Chinchilla Poo: The Ultimate Rainfall Gauge

[crossfire]

If you need to measure rainfall and all you have is a chinchilla, all is not lost!

http://news.discovery.com/earth/chinchilla-rainfall-chile.html

It's actually pretty cool:

THE GIST

• Chinchillas deposit their waste in personal scrap piles full of plants and their poop that they glue together with urine.
• Scientists find that measuring the size of these pellets can reveal rainfall amounts from previous years.
• Reconstructing climate history of Chile's Atacama Desert could help reveal how events like La Nina affect Chile's rainfall.

Paleontologists use pack rat middens in a similar way.