Dung beetles bury their booty to escape all this competition, and to create a safe nursery for their offspring. There are beetles that dive directly under the pat, dragging dung down with them. These beetles are veritable earth moving machines, with shovel-like front tibias and a stocky build. Others fashion balls and roll them away from the crowd--backwards, pushing with their specially adapted long hind legs at speeds of up to 14 meters per minute. Still others simply tunnel into the dung where it lies, chow down, and lay their eggs.

Mating pairs of ball rollers frequently cooperate in the ball rolling and burial. Sometimes the female takes a free ride on the rolling ball.

The burrowers are unusual among insects for the incredible amount of care they lavish upon their progeny. The brood balls provide nourishment, and a safe place to pupate. In some species, mothers and offspring actually communicate, by stridulating, or chirping, as crickets do. Entomologists have yet decipher the meaning of these messages. Scientific observation: The more creatures care for their offspring, the smaller the number of offspring they have. Most insects lay--and abandon to the whims of nature--hundreds, or even thousands of eggs. Some species of dung beetles lay but a single egg in a season.

Following the cataclysmic collision of a meteorite with the earth that most scientists in relevant fields now believe finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, new species of mammals burst forth upon the globe. This massive evolutionary radiation is believed to have been matched by a parallel profusion of new dung beetles.

It was the newly prodigious production of mammalian ordure that fueled the radiation of the copraphages, says Cambefort. The richer the mammalian fauna, the greater is the diversity and size of dung beetles. One hundred fifty species coexist in undisturbed savannahs in Africa.

But few dung beetles feed upon the dung of either birds or reptiles, and in 1942, when French scientist R. Jeannel made the first suggestion that troops of dinosaurs were followed by dung beetles, he was being remarkably prescient. For until this decade, the oldest known dung beetle fossils were 40 million years old.

Responding to a reporter's query, Bruce Gill, a student of scarabs at Agriculture Canada in Ottawa, Ontario finally telephoned Paul Johnston, curator of invertebrates at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta. Months earlier, Gill had seen Johnston on Canadian television showing 72 million year old nests of ankylosaurs and other dinosaurs he'd excavated in the Gobi, and he'd listened to Johnston describe an abundance of burrows amongst the nests. "Whatever was living in those burrows was living in association with the dinosaurs," says Johnston.

It was dung beetles, says Gill. As Johnston explained to him, "You have a large burrow that goes down underground, and off to the side you have very small burrows that branch off of the main one." The side burrows, Gill explains, are the signature of the little klepto beetles that steal their meals.

Gill had never heard of Karen Chin, nor she of him, but they were about to become collaborators on a paper which would push the age of the oldest known dung beetle fossils to 80 million years. Chin, I learned, was a leading expert on fossilized dinosaur dung, or copralites, as they are known in the trade. Following slim leads provided by Johnston, I tracked her down at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was a graduate student in geology. She had been digging with dinosaur Mavin Jack Horner, and among other things, they'd found some 80 million year old copralites amongst the dinosaur nests at the Egg Mountain site in Montana.

Chin didn't know much about beetles, but she did allow that there were burrows beneath the copralites. I gave her Gill's phone number, and within days, Gill had photos of Chin's fossils.

"This thing looks just like a modern day piece of dung that has been colonized by dung beetles!" Gill exclaimed, upon receiving the photos from Chin. I asked him if he was going to call his wife. No, he said, but he was going to call Chin immediately.

The upshot of all of this, says Gill, is that "there probably was a large, rich fauna of dung beetles during the age of the dinosaurs." Some of those dung beetles might have been substantially bigger than today's, he speculates. Further, the demise of the dinosaurs would have caused a great extinction of dung beetles, and "only a few lineages would have survived to radiate with the mammals."

The parallel radiation of dung beetles and mammals insured that each species of dung beetle was well adapted to munching the dung of specific species. Hence, it is no surprise that the scarabs of Australia, adapted as they are to nothing larger than the little dry pellets of kangaroos, are useless against the avalanche of excrement from imported bovines.

Fortunately, by the time he settled in Australia, George Bornemissza had the background to see a solution to the problem. As a young lad in Hungary, Bornemissza could hardly contain his enthusiasm for dung beetles. When he was only 15, he declared to his mother, "I'll be a beetleman all my life." (And his mother, now 99 and sharp, has certainly lasted long enough to see that he kept his promise.)

Bornemissza had been captivated by scarabs' ball-rolling and fighting, but soon he noticed that the dung-littered pastures that he passed in the morning as he set off on his collecting forays had been cleared away by the time he returned. "And that," he says, "is how I became an entomologist and an ecologist."

At 16, Bornemissza left his small town and parents to finish high school in Budapest, so that he could have access to scientific institutions for guidance and training. Following university and graduate school, in 1948, Bornemissza fled communism, landing in Australia in 1951 at the age of 27.

