Well, if that last post on farting farm animals didn’t give you a large enough dose of gross, you really need to read today’s blog post! Today we’re once again visiting a few rear ends, but instead of cows and sheep we’re going to get the scoop (or rather the “poop”) on panda dung (the scientific word for poop)! Yes, it’s time again for your favourite blog topic “Science mysteries… explained!!!”  And today we’re going to solve that age-old science mystery… What can you make out of panda poop? Now don’t tell me you aren’t curious. Maybe the question hasn’t been burning in your mind, but the people who run zoos in China and other parts of Asia have given it a lot of thought—after all, they have a lot of panda poop to deal with every day!

What did they come up with? It turns out that you can really make an amazing amount of things out of those stinky brown blobs—and they are all odor-free! Everything from bookmarks to panda poop photo frames. Of course, they don’t look like panda poop in the end. That’s because the dung goes through a long process where the undigested bamboo leaves found in it (pandas eat only the leaves of bamboo plants, nothing else!) are made into paper, just like we make paper out of wood. The dung is sterilized at super-high temperatures when it is cleaned. Next it is mashed to a pulp and dried to make paper. The paper is then used to make objects that the zoos sell as souvenirs for a nice amount of cash. After all, there’s nothing like a nice pad of panda poop paper!