene barrier that went around the tooth impressions. And 24 hours later, after it had cured, I peeled out the silicon rubber. That showed me the shape of the teeth that penetrated into the feces. So the feces were bitten by a shark.
Speaker 3:Now here's the kicker. Some people think that, or if you just don't know, you don't know, but you might think that all sharks have the same shape teeth. But in fact you can tell what kind of shark you have by the shape of the tooth. Different kinds of sharks have different kinds of shaped teeth and that really helps sharks feed on a whole variety of different kinds of things because they have different teeth that are specialized for doing different things. Some are like forks, some are like hammers and some are like cutting knives, and so from the shape of the teeth that are preserved in the feces, we can tell that it's from one kind of tiger shark that lived here during the Mayan Sea. What do modern tiger sharks tell us about what they eat? Well, modern tiger sharks will bite things to assess their palatability. Is this something I want to eat? And if they decide to eat it, they'll eat it, and if they don't want to eat it, they won't eat it.
Speaker 3:So obviously, when this tiger shark bit the feces, I am not going to eat this. I've got standards. I will eat Modern tiger sharks. In their stomachs of modern tiger sharks have been found rubber tires, essence plates, cool rags, tom Tom drums, chicken cubes all kinds of things have been found. Pieces of them have been found in the stomachs of tiger sharks. But one thing that's never been found in the stomach of a tiger shark are feces. So they are not copper phagic animals. They will not ingest feces. And so obviously this tiger shark bit the feces but didn't eat it.
Speaker 3:Because the impressions would not have survived passage through the digestive system and being voided by the tiger shark. When I was first shown this fossil, I thought this is the most amazing and unlikely fossil that I am to see in my professional career. I'm never likely going to see another fossil that is so unusual, but as I was looking at these I noticed that it puzzled me as to why the tooth impressions were different on the two sides. So on one side the teeth really penetrate deeply into the feces and on the flip side they are only these shallow little tooth impressions. So I imagine that after the saltwater crocodile voided into the ocean, the feces are floating around. The tiger shark swims up, bites it.
Speaker 3:I would expect, if that's how it had happened, that the teeth in the upper and lower jaws would have equally penetrated into the body of the feces, but they didn't. I was thinking well, is there any other way of explaining this disparity in terms of how the teeth penetrated into the feces? And it dawned on me that maybe the feces weren't floating through the water, maybe they were still within the body of the crocodile and the tiger shark plowed into it, its teeth penetrating differentially to the upper and lower teeth. Some teeth went in much further, through the abdominal wall of the shark, through the intestines, and impressed the teeth penetrating into the feces. And then the other side of the jaw didn't impress us as far and the saltwater crocodile was disemboweled.
Speaker 3:The feces were not ingested, they sank to the bottom, were covered with sediment and again about 15 million years later were found by Dougie Douglas, the fishable collector, who brought them to my office when I first saw this fossil because it was so unbelievably unlikely that this would ever be preserved. That's a really neat story, but some of what I enjoy about paleontology is that we get to tell stories, we get to tell scenarios. Now, I'm not saying that that part of paleontology is strict science. It's using our imagination to help us picture what might have happened, and that's the artistic side of paleontology which I love.
Speaker 2:Now back to our story. I had just told George I found him through his book. That's actually how I found you is. We had the Universal Copperlight Day at the Museum and I was like, well, I want to find some books and learn a little bit more about copperlight. There are not many, unfortunately, but yours is on there, Copperlight of the World by George Franson, and I got it and it's so cool. It has all these fantastic pictures of different kinds of copperlight and some of my favorite ones. There's one in here that has the bright purple. It's actually a very pretty poop. It's from the one from Florida and it just has this gorgeous purple in it. And another one has it's turned into fools gold, so it's literally a golden turd.
Speaker 2:Yes it's so cool. So, I love it. Why don't you tell us what some of your favorite copperlights and I know that's asking a lot because you have so many, but if you have to pick like two that were your favorite that's really hard.
Speaker 1:It's like which, which leg do you like better? Which puppy do you like better? And they're all amazing. I love them all. They each tell a really neat story individually, but I'm going to tell you about it's my newest favorite that was just discovered Lyme Regis, england, which is the South Coast of England. It's the same place where Marianning seashells by the seashore woman would go hunting for fossils back in the 1820s and 30s and she was really key in the development of copperlight knowledge. So the same coast. There's still fossil hunting going on there and it's. It's such a fun place to look for fossils because if you don't go get them, the tide will wash them away forever. So they really want you to go pick them up.
Speaker 1:This guy I know, mike Harrison, who hunts fossils all the time, does fossil tours and whatnot. He found this little two inch it's nearly about two inch fossilized poop. It's not significant because you can find them, but this one had a distinct impression of an ammonite in it and an ammonite is like a cephalopod. It has this very pretty spiraled shell and imagine like a squid coming out. That's kind of what it is. But this shell landed right on this poop, the soft poop and it left a perfect impression in it and it is so fantastic.
Speaker 1:I've never seen something like this happen before. There's one other one, and it actually has a turtle shell in it and that's not mine, that's actually up at your museum with the turtle shell impression, which is very awesome. But this one has an ammonite impression in it. It's perfect, and somewhere along the near 200 million years since it was made, the ammonite came off from it and it still was fossilized, so that one was discovered, I think, two weeks ago, and it arrived at the museum last week, and so that is one of my favorite, because it's just so rare, so awesome that these two things interacted in the way they did, leaving this little story to tell 200 million years later.
