I blogged before about the crystallised urine and poo from dassies, the large guinea-pig-like creatures, being used in perfumes. Well as if that isn't weird enough, a battle of words (and possibly resources) has broken out between"foreign" perfume manufacturers, who are placing orders for TONS of South African dassiepis (sic), and cash-strapped researchers at the University of Cape Town who regard the middens of dassies as invaluable sources of information about biodiversity. These dassie toilets - some of which are half a metre deep and go back forty thousand years - contain the pollen of plants that passed through the dassies of the time, and according to the scientists "you can work out migrations of species and climatic conditions - it's an essential archive to help us understand better the impacts of future climate change". So what's it to be - dassiepis dabbed behind your ear, or scrutinised under a microscope to help save the planet?
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