Leaping lizard crap, it’s the saddest tale I ever heard. Daniel Bennett, a PhD student at Leeds University UK, writes in the Times Higher Educational supplement of his distress when, after years of collecting poo from a rare and incredibly shy lizard in the Philippines, he returned to his lab in Leeds one day to discover it had gone. Vamoosed. It seems it had been vamoosed by an over-zealous cleaner, but Bennett may never really know. His desk had been cleared too.

I mean, if I found 35 kg of poo in a bag, I think I’d assume it was there for a reason.

A good reason, if Bennett is to be believed. He was using poo to understand better the butaan, (the ‘lost dragon’). The butaan is a lizard a bit like a Komodo Dragon, but one that feeds only on fruit and snails. “The butaan is so reclusive that all attempts to study it using methods that have proved suitable for the Komodo dragon and other large lizards have ended in total failure,” writes Bennett. “After an encounter with humans, butaan never return to the place where they were captured. The capture of a single animal often results in the total cessation of activity by all butaan in the area.”

This explains why he had to spend five years collecting butaan poo. “By the beginning of the third year of my PhD, I knew more about lizard shit than I ever thought possible,” says Bennett.

So why, as he returned to the lab for that third year, was his desk occupied by someone else and his 35 kg of lizard poo not there? Bennett asked the university, and got an official response 16 months later, and an offer of £500, which he refused to accept.

Bennett says that losing his shit (it was incinerated) didn’t stop him getting his PhD, but has hampered any chance of him learning more about the butaan.

In the same edition of THE, Zoe Corbyn writes a short piece about Bennett’s plight, and has a comment from the university saying that the burning of the poo was an “unfortunate mistake”. One they could regret, because Bennett

really lays it on thick in his piece. My heart strings are well and truly tugged. Not only does he describe his “feeling of despair”, but get this: the day after he got the response from Leeds University, his girlfriend of ten years dumped him.

Ouch.