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so they left scat on the trail, announcing to the wolves “Oh, yoo-hoo! I beg your
pardon,butthisjustsohappenstobeourneighborhood.Wewouldbemostappreci-
ative if you departed from it. Ta!” The wolves responded by hunting down, killing,
and eating one of the coyotes. Soon afterwards, they left scat in the same spot, but
this time with coyote fur in it. (I could not help but envisage the coyotes' reactions
when they came back to this place, got a whiff of the scat, and realized it contained
one of their own.) The tracking instructors said they had seen trace evidence of this
Mafia-like behavior not once but twice, suggesting it might have been a standard
wolf response to coyote defiance. I have no idea if predatory dinosaurs had similar
practices in establishing territory, but this modern example certainly lends credence
to such scenarios.
Since then, whenever tracking, I have paid careful attention to the identity,
placement, and contents of mammal feces with relation to one another, and have
often confirmed for myself other such “scat wars.” These conflicts are normally
manifested by one mammal dumping in a prominent spot—such as the middle of
a trail—and then on top of it will be another, fresher pile of feces, left by another
mammal.Forsomemammals,theyalsomakesuretheirfecescoverasmuchreales-
tate as possible. For example, hippopotamuses do this by rapidly flicking their tails
back and forth as they excrete, flinging poo with wild abandon. This windshield-
wiper action instantly expands their territory, too, as other animals flee from this
fecal assault.
Birds are different. Appropriately enough for a clade represented by about
10,000 species, these modern dinosaurs eat a wide variety of foods, and this susten-
anceisdigestedandexcretedinmyriadways.AsfarasIknow,though,theirwastes
are not used for staking claims over territory. This is understandable because most
birds are more influenced by sight and sound rather than smells. Their digestion is
also more complete than that of most mammals, and instead of the mostly solid fe-
cesorpurelyliquidurineofmammals,eachemittedthroughdifferentorifices,birds
excrete uric acid out of a single orifice, the cloaca. This waste is liquid in some