Speaker 2:I couldn't resist sharing more about the fascinating turtle shell coprolite George mentioned earlier. So this coprolite shows a mold of a hatchling turtle partial shell or carapace. This coprolite was expelled some 60 to 70 million years ago in South Carolina and it is the first known specimen in the world to preserve a vertebrate body impression. The coprolite was collected from a lag deposit containing a mix of different vertebrate species, including specimens from the Cretaceous, the Paleocene and Plioplistocene periods. The researchers concluded that the small turtle shell, only about 2 and 1 half inches in length, was from a juvenile turtle. Due to its convenient snack size and signs of breakage in the shell, they believed that the turtle was consumed and the impression formed while the feces was still inside the predator's body.
Speaker 2:But which predator? According to Stephen and his team, considering the size of the coprolite and the known predators in the area, possibilities include a mosasaur, a very large bird, or a theropod dinosaur like a T-rex. It is unlikely to have been crocodilian, as their highly acidic stomachs typically dissolve bone, especially the delicate bones of baby turtles. Another intriguing detail from the paper is that the feces taper immediately beyond the turtle shell impression, indicating that the cloacal aperture was stretched more than usual during expulsion, meaning some effort was required. Now, if you would like to read more, I will include this article, written by Stephen and his team, in the show notes. Now back to George and his all-time favorite, coprolite.
Speaker 1:My favorite coprolite, I think, in the world is named Barnum and some of the real special ones get names. This one is named Barnum and it is the world's largest fossilized boot by Guinness. It is a T-rex coprolite and we know it's a T-rex coprolite because of its size it's about 26 inches long, seven inches wide and it's filled with crushed bones right. So it's found in South Dakota where other T-rexes have been discovered near T-rex fossils, and because of the timeframe where it was found this Hell Creek. We know there were T-rexes there and T-rexes were the only carnivores, theropods, that were big enough to make this exquisite boot.
Speaker 1:You know it's this huge thing. It's still in. It's gonna live in a cast this you know. The fossil cast its whole life. But again, it tells this really neat story. It's my favorite dinosaur. It was named after Barnum Brown, who was the paleontologist who discovered T-rex, and PT Barnum, who was the great showman, the circus man, and actually Barnum Brown, they say, was named after PT Barnum. So I just thought what a perfect name for this great fossilized poop, because Barnum is gonna go to all these museums and be seen, have his own little show where people can see him and be excited by him. I think it's a very proper and fitting name, so he's it is my favorite.
Speaker 2:That's the one that's actually on the cover of the book.
Speaker 1:It is on the cover of the book. My favorite gets the cover.
Speaker 2:As it should. So another thing I wanted to ask you you had a bit of an issue when you were trying to get the Guinness count. What's the story behind that?
Speaker 1:So back in 2014, when I wanted to get Guinness to count this turd collection. So they have these rules where you have to have the count has to be held in a public place, you have to have two experts examine every one of them, it has to be video, it has to be photographed. Each specimen has to be photographed with all the information on it. So there was spreadsheets, there was pictures. I reached out to everybody, everybody around Florida, and then it started going to five hours out, six hours out. Then it was like, can I do a day drive to try to find someone who will host this and, if they know anybody that would help do the count. And it was rejection after rejection after rejection. It was insane. So I give Stephen a God for you, a message we had connected in the past. I said, look, this is what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to find someone and a place to help. Can I? Maybe I'll bring them up there? I was willing to drive up to the Calver Marine Museum and work with Stephen to do this Super nice guy. And he says well, you know what? I have a guy at University of Florida, his name is Victor and check with Victor. I think Victor will help you out. I said okay, and at the same time I have this museum, south Florida Museum, which is in Bradenton, south of Tampa, and they want to do it. They thought it was cool but they didn't have any experts.
Speaker 1:So it just all kind of came together within about two weeks and I reached out to this Victor guy. I'm like, hey, victor, stephen gave me your info and do you want to go do a turd count? And we're the expert and he was the nicest guy. He said, yeah, of course I wanted to go do that and he had one of his friends that he was going to school with that was also in a program. They came down and out at their own time and they drove like four or five hours to go help this guy.
Speaker 1:They didn't know to count his fossilized poop. So I really owe Victor and Stephen so much because without them who knows what would have happened? Maybe Gennis thing would never have happened, it wouldn't have ever blown up and kind of gone viral. But you work with some really neat people that put education and helping you know, getting that information out to people, up at the forefront. And that's neat because I can tell you there's a lot of professionals out there and there's a lot of museums that don't so that they were willing to do. That is pretty fantastic.
Speaker 2:They are really amazing. A huge shout out to Victor and Stephen and the Calvert Marine Museum and to you, george. Thank you so much for sharing your Puseum with me, with my listeners and with any museum who would like to display them.
Speaker 1:You're very welcome. I really appreciate you taking an interest and inviting me on to your show. It's been a lot of fun and if anybody has any questions concerns specimens they think they might be a coprolite and they wanna share it with me I'll do my best to help identify it or answer any questions that people may have.
Speaker 2:I'll definitely put a link to the book. I'll put a link to the Puseum itself so people can get there and your contact information is right on there as well, so everybody can go and actually take a look for themselves too.
Speaker 1:That would be amazing and I'm just gonna say Amazon is great for the book, but I actually sell the book for a few dollars cheaper personally on my Etsy story. It's a link from the Puseum and that one I'm able to sign and put in and it's a little bit cheaper.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, George. This was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:You too. It was great. Thank you so much.
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