Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Fossilized excrement.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A hard roudish stony mass, consisting of the petrified fecal matter of animals, chiefly of extinct reptiles or sauroid fishes.
  • noun Any rounded concretionary mass or pebble containing largely calcium phosphate and representing the more or less altered debris of fossil bones, teeth, etc., used as a source of phosphoric acid in the manufacture of fertilizers.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Paleon.) A piece of petrified dung; a fossil excrement.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A fossil consisting of petrified dung.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun fossil excrement; petrified dung

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From copro- + -lite.

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Examples

  • The fossilized dino dung, called coprolite, made its way to

    Columnist: Keith Groller 2010

  • I just looked at the link to the Arizona Daily Star that Steve had in his last post that had this great picture of Dr. Paul Martin holding a Pleistocene Ground Sloth - "coprolite" is the proper term - and thought it deserved a post of its own.

    Archive 2005-08-01 2005

  • I just looked at the link to the Arizona Daily Star that Steve had in his last post that had this great picture of Dr. Paul Martin holding a Pleistocene Ground Sloth - "coprolite" is the proper term - and thought it deserved a post of its own.

    Pleistocene Sloth Poop 2005

  • Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal right, coprolite fossilized dinosaur feces.

    The Art of Selling Dino Dung Ralph Gardner Jr. 2011

  • It's also used as a suffix, as in monolith (big block of stone) or in the form "-lite" (as in coprolite, fossilized dung).

    Week in Words Erin McKean 2011

  • It is either that the box is opened and the contents let loose on the world, like a cracker jack with the trots, or the box sucks in the world — a technoid machine — compacts all down like a Faraday compression of absolute skrunch no larger than a chicken bouillon cube if not an outright chip of a teeny weenie humanoid coprolite.

    Kracton Commons 2009

  • Kudos to the person who did the unicorn/fairy cake for not make the uni horn look like a piece of... coprolite.

    Sunday Sweets: Fastastical Beasts Jen 2009

  • You can dig up a coprolite, put sunglasses, an ugly gray wig, and clothes on it, give it a job, even paint it.

    As If The Right Wing Has Not Had To Endure Enough, Now the Jury System Bites Them In The Butt Tenured Radical 2009

  • One said their own analysis of one of the coprolites was “difficult to reconcile with the DNA results identifying the coprolite as human.”

    Swearing off DNA 2009

  • He explained to them that what they were holding was coprolite — fossilized dinosaur excrement.

    Obama’s Real ‘Vietnam’ 2009

Comments

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  • "'We found a little pit in the bottom of a cave,' related Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon, whose team excavated the Paisley Caves in 2002 and 2003.

    'It was full of camel, horse and mountain sheep bones, and in there we found a human coprolite.'

    This and 13 other coprolites - fossilised faeces - proved the star attraction, because they contained tiny quantities of human mitochondrial DNA - genetic material found outside the nuclei of cells which is passed down from each mother to her children."

    - 'Faeces hint at first Americans', BBC website, 3 April 2008.

    April 4, 2008

  • My goodness. Ian Paisley now has a group of fossilised faeces caves named for him. Seems oddly appropriate.

    April 4, 2008

  • really old shit

    October 10, 2008

  • "From the steps he shouted into the night.

    'Coprolite! Faecal débris! Fossil of dung!'

    A minute later he returned to the sitting-room."

    (Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room)

    July 9, 2009

  • 'She wore a charming necklace, made of coprolite.' --jorge999

    November 7, 2009

  • A fan recently sent me two coprolites. One is a cabochon and the other is in its unpolished state. I like the unpolished one better. Perhaps someday I'll even have some regurgitalite. One can at least hope!

    June 11, 2010