CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop

CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
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CAVE PICTURES: Mineral Crusts, Ooze Found to Be Poop
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Orange blotches coat the lava-rock walls of Gruta do Carvão in São Miguel, one of the Portuguese Azores islands, in an undated picture.

Long thought to be minerals that formed by inorganic processes, colorful deposits such as this are actually excreted by microbes living on lava tube walls, University of New Mexico geochemist Diana Northup said in October 2009.

The cave researchers have found "what looks like a gold, crunchy mineral in New Mexico and, in the Azores, amazing pink hexagons," Northup said.

"That's the waste---the bug poop, if you will."
—Photograph courtesy Guy Caniaux
 

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