November 26, 2008
T. Rex: The other white meat?
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The Smithsonian staff will be taking the day off tomorrow to gather with family and eat our preferred turkey variant (turkey, tofurkey, turducken, etc.).
So, with food on everyone’s minds, now seemed as good a time as any to address the inevitable question: What did dinosaurs taste like?
And, yes, the inevitable answer: Chicken.
Well, possibly chicken. The best clue comes from two studies conducted in 2007-2008, by John Asara of Harvard Medical School and Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University (whose work on soft tissue in dinosaurs was described in Smithsonian magazine’s “Dinosaur Shocker.”) As the Washington Post reported:
“Protein retrieved from a 68 millon-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone closely resembles the main protein in chicken and ostrich bones and is only distantly related to lizards’, strengthening the popular idea that birds, and not reptiles, are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.
In the new analysis, the team compared the order of 89 amino acids from the T. rex sample to the equivalent collagen sequence from a chicken, an ostrich, an alligator and a green anole lizard, a reptile commonly used in laboratory research.
The results indicate that T. rex, chickens and ostriches are evolutionary siblings, all descended from a single unidentified predecessor. Alligator collagen is more distantly related, and lizard collagen is more distantly related still.”
When the research team first released their findings in 2007, the New York Times wryly observed: “The scientists resisted being drawn into speculation on the likely taste of a T-rex drumstick.”
But, by 2008, Asara felt sure enough of his latest study to note, “Based on this data, you can be very confident that T. rex would taste more like chicken than it did last year.”
Our distant ancestors could have confirmed this theory—and, no, I’m not talking about cavemen like the fur bikini-clad Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. I’m referring to a shrew-like mammal named Repenomamus robustus, which lived 130 million years ago. In 2005, scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York announced they had found a fossilized specimen, with a baby dinosaur still in its gullet. “This is the first direct evidence that mammals fed on dinosaurs,” said Jin Meng, a paleontologist at the museum. “Now we can say that dinosaurs could be very tasty, which is good news.”
Well, good news if you’re not a dinosaur. In the meantime, the precise answer to the question of what dinosaurs tasted like will remain a mystery.
However, this much we know for certain: They weren’t kosher.
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“Should you, therefore, find a dinosaur steak listed on your menu you should refuse it on the grounds of kashrut and due to the age of the meat.”
LOL
I would /assume/ the results would be the same, but did they carry this experiment out with just the T. Rex or are any other dinos potentially on the plate? Naturally the predators like T. Rex are already very bird-like (that they would even HAVE drumsticks is telling, you would assume that in a cartoon they would be cooked like chicken without any scientific basis), but what about sauropods and ceratopsians and that sort, who–based purely on their physical appearance and ecological niches–have more in common with beef? Wouldn’t it be more interesting and surprising in an “oh I didn’t think about that” way if it went against an already made assumption, such as confirming that a Flintstones’ “Bronto-Burger” is less Big Mac and more Grilled Chicken?
This is important!
Hey, at least the uniformitarians/Darwinians know how to take a thoroughly scientific, observable, prima facie invalidation of their entire world-view with such good humor. Finger-lickin’ and rearend-kickin’ good indeed.
[...] The debate also owes its origins to the festive Purim tradition of mocking serious rabbinical studies. (See, for instance, the discussion of whether dinosaurs are kosher, mentioned at Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking blog.) [...]
[...] it now seems that this view is not exactly right. In very exceptional circumstances , remnants of dinosaur soft tissue can be preserved, and a recently published paper in the journal Science throws new support to this controversial [...]
[...] it now seems that this view is not exactly right. In very exceptional circumstances , remnants of dinosaur soft tissue can be preserved, and a recently published paper in the journal Science throws new support to this controversial [...]