Often overlooked: 540-million-year-old poop revolution may be the source life as we know it

Is it the theory of evo-poo-tion?While poop may seem like a revolting subject, it could could also be responsible for life on earth thanks to a “fecal revolution” over half a billion years ago.This progression of man-ure was described in an excremental study published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.“Next to rising oxygen levels and other contributing factors, the importance of feces in ancient ecosystems is often overlooked,” study author Russell Bicknell, an evolutionary ecologist at Australia’s Flinders University, said in a statement.

To understand the importance of scat, one must go back to the Cambrian Explosion roughly 540 million years ago.During this seminal epoch, which lasted between 13 million and 25 million years, Earth saw the emergence most of the major animal groups as well the rise of complex marine ecosystems and the oceanic food chains that persist today.Scientists previously proposed a wide range of theories for this relatively rapid diversification, ranging from rising oxygen levels to increasingly complex predator-prey interactions.However, the international research team believes that our waste matter actually drove this evolutionary boom.The scientists analyzed coprolite — fossilized feces — samples from 35 sites around the globe, whereupon they noticed a transformation in size, shape and composition of species’ poop during the start of Cambrian epoch, Popular Science reported.“As we move forwards in time, more diverse coprolites appear,” the authors wrote.

“Evidence from dozens of deposits across the globe shows an array of different shapes and sizes.” They added, “The fecal matter ranges from microscopic pellets through to centimeter-scale coprolites containing crushed shells and other animal fragments.”This coincided with an uptick in increasingly complex digestive systems, especially among early arthropods, which evolved specialized “foreguts and digestive glands” that could handle more va...