http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-05-12/dr-karl-poo-feces-mammal-12-seconds-science/8496988
Headlines don’t get much punchier than the recent, “All mammals poop in 12 seconds …”.
Skeptical, but intrigued, I read beyond the clickbait headline and found some unbelievable claims.
Like that an elephant poo weighed 3,837 kilograms — which is incredible, considering that a really big elephant weighs less than twice that, at around seven tonnes.
Or the claim that a mouse can defecate 15 times its own body weight. That’s not just unbelievable — it’s impossible.
At this point, I realised that I needed the genuine peer-reviewed scientific paper — not the incorrect online summary.
The original paper was called Hydrodynamics of defecation. It was published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, in one of their journals called (rather coyly) Soft Matter.
And this real science paper set the record straight.
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