Poop is awesome.

It’s fertilizer. It’s a territory marker. It’s even — gah — food.

But mostly, it’s freakin’ funny.

The Cleveland Metroparks Zoo gets all of this, which explains why it’s opened a nearly four-month-long exhibit on all things scat (don’t give us that stink-eye, curators use the term) called The Scoop on Poop.

We stopped in and got the poop on the Scoop.

Turds. Scat. Poop. There are only so many PG-13 ways to refer to feces, and the zoo’s potty mouth isn’t afraid to use all of them. Especially since practically every day at the zoo is an education in defecation, anyway.

The Scoop on Poop, based on Dr. Wayne Lynch’s book and sponsored (appropriately enough) by the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, is splashed in vibrant colors and right-sized for the kiddies. But if you’ve ever giggled at a well-timed fart joke, it’s going to tickle your toilet fancy at whatever age.

Featuring a scale that tells you how long an African elephant would take to poop you out (eight-and-a-half hours for your 165-pound editor), a memory match-the-scat game called Who Dung It, an opportunity to touch fossilized dino poo, and a dung-beetle racing arcade game, this is an exhibit that’s more hands-on than you might be prepared for. (Perhaps it also should be sponsored by Purell?)

And it doesn’t take itself seriously, especially when games laud you with such pre-recorded feedback as, “Congratulations, scat tracker!”

It’s okay to laugh.

Along the way you learn such gems as:

• Sloths poop just once a week (oof), and they travel from their safe tree homes to the dangerous ground, where they mysteriously bury it.
• A variety of bugs, snakes and frogs have evolved to look like bird droppings because that reduces their likelihood of being eaten. After all, who likes to eat poop?
• Deer, that’s who. Moms eat their kids’ turds because it keeps predators off their trail. So do baby koalas, who need the beneficial bacteria, and rabbits, who have a rather disgusting waste-not-want-not attitude.
• Even plants are getting in on the action. Those darn daisies smell like dung to attract poo-loving flies. And fruit evolved as a way of attracting hungry animals, who eat it, poop it, and spread the seeds to create, well, more plants.

The Scoop on Poop is just two rooms, perhaps 45 minutes of your time. So it’s probably not the lone reason to visit. But Cleveland’s fantastic zoo is just $10 per adult (free for Cuyahoga County residents on Mondays!), which means you won't be, er, dropping a pile on admission. And for that you get access to the poop, the zoo and the delightful rainforest exhibit. And all of that’s a full day (including potty breaks) of entertainment.

And for those of you who have gotten to the end of this story and are thinking, man, Spangle’s got kind of a creepy interest in poop:

Yeah, no shit.

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