There, "I was struck by the dung-littered pastures that stood in stark contrast to the pastures of Hungary, and I knew then and there that Australia lacked a suitable bovine dung beetle fauna." A single cow could blanket five to ten percent of an acre per year, with pads so durable that ranchers would pile them one on top of another to prop up irrigation pipes.

The solution, Bornemissza decided, would be to import dung beetles from Europe and Africa to recycle the dung. He single-handedly convinced the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's major national research institution, to back his idea. One problem with introducing exotic species into a new habitat is that they frequently become pests, as gypsy moths and kudzu have done in the U.S. But dung beetles, which are naturally present on every continent except for Antarctica, are less exotic in Australia than cows. Dung beetles pose no threat to crops, or to plants of any sort, because their mouthparts are soft, and suitable only for eating the natural equivalent of baby food, says G. Truman Fincher, supervisory research entemologist at the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service. Nor were they likely to drive native Australian dung beetles to extinction, since their eating habits were so different.

Bornemissza had hoped to introduce about 150 species to occupy the various different cattle-raising environments, but Australia's quarantine proved a bottleneck. Only eggs, not beetles, could be imported, and the first generation beetles had to spend their lives in isolation in order to insure that other invertebrates that might have hitched a ride with the dung beetles did not get loose in the country. "I managed to pump through only 50 species from 1970 to 1980," says Bornemissza. Of those, only 22 have established themselves in the field, according to Cambefort.

Nonetheless, at least one species of exotic scarab now inhabits almost every pasture in Australia, and some pastures host as many as seven. Under the best circumstances, beetles have reduced fly populations by up to 90 percent, says CSIRO entemologist T. James Ridsdill-Smith. But in some regions the life cycles of beetles and flies are out of synch, so that the beetles are absent during the height of the fly breeding season. Many more species of scarab are still needed to fill the vacancies in the Lucky Country's dung burying niches. Unfortunately, CSIRO quit funding the beetle program in 1986, although it was so popular that the state of Western Australia has taken up some of the slack. (The Commonwealth of Australia is divided politically into seven states.)

Although there are native species of dung beetle in the US, as in Australia, they weren't up to handling the huge flow of feces on a cattle ranch. So there as well, researchers have imported dung beetles.

Scarabs could save US farmers up to $2 billion annually, according to Fincher, by returning pasture to grazing, by recycling the nitrogen that normally is lost to the atmosphere, and by reducing the populations of close relatives of the Australian cattle-blood sucking flies that stunt the growth of livestock in the U.S.

A short-lived U.S. program, which was shut down in the budget-cutting environment of the latter 1980s, introduced about 15 species in Texas and across the South, and these have slowly spread northward.

Into Oklahoma, for example. There, cattle rancher Walt Davis, who has counted 11 different species of dung beetle on his 3,000 acre spread in Hugo, sings the beetles' praises. Although he concentrates his cattle in a single paddock at a time, "in the summertime, once the cattle have vacated a paddock, in 48 hours there is no manure left."

But getting the best out of the beetles, says Davis, "depends on working with nature, instead of against her." It takes more than dung beetles to keep the soil healthy, he explains, crediting earthworms, pill bugs, and bacteria and fungi in particular, and biodiversity in general. And to preserve it all, the former practitioner of chemical agriculture now eschews pesticides and fertilizers. Agricultural chemicals, he says, account for the fact that "the neighbors within a mile of me don't have one dung beetle where we have 50."

And Davis wants everyone to know that what works ecologically makes financial sense as well. While production has remained steady, out-of-pocket costs (which includes inputs, but not land costs) have declined from more than $300 per acre to less than $100 per acre. "I'm making a whole lot more money now, and my life is sure a lot better," he says.

The modern uses of dung beetles parallel the religious significance of the sacred scarab in the lives of the ancient Egyptians. Scarabus sacer was worshipped as the power that propelled the sun across the sky. This was not a nutty idea in the context of the times, says Catharine Roehrig, assistant curator for Egyptian art at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Forget what we have learned about the universe and astronomy in the last 5,000 years and use your imagination based on observation of the world around you," she says, alluding to the image of a beetle pushing it's ball of dung across Egyptian sands. "Why shouldn't the sun be propelled through the sky by a scarab beetle?"

To the Egyptians, the phases of the sun represented the phases of life. "The beetle's development in the underground nest chamber, culminating in the appearance of the new scarab from the nymph, also resembles the daily resurrection of the sun, a promise of new life to the Egyptians," says Cambefort. He believes all this inspired the construction of the pyramids. Mummies, with their wrappings, resemble pupae, which in a sense are wrapped larvae, and the pyramids, Cambefort suggests, represented the dung pats that contained them.

The scarab is the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the words change, regeneration, and renewal. Says Davis, "it is just as appropriate to modern ranchers as it was to the ancient Egyptians."

© David Holzman, 1997