An audio guide to the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Co-founder Dylan Thuras and a neighborhood of Atlas Obscura reporters explore a new wonder every day, Monday through Thursday. In under 15 minutes, they’ll take you to an incredible place, and along the way, you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories. Our theme and end credit music is composed by Sam Tyndall.
William Buckland’s Poo Table
In the collection of the Lyme Regis Museum in England is a beautiful 19th century tabletop made of delicate, inset stones. The rub is that these stones are… (spoiler alert)... coprolite, or fossilized feces. Amanda and Johanna discuss the man who had this table made, an eccentric scientist named William Buckland, who was a key figure in the early history of paleontology.
For more information about William Buckland’s table, see:
- https://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/related-article/bucklands-coprolite-table/
- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-father-and-son-who-ate-every-animal-possible
- “The man who tried to eat everything on Earth” from the Royal Society https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-fcaKO_5sk
- https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/unusual-diet-18th-century-geologist-william-buckland
- https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/05/19/me-and-my-monkey/
- On the Kirkdale Cave: https://scarboroughmuseumsandgalleries.org.uk/object/kirkdale-cave/
- For more on Buckland’s son, Frank, see: “The Man Who Ate the Zoo” by Richard Girling
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