Meet a Paleontologist: Dr. Karen Chin

“I was always fascinated by science,” says paleoecologist Dr. Karen Chin. As a child, her father taught her how to garden and the “miracle of growth” amazed her.  

“I still garden a lot and I have a huge collection of indoor plants as well,” she says. 

But the rest of her scientific pursuits look a little different these days. Now a paleoecologist and a professor and curator of paleontology at the University of Colorado, Dr. Chin studies extinct organisms and is one of the world’s leading experts in coprolites, aka, fossilized feces of prehistoric animals or, more colloquially, really old poop! 

“I became fascinated with how challenging it is to reconstruct what ancient life was like with relatively little fossil evidence,” she says, sharing how working at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana galvanized her interest in paleontology.  

“I just began to think about paleontology all the time,” she laughs. “It was just so interesting to think about, to read about, to talk about.” 

Can you tell us about your area of expertise? 

I’m a paleoecologist and a professor and curator of paleontology at the University of Colorado. I teach, I'm a curator, and I also do research. Paleoecology is the study of ancient ecosystems, and it can be challenging because it's hard to get enough information to try to infer how different organisms were interacting with each other or with their environment long ago. But we do the best we can with the clues we find in the fossil record. 

I study trace fossils—like coprolites—that tell us about ancient life. They’re not body fossils like bones or wood. Trace fossils provide evidence for animal activities and I really like studying them because if you find specimens that are well preserved, they can tell us things about interactions among ancient organisms. 

The purpose of science is usually to answer questions about what we see in our world. But I found early on that I was particularly fascinated with questions in paleontology about life that lived millions of years ago. 

What can we learn from studying coprolites? 

Fossilized dung can tell us about a variety of things. It can tell us which animals, plants and other living organisms were around at the same time. It can tell us about trophic interactions—or who ate whom in the ancient world. We can even look at some of the organic materials preserved in fossilized feces and get information about ancient climatic conditions. 

Dung also tells us how carbon resources and nutrients are recycled in the world. We all need energy to survive and, in our case, that energy comes from carbon compounds. Coprolites provide very important information about how carbon compounds, which were kind of like ancient money, were recycled through different organisms.  

So, we can learn about diets from ancient feces, but we can also learn what happens to the waste—for instance, we now know that dung beetles, snails, other invertebrates, and bacteria helped recycle dinosaur dung. If we didn't have mechanisms to recycle all the waste that animals produce, we’d be drowning in piles of dung. 

What has been your favourite discovery or field experience?  

I've had so many wonderful experiences in the field and have made quite a few discoveries, but I think one of my most exciting discoveries was actually made under a microscope.   

I was investigating some structures that really looked like fossilized muscle tissue in a tyrannosaur coprolite. But I had a hard time believing that muscle tissue would be preserved in fossilized feces because meat is highly digestible and we don't usually see evidence of it in feces.   

I was in my lab at home, looking at a slide under my microscope, and I had fortuitously made a thin section right through the longitudinal section of what I thought (but still wasn’t sure) was muscle tissue. And—so this is technical jargon—but we know that vertebrates have skeletal muscles which have very distinctive lines called myofibrillar striations. I was cruising around looking at the slide under my microscope and I saw this incredibly preserved muscle cell that showed ancient myofibrillar striations. We would not expect that such delicate structures would be preserved in a 75 million year-old coprolite! I think I gasped and then yelled because it was such an exciting moment.  

If people could take away just one important point about paleontology, what would you want that to be? 

I hope people appreciate that we can get very useful insights about this world we live in—the modern world—by examining life from the past. We can see and understand patterns of evolution. We can see how environmental conditions have affected ancient life in the past and how in turn, ancient life has affected environmental conditions. For example, we wouldn't have all the oxygen in our air today if it were not for photosynthesis. So, the environment, the climate, these things affect life and life also affects the environment. By examining what has happened in the past, we get valuable insights into what is happening in our modern world. 

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Wanna learn more about dinosaurs? 

Visit our feature exhibition, T. rex: The Ultimate Predator presented by RBC and White Spot Restaurants. It'll take you back in time to encounter the prehistoric wonders of the late Cretaceous period and come face-to-face with a 66-million-year-old marvel!