NEW YORK — A pile of dinosaur dung 130 million years old sold at a New York auction Wednesday for nearly $1,000.

The prehistoric deposit fetched $960, said a spokeswoman for Bonhams New York. Its pre-auction estimate was $450.

The fossilized dung is from the Jurassic era, the auction house said. It looks like a rock on the outside and a colorful mineral inside.

The buyer was Steve Tsengas of Fairport Harbor, Ohio. The 71-year-old owns OurPets, a company that sells products to treat dog and cat waste.

Tsengas bought the dung in hopes of motivating his employees and using it as a marketing tool by displaying it at the company’s booth at trade shows, he said.

“Poop,” he said, “is a big business in the pet industry.”

Alaska town picks to keep pink for federal building

KETCHIKAN, Alaska – It’s easy for tourists to find the city’s historic Federal Building – it’s the only big, pink building in the middle of town.

Now the 1938 landmark needs a paint job, and the federal government has a question for Ketchikan residents: keep it pink or go with cream?

Paint selection isn’t normally brought to the attention of the public, but officials thought it was important in the case of the five-story Federal Building, one of 2,300 federally owned structures on the National Register of Historic Places.

National Register guidelines call for a historically appropriate color, in this case cream, but there is leeway if the community prefers pink, said Rebecca Nielsen of the General Services Administration.

The preference at a sparsely attended public meeting Tuesday was pink.

Amanda Welsh said painting the building a color that matched Ketchikan’s gray weather would be “dismally boring.

“I’m here to support the pink,” she said.

The L-shaped concrete building is significant for its modern European-influenced architecture. It was painted pink – or salmon, as some prefer to call the shade – in the early 1990s. A local committee chose the color.