Even during your toughest day, you probably haven’t accidentally eaten feces
For 240 million years, the gar has been swimming the waters of North America.
It’s an alligator-like creature that can grow to up to 100 pounds and their long mouths are filled with sharp teeth.
Needless to say, you wouldn’t want a gar to take a chomp out of you during a chance encounter in freshwater spaces in a relatively small area of the Midwest.
Apparently, if you decide to take care of a bathroom emergency (I have had a few myself, so I sympathize), it might be the gar that suffers more than you.
The sports, pop culture, and anything interesting website Defector recently posted an article by their animals and creatures writer, Sabrina Imbler, who wrote about the time a gar had a particularly bad day.
Specifically, fossilized proof that one particular freshwater fish of the Lepisosteidae family took a chomp out of a floating piece of poop.
The journal Ichnos looked into a recently discovered fossil to determine the sad poo eater. For those of you wondering, yes, poop can become a fossil. Specifically, something called a coprolite.
Coprolites are rare. Imbler helpfully explains that feces tends to decay much faster than bones or even skin.
Poo fossils are real, and you can find them anywhere something ancient has lived… and pooped.
This particular coprolite was “left” by its owner around 16 million years ago in what is now Virginia. Around four inches long, Ichnos reasons that the gastro-incident came from a crocodile or a cartilaginous fish, though the most likely culprit would be a prehistoric 11-foot long croc.
“It wasn’t me…”
As this long turd destined for immortality drifted down in a Virginia lake, researchers determined through the size and shape of the lacerations on the fossil poo that it was most likely a gar who thought he had a tasty snack, only to graze the poo and immediately realize his mistake.
There are other possible accidental-fecal-eaters that could have been responsible, based on the bite pattern and the location the coprolite was discovered.
The bite marks could match that of a salmon shark, a porbeagle shark, or a sandtiger shark. But as Imbler infers from the report, the approach a gar takes to capture prey (along with their different-sized rows of teeth that match the fossil) it is likely a gar was the unfortunate poop recipient.
There is a silver lining for this poor gar
Our dude had a bad day
If there’s a silver or brown lining here, it’s that by all accounts it appears that the gar in question confused the poo for food but immediately spit it out. And as stated earlier, it was just a glancing blow.
We recognize that some people might actually enjoy the concept of eating waste, though we do not encourage it. But for anyone who has accidentally ingested poop, we at Poopable feel your pain. Just like this prehistoric gar.
If you’ve encountered such a tragedy, feel free to reach out to us, and we could tell your story (anonymously, of course).
By the way, the gar was named Frank…
Neil