“Danes identify Aalborg bishop’s 300-year-old poo” is the BBC News headline. The report begins:
A lump of faeces stored in the back of a Danish museum has been traced back to a bishop who lived in the city of Aalborg at the end of the 17th Century.
Researchers discovered the lump in a broken bottle. Analysis revealed remnants of an exotic diet of fig, grapes, pepper and buckwheat.
The faeces were found when the old bishop’s manor was excavated in 1937.
The team then decided it had belonged to Bishop Jens Bircherod, from an island whose residents ate buckwheat.
“It all fits nicely with the bishop who lived in that house from 1694 to 1708,” says Jette Linaa, from Moesgaard Museum in the Danish city of Aarhus….
(Thanks to Jonathan Fisk for bringing this to our attention.)
Museums are good places to view treasures that come from bishops. The Hunterian Museum, in London, proudly displays the rectum of the Bishop of Durham. We discussed this in a report in The Guardian.