Travel Tuesday: National Poo Museum Opens in England

Yes, this is exactly what it looks like. It's a fox turd preserved in a resin sphere. I'm not a big fan of fox poo. It's sticky and smelly and is all over my son's skate park every morning. You see, the older kids who skate there at night leave food wrappers all over the place and the foxes nibble at whatever is left inside. Then the foxes dump right where they found the food, often pinning the wrapper to the pavement.

Perhaps this odd behavior will be explored in the new National Poo Museum at the Isle of Wight Zoo in England. This museum is a work in progress. Right now it's a "Poo at the Zoo" exhibition that will go on national tour in the fall. The focus is on crap, both human and animal, encapsulated in resin spheres in order to make them more visitor friendly. There's human poo, a tawny owl pellet containing the bones and teeth of its prey, 140 million year old fossil poo (called a coprolite by paleontologists) and a child’s shoe with a cat poo inside it.

The exhibition is lined with retro toilets. Visitors can lift the lids to discover amazing poo facts such as:

Probiotic foods are produced using healthy bacteria originally isolated from human feces.
If you take a dump on a train in Britain, there’s a 25% chance it will drop directly onto the tracks, because many carriages have never been fitted with sewage holding tanks.
Wombats are the only animal known to produce cubic poos, probably to prevent their territory-marking poos from rolling off the rocks where they are deposited.

There's also some more serious information about the need for proper waste treatment in developing countries. Poor sanitation leads to disease and is a major killer in some regions.

To read more about my personal experiences crapping around the world, see my guide to squat toilets post I did for blogger buddy Alex Cavanaugh a while back. And go visit the National Poo Museum!

Photo courtesy National Poo Museum.