What Kind Of Dinosaur Would Taste The Best?

By Rudie Obias | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

FeathersWould dinosaur meat taste like chicken? It might be interesting to know what dinosaurs could’ve tasted like if they were still around today. But much like the animals of today, there is actually a lot to consider before choosing a prime cut of dinosaur meat.

There are carnivorous and herbivore dinosaurs and narrowing down your selection comes from choosing one of these types. According to Popular Science carnivorous dinosaurs would most likely be “gamey” and tough in texture due to their diet and activity. We would want to go for the plant-eating dinosaurs because they closely resemble the meats we are used to as humans. Most animals like cows, deer, and pigs don’t largely eat meat themselves and thus their meat is the most palatable to people.

When people ask me if a T-Rex would be good, well, I don’t think so,” David Varricchio, professor of paleontology at Montana State University, says. “They’ve found jaw abnormalities that suggests they were eating fetid meat and had diseases that came about from prey items. They would be pretty parasite-laden.

So we can rule out eating a T-Rex if we wanted to find the best tasting dinosaurs. Another question to narrow down the field is if you prefer red meat to white meat. The notion that dinosaurs would taste like chicken because they are so closely related to birds is a misnomer. Land-dwelling dinosaurs would be more closely related to red meat or beef considering the type of activity most dinosaurs exerts. Dinosaurs that take extended periods of activity would probably have muscles less like a chicken and more like slow-moving cows.

But there are exceptions, so the best tasting dinosaur after narrowing down choice cuts of meat would be Ornithomimosaurs. This ostrich-like herbivore dinosaur would closely resemble modern birds with the activity and diet that humans might find pleasing to taste. According to Varricchio…

About 80 percent of the Ornithomimids were hindquarters, and they were really well-suited for running, I’ve also done a little work on their bone histology and it’s safe to say they’re relatively fast-growing. I think it would be a lean, slightly wild-tasting red meat.

So there you have it. Some dinosaurs would be, in fact, tasty to some humans. But there are a large number of factors that would go into which dinosaur to pick to eat that it would be almost annoying to choose and most likely expensive. Maybe we’re better off sticking with vegetables. As they used to say on the short-lived TV series Dinosaurs from the early 90s, let’s give peas a chance!

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