The Annals of Scatology, continued: Fecal Forensics

As we have often noted here at the Scatology Desk in the Dougloid Towers. the subject of...errr....ahem...poop...is a regular feature that appears in the news from time to time.

We here prefer to do our business as quietly and tidily as possible and to that end we have invented sanitary plumbing and ventilator fans, due no doubt to the tribal memory of  folks like Samuel Pepys, who in his diary records that a cesspool of his neighbor's broke into and flooded his basement with the awful accumulations of years gone past.

We've discussed several forms of coprolites-fossil turds as John Ciardi the poet described them.

Also of note have been protean dumps left in rental properties by Kennewick man  and his contemporaries, and a thirty foot deep repository of giant ground sloth crap in a cave in the Grand Canyon that unaccountably caught fire and was destroyed-to great moans of sadness from the crapologist academic community. And, of course, the subject of the Lloyds Bank Turd.

More often than normal these stories originate from or in Europe....make of it what you will. The connection that is. It is rather odd but hey! You go where your heart and brain lead you to find out what it is you want to know. My suspicions were raised by the involvement of the Max Planck Institute which has come a long way from its genesis as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and as a center for applied research for the Nazis. Perhaps muddling about in piles of crap is expiation of a sort like Job and his dung heap? We'll never know.

Now we have word that research in primatology has discovered new and better methods of developing large primate population data by accumulating information on gorilla crap.

That's right folks. Plucky researchers from the Worldwide Fund For Nature and Flora and Fauna International, headquartered in Switzerland have taken to the field under the direction of managing director Yolanda Kakabadse in order to seek out gorilla latrines wherever they may be found.

You can read all about it here.

It seems that the primates, like their humanoid cousins, when arising in the morning head off to the head to take their morning ease, but in the case of the mountain gorilla, the place for such efforts is the edge of the treeborne nest and a grand educational letting fly, without so much as a "Gardy Loo! Look out there below I say!"

Pity the poor critter who happens to be walking by at that exact moment.

But all's not lost. You hear? More than 1100 samples of gorilla dumps were gathered by enterprising volunteers who pay for the experience of tramping through the jungle looking for gorilla poop.

You heard it right. They pay, and pay handsomely for the experience of getting up before dawn, tramping through the jungle, and listening and perhaps sniffing for the awful signs of their quest. Did I mention that they have to pay for it?

Perhaps this is on their headphones?


You can count me out. I've got plenty enough to do right here at home..