On the origin of feces: how animal poo drove Earth’s greatest evolutionary event

Kimmig & Bicknell / Trends in Ecology & Evolution, CC BY As all children learn, everyone poos. But when did this begin? And what evolutionary and environmental changes accompanied the dawn of dung? Going further, is the evolution of excrement the reason we exist? Our new research suggests the evolution of fecal matter helped fuel one of the most important events in the history of life on Earth: the Cambrian explosion. And poo really might be the reason animals were such a huge evolutionary…