Roast dinosaur for Christmas

Tired of turkey? Bored with beef? Maybe it's time to consider a more exotic roast this holiday season. At Popular Science, Erin Berger has taken the time to figure out what dinosaur would hypothetically make the best dinner for people (as opposed to the other way around). The analysis turns out to be surprisingly fascinating — Dinosaurs probably tasted more like beef than chicken! Armored tails are the other other white meat! — and it turns out that what you really want is a nice chunk of sauropod neck.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: dinosaurs • Food • holidays • OM NOM NOM • Science

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Meanwhile at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse, in Manhattan…
- Boundegar
  
  What the hell is that???
  - kP
    
    Their Rib Steak – a rib eye with adjacent rib bone still attached.
edgore

Ostrich. There you go.
margaretpoa

Dinosaurs probably tasted more like beef than chicken!

I dunno. Therapoda might taste more like chicken.
- chenille
  
  It’s a mistake to think that because birds a line from dinosaurs, we should assume all their features were bird-like by default. There’s millions of years of change separating our birds from even flyers like Archaeopteryx – longer than between pigs and whales.
  
  Dinosaurs weren’t crocodile-bird intermediates, they were each a living thing with its own specialties. The type of analysis in the article, trying to reconstruct them on their own terms, is a much better way to understand them.
  
  P.S. And yes, I know we’re supposed to take “dinosaur” as including birds, but in my experience it only serves to encourage this sort of mistake.
  - margaretpoa
    
    Yeah….I was being silly. Sorry about that. I won’t assume you have a sense of humor again.
    - chenille
      
      Sorry. It was a general response; if your particular comment was just the bird joke instead, that same assumption still shows up right below it.
      
      It makes me wonder, though…how will you know when you’re addressing me?
zotlerg

How do they know it tasted like beef? They don’t even know what most dinosaurs really looked like or what colour they were.
Although, I bet they tasted like Rhino…
- http://twitter.com/coherent_light Scott Elyard
  
  They do have color in some cases: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=dinosaur+feather+color&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
  
  A better candidate for theropod flavor is probably ostrich or other ratite, maybe with alligator. I’ve had the latter, but none of the former, but Raven tells me ostrich tastes like chickeny beef.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Ostrich is very similar to filet mignon. It’s dark red, densely-grained and perfectly lean.
CHilke

But we already eat dinosaurs. We even have a holiday dedicated to it: http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/11/happy-dinosaur-day.html
http://twitter.com/coherent_light Scott Elyard

I’d always figured the Flintstones went out for Mammoth or Indricothere ribs.
- chenille
  
  They generally eat bronto ribs in the show itself. Of course Brontosaurus is an Apatosaurus with parts from a Camarasaurus, so it’s probably some sort of mixed meat like a turducken.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Aye.
Rich Keller

Just think of the turducken variations…

You could take an apatosaurus, stuff it with a diplodocus, put a tryannosaur inside that, cram a hadrosaur into its ribcage, shove a deinonychus in there, somehow, ram that full of a compsongathus that’s embedded with a microraptor. Only then can we begin to talk about sauces and wine parings.
- GawainLavers
  
  It’s dinosaurs all the way in!
http://www.youtube.com/user/PipLagenta Pip_R_Lagenta

”Dinosaurs probably tasted more like beef than chicken!” And as such, “Old World Monkeys” are more like Turtles than they are like “New World Monkeys” because, of course, the more distantly related two things are, the more similar they are. Duh.
- Rich Keller
  
  Didn’t Groucho Marxstone say something like that?
  
  “And east is east and west is west and if you take stegosaurus and stew them like archaeopteryx they taste much more like allosaurus than mosasaurus does. Now you tell me what you know.”