The professor, wearing flowing robes and holding a skull in his hand, approached a student sitting in the front row. “What rules the world?” he asked. “I have no idea,” the terrified student muttered, to which the prof retorted: “The stomach, sir!”

Except for the attire and the skull, that little exchange could have taken place in my class, where we discuss the role that food and nutrition play in our lives. But that episode actually played out in the mid-19th-century at Oxford University, where William Buckland was professor of Geology. Obviously, his interests extended beyond rocks.

Let’s meet Buckland, one of the most colourful scientists I’ve ever come across. After all, how often do you get to talk about someone who is said to have eaten a king’s heart? But that is not where our story starts.

It begins with an ancient hyena den.

As a young man, Buckland fell in love with fossils, the preserved remains of ancient organisms. He was in his 30s when he investigated fossil bones found in a cave in Yorkshire and concluded that they were the remains of prehistoric hyenas. He believed that from their fossilized feces, for which he coined the term “coprolite,” one could determine what sort of animals the hyenas had eaten. Buckland went about proving this by feeding guinea pigs to a hyena and examining its poop, which he found to contain fragments of bone just like in the coprolites he had discovered.

He was so fascinated by these fossils that he commissioned a table to be made that featured an array of coprolites inlaid in........

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