This Fossilized Turd Will Make You Glad You Weren't A Viking

"Blimey!" exclaimed Dr. Andrew "Bone" Jones when he discovered this particular poop in some old boxes of soil and rocks, "This must be the turd!" At least that's how he remembers it.

Jones, an archeologist at the Jorvik Viking Centre, had been on the hunt for this specimen for some time. Since an archeological dig in 1972, there had been rumors of the discovery of a large and intact piece of ancient human feces, but no such item had been cataloged.

When he saw the now-famous turd, he knew it was definitely what he was looking for.

Archeologists uncovered it in what is now the English city of York amongst the remains of many other Viking artifacts.

Full of bits of grain and parasites, this thing (large as it may be) unquestionably came from the digestive system of a human being.

It's also quite clearly old. Much of the fecal material has been mineralized — one of the processes that forms fossils.

When its contents were examined, the lumpy rock preserved a plethora whipworm and mawworm eggs — parasitic nematodes known to cause stomach aches, diarrhea and inflammation of the bowel. Scientists find it likely that such problems were widespread amongst this Viking community.

In a 1991 Wall Street Journal article* about the historic turd discovery, Jones said "The bottom line is that people tolerated what would seem to us incomprehensible squalor. Time and again, you get a very strong picture of filth."

*Horwitz, Tony. Endangered Feces: Paleo-Scatologist Plumbs Old Privies — It May Not Be the Lost Ark, But Then, Andrew Isn't Exactly Indiana Jones. Wall Street Journal September 1991. Print (not available online).

According to Gill Snape, one of the people tasked with reconstructing the specimen after it broke apart in 2003, this Viking "was not a great vegetable eater." Instead, she said, the defecator's diet consisted almost exclusively of meat and grain, despite there being evidence for the availability fruit and nuts from the same site.