The sun has just set over the tranquil Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, and the crisp evening air is redolent of warm sand and eucalyptus. Scores of students are jogging or cycling under the rosy gold autumn sky; a few stroll back from the beach with surfboards under their arms.
But in a low white building on the east side of campus, in a cavelike room that smells of wet stone, Karen Chin is hard at work. Chin is hunched over a cluttered bench, her dark hair fanning halfway down her lab coat, her slender fingers holding a small gray rock against the motionless blade of a circular saw. She has repositioned the rock several times, in search of the right cut, when her concentration is shattered by a colleague entering the lab.
Hey, Karen, calls the colleague in greeting. You still messing around with poop?
The short answer is yes. Karen Chin was, is, and probably always will be messing around with poop--petrified, prehistoric poop, the poop of ages past. She’s a pioneer in a specialty so peculiar it’s not taught in any university. It doesn’t even have a formal name, though one does suggest itself: paleoscatology. It is safe to say that Chin is the world’s leading paleoscatologist. Also the world’s only paleoscatologist.
For the past six years this doctoral student has been analyzing and categorizing hundreds of the fossilized leavings that go by the polite name of coprolites. The specimens come from around the world and across the epochs. They include 300-million-year-old fish feces; dinosaur dung from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous; and a sloth stool issued during the last ice age. Some of the fossils have been ravaged by time and are nearly unrecognizable. But others have survived more or less intact, their humble morphologies uncannily familiar in spite of their antiquity.
