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Weird Animal Poop News

Weird Animal Poop News

September 14, 2016

Birds do it, bees do it. By which we mean eats food and turns it into, uh, solid waste material. But we humans are the only species that can gain amusement from the droppings of other animals, and since we are the people who bring you Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, here are the latest scoops in animal poop.
Weird Animal Poop News

Remnants of Another Time

George Frandsen is an avid and voracious collector of coprolite. In fact, in 2015 Guinness World Records declared his collection to be the largest in the world. At the time, Frandsen had 1,200 pieces, but he says that number has now more than doubled. So what’s a coprolite? Ancient fossilized animal dung. Frandsen has decided to share his pieces of fossilized feces with the world: He’s opened a museum called The Poozeum. Sorry, this isn’t a hands-on museum—it’s entirely online. You can go there right now and check out thousands of pieces of poop from millions of years ago, left as relics by bugs, animals, and even dinosaurs. The star attraction of The Poozeum: “Precious,” an eight inch-long, four-pound turd generated by a large crocodile-like creature. It’s the largest coprolite ever discovered.

Rise of the Robots

If there’s one thing we love at the BRI as much as weird animal poop stories, it’s weird robot stories. This one is both. Until August 2016, Jesse Newton of Little Rock, Arkansas, relied on his trusty Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner to keep his floors tidy. Every night, while Newton and his family blissfully slept, the Roomba was programmed to quietly clean around 1 a.m. The Newtons were also blissfully unaware that their dog left a surprise on the living room rug, sometime between when the family went to sleep and when the Roomba sprung into action. In a Facebook post that went viral, Newton described in graphic detail what happens when a Roomba runs over and through a fresh dog turd. In what Newton called both a “Pooptastrophe” as well as a “poohpocalypse,” the Roomba “spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.”

There are More Accessible Bathrooms

In 2015, a 700-foot-tall construction crane sat idle outside of the Air Canada Centre arena in downtown Toronto. When the operator, Robert MacFarlane got to work one morning, he noticed that someone had beat him to the job: a raccoon who had fearlessly climbed all 700 feet up the piece of machinery. And once the raccoon got there, MacFarlane notes, he defecated. And then he climbed back down.