I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.

Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.

  The estimated lethal dose (LDmin) of taxine alkaloids is approximately 3.0 mg/kg body weight for humans.[27][28] Different studies show different toxicities; a major reason is the difficulty of measuring taxine alkaloids.[29]

The always excellent Oatmeal:

We need to have a conversation about wombats

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats

Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.

A bit of a tangent but I've read this phrase almost verbatim in another article[1] today:

> "This study is really good," says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals "are very special."

The other article [1] quote:

> It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak (opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”

Are these editorial guidelines to get an independent read? Just coincidence? I don't think they are LLM bits because I expect better from these magazines, but it's too eerily similar.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-bui...

"exceptional excrement" "sharp-sided scat" "To get to the bottom of the mystery" "...aptly titled journal Soft Matter."

Great to see someone having some fun writing an article.

All that work I did for my PhD and I could have been studying this topic instead...

Related: drilling square holes, not as much fun as a wombat though.

If someone hasn't submitted this for an Ig Nobel, it would be a calamity.

   Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think".

It’s hip to be square

Surely it has something to do with their square arseholes.

This is most amazing when you click into the study[0] and see the supporting materials linked to at the bottom like a .mov of a rotating 3d model of wombat poop[1]

[0]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-abstract/17/3/475/708006/Int...

[1]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-supplement/708006/mov/d0sm01...

The pun in the title is just world class.

>Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.

and those who of them who shit cubes ended up more likely to procreate...?

I was so confused by wombat poop the first time I saw it. Wasn't sure what I was looking at so I poked it with a stick.

well written and has a distinctly human feel to it, compared to the slop we get to read these days.

I'm reminded of Professor Hermione Lee of the University of York English department facing a stuttering student explaining the contextual meaning of the word "quaint" in middle English poetry:

  Spit it out man! It means CUNT.

Can we stop with this "poop" nonsense. Number #2 and other forms, it's shit English, it's stupid. It's feces. Or shit. Or that fine old English word Turd.