Hooroo, where's the poo?

ALAN Cooper specialises in ancient DNA. When he came to Australia in 2005 to be director of the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, he was keen to find and analyse the droppings of the country's megafauna, creatures such as giant marsupial diprotodon and the giant short-faced kangaroo, which became extinct more than 45,000 years ago.

ALAN Cooper specialises in ancient DNA. When he came to Australia in 2005 to be director of the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, he was keen to find and analyse the droppings of the country's megafauna, creatures such as giant marsupial diprotodon and the giant short-faced kangaroo, which became extinct more than 45,000 years ago.

So far he has had no luck and, although he is learning to live with it, Cooper is also intrigued by the absence of this dung material, called coprolite.

Things are much better in New Zealand. In December, a paper he co-wrote appeared in Quaternary Science Reviews, documenting the discovery of 1500 samples of moa faeces.

Cooper's centre performed the DNA typing for the University of Otago's Jamie Wood, who had discovered the abundant dung from the extinct bird.

"In New Zealand we often get tip-offs from hunters (who) report moa bones or finds, and we get called in to collect material," Cooper says. "And Jim Wood will meander around the outback of New Zealand looking for rocky areas with overhangs and scoop out the sheep poo and go through the dirt and very often come across coprolites.

"The main thing is the extent of the poo. Pretty much everywhere we have looked for it, we have found it."

The coprolites yield a DNA record of interaction between the giant bird and its environment, particularly its diet. The record pre-dates human settlement; moa, unique to New Zealand, are thought to have become extinct about 1350, soon after the arrival of the Maori.

Cooper says this provides an ideal opportunity to reconstruct the origins and history of the present environment, making informed predictions about it easier.

As for the coprolite record in Australia, he says: "Our leading hypothesis at the moment is that the termites have got it all."

NZ has no termites, although North America does, which is why he is somewhat baffled at the amount of great brown sloth dung in the caves of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

"When I came here from Oxford to set up the centre, one of my aims was to find out where Australia's megafaunal poo was hiding out. There seems to be so little evidence of it in museums, just the occasional fossilised form, and no deposits in the field as there are in New Zealand and North America."

People in the field confirmed the absence of sightings.

"It's possible Australia is so vast that it has not yet been found," Cooper says.

"And poo is hard to recognise, especially under layers of sediment on a cave floor."

It is also possible that Australian megafauna died out so long ago the coprolites have degraded.

Cooper is eager to use Wood's proven sleuthing abilities to mount a more systematic search of likely sites in Australia, but an Australian Research Council grant application for this purpose was turned down last year.