Over 200 Million Years Ago, Nature Called. It Was Full of Beetles.

Fossilized feces from a dinosaur ancestor preserved an insect species not previously known to science in exquisite detail.

Imagine a bunch of beetles minding their own business on an algae-covered rock. All of a sudden, they get hoovered up whole into the beak of a slim, long-necked dinosaur ancestor. R.I.P. — but on the bright side, through a complex combination of luck and microbial activity, their tiny corpses become frozen in time. And over 200 million years later, scientists uncover them while rooting around in fossilized feces. These coprolites, as they’re called, can provide extraordinarily detailed insight into long-lost ecosystems, according to new research published in Current Biology. A team of researchers found nearly unscathed beetles, now extinct, that are new to science, suspended inside a piece of excrement from the Triassic Period. The scientists suspect that the waste belonged to Silesaurus opolensis, a close relative of dinosaurs that lived about 230 million years ago, although it is tricky to place once separated from its point of origin. “We decided to look at coprolites to try to understand who ate whom in this ecosystem,” said the paper’s lead author, Martin Qvarnstrom, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. “And in one of the fragments of coprolites, all these beetles popped up.”