Not to be sniffed at: dinosaur dung fetches twice the estimate at auction

Owning a meteorite that came to rest in a remote corner of China would be cool. But taking home a coprolite is apparently altogether more exciting. That would seem to be the message from a sale being held in New York this week by Bonhams, the auctioneers.

Coprolite, for the uninitiated, is dinosaur dung that has fossilised into what looks much like a chunk of ordinary brown rock with a crystalline inside. A fine example was put under the hammer on Wednesday by the auction house and sold for $960 (£480), roughly twice the estimated price.

At the same sale, however, a 925lb (420kg) meteorite of nickel and iron discovered in Fukang, China, in 2000, failed to reach its minimum price and was withdrawn from bidding. Very old poop – 140 million years old, in fact, from the Jurassic era – is more exotic than plain old space rock, it seems.

And the buyer of the dinosaur droppings had his reasons for going so high. His name is Steve Tsengas, 71, and he is the owner of an Ohio firm that sells products to treat pet animal waste – cat litter boxes and so on. He intends to deploy the fossilised faeces as a marketing tool at trade shows. "Poop is big business in the pet industry," he disclosed to the Associated Press.

The owner of the space rock, Marvin Kilgore, of the University of Arizona's South-west Meteorite Centre, admitted he was a trifle surprised that the dung did better. "Some people want it on their shelves, I guess," he said. But he was sanguine about losing the popularity contest. "I'm not disappointed," he went on. "I always said, if we don't make a deal, I'm happy to take it home."

Bonhams had expected his meteorite to fetch between $2.25m and $2.75m. In the end, the highest bid for it was just $1.75m.