Saturday, November 30, 2013

about that "prehistoric toilet"

My buddy Tom insisted that I blog this story, so... here you go, Tom. Happy now?

The BBC reports that the world's oldest "prehistoric toilet" has been found in La Rioja Province, Argentina: a patch of ground containing numerous examples of desiccated dinosaur feces, ranging from small to gigantic, that may be as much as a quarter of a billion years old. Scientists rejoice at the trove, which has the potential to reveal much about the ancient world.

A bit of trivia: our galaxy takes approximately 250 million years to revolve once. Assuming cosmologists are correct that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, this means that our galaxy has revolved, at most, only about 54 or 55 times. It's amazing to think that a single galactic revolution brought us from dinosaurs to modern humans. (I have to wonder, along with the Beatles, what the earth was like during Revolution Number Nine.)


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1 comment:

Bratfink said...

I thought this sentence from the article was interesting: "Only one species could produce such big lumps - and we found their bones littered everywhere at the site."

So they sometimes died while taking a shit?

My grandfather did that. No joke! My grandmother said "I told Johnny he was pushing too hard."