Vice Munchies tried to get to the bottom of a question that has been plaguing omnivores for millennia: what did dinosaurs taste like?
“Ever-curious, we rang up Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, the lead author on the dino-chicken study, for insight into what tearing into a rack of Tyrannosaur ribs would be like, from a flavor and texture perspective. Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but if Bhullar and his team can make a dino-chicken, they can probably make a pretty educated guess.
MUNCHIES: Hi! We’re really curious about what dinosaur meat tastes like. Is this a clear case of “tastes like chicken”?
Bhart-Anjan Bhullar: I can give you some pointers, I think. What range of birds have you had to eat?
Chicken, duck, turkey, ostrich, quail … probably a couple of other kinds, too.
The number one thing to say here—and this is driving home a point that has been made ad nauseum—is that when you’re eating birds, you are eating dinosaur. Birds are the remaining living dinosaurs, but they’re very modified from dinosaurs and their antecedents. Of those, ostrich would be the most important, because if you’d had ostrich, you’ve had a part of the most primitive living bird. And as I recall—I’ve had ostrich and emu—it doesn’t taste so different, but it’s a little heavier-tasting, tougher, a little more earthy, but it’s fundamentally pretty similar.”
Read the rest of the article here. Photo by Flickr user Kevin Dooley.