Great greasy gravy, I can't believe I've neglected my own "Ask Me" thread so badly!
I'm so sorry!
How was your Easter?
Fairly uneventful. Apologies to anyone reading this who values the religious aspects of Easter, but for me and my family, Easter is little more than an excuse to hunt down hand-decorated hard-boiled hen fruit and eat lots of chocolate and ham.
Since you're posting more often now (As in more than once a month) You wanna try to answer my question? 
Yes, I'm sorry.
I've actually been working on a (very long) response to your question for months, but like my activity on the GOF until recently, my progress on it has been sporadic. Completing it, however, was in fact on my immediate "to do" list even before you reminded me.
I'm wondering if you can get together your Paleontological knowledge to answer this little question that's been bugging me. What did dinosaurs taste like?
First I's say like any other reptile, like alligator or something, but there's that little thing about them being closely related to birds. So would they actually taste like chicken then?
Now that's a
really tricky question, but also a really good one. I can say you're probably on the right track in assuming that alligator and chicken are good starting points for speculating on what dinosaurs tasted like. Pretty much any time someone poses a question about dinosaurs that could only be solidly answered by studying a flesh-and-blood dinosaur, paleontologists turn to birds and crocodilians to make inferences. This makes sense, considering birds are descended from a group of dinosaurs, and crocodilians had a close common ancestor with dinosaurs. The problem is that dinosaurs were extremely diverse, and inhabited a wide variety of niches, so there's only so much one can infer from animals that are mostly wither semiaquatic ambush predators or small-bodied, high-energy fliers. It would be like trying to figure out everything about the behavior and physiology of mammals by studying only bats and platypuses. But I digress.
According to one source I found, alligator and crocodile meat does taste something like chicken, due to the fact that they have large amounts of anaerobic, or fast-twitch, muscle fibers. Fast-twitch muscle is extremely powerful and requires little or no oxygen to function, but it tires much more quickly than aerobic, or slow-twitch, muscle. It allows for the short, sharp bursts of speed which crocodilians use to catch prey, and birds like chickens to rapidly propel themselves into the air to escape from predators. Slow-twitch muscle, by comparison, has less power output, but is good for sustained activity like endurance running or flapping flight, as well as structural support for the body. Slow-twitch muscle fibers are packed with blood vessels, myoglobin, and mitochondria, and as a result are dark in color and, when eaten, have a richer, “meatier” flavor (think beef and pork). Fast-twitch muscle fibers, on the other hand, contain mostly glycogen, and are paler. Apparently, animals with a lot of fast-twitch muscle tend to taste like chicken.
Tha ratio of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle in an animal often correlates with the animal’s lifestyle, and what it needs those muscles for. Size is also a factor, because muscle supports and holds the body together as well as providing movement, and the larger the animal, the more muscle it needs for both of these purposes. Endurant slow-twitch muscle is best for the job of holding up a lot of weight, so larger land animals will have more slow-twitch muscle than smaller ones. It is also possible for the muscle composition of an animal to change as it grows up, so a sharptooth might describe the taste of a young dinosaur as different from an adult of the same species.
It is fairly safe to assume that since non-avian dinosaurs were generally terrestrial animals that spent most of their time walking, their legs would have contained a fairly high proportion of slow-twitch muscle. Their tails, however, may well have contained large amounts of fast-twitch muscle. Until recently, a much-overlooked feature of dinosaur anatomy was the caudofemoralis, a large slab of muscle that ran much of the length of the lower half of the tail, connecting to the thighbone via a tendon. When a dinosaur needed to get somewhere in a hurry, much of the power behind its sprint would have come not from the leg muscles, but from the caudofemoralis. It would seem likely that the highest concentration of “light meat” in a dinosaur would be in the tail.
The meat of large flightless birds like ostriches and emus tastes much like lean beef. It is plausible that the leg meat of similar-sized (50–300 lb) fast-running dinosaurs had a similar flavor. However, the tail meat of these dinosaurs may have tasted more like chicken or alligator. On a related noteóand this is pure speculation on my partóit may be that the tail meat of dinosaurs specialized for endurance running may have tasted slightly richer and beefier than that of dinosaurs adapted for high-speed sprinting.
It’s worth noting that muscle composition is just one of the variables behind the taste of a meat. The diet of the animal, the amount of fat and gristle in the meat, and even the hormones in the body can all have an influence on flavor and texture. Fat, for instance, though it doesn’t fossilize, was certainly stored by dinosaurs to sustain them over extended periods without. Some dinosaurs, such as those that lived in hot climates (which was the case for much of the world during the Mesozoic), may have concentrated their fat storage in certain areas of the body, as emus, camels, and lizards do, so as to reduce the risk of overheating. Those that lived closer to the poles, such as
Pachyrhinosaurus from Alaska and
Leaellynosaura from southern Australia, were perhaps fatty all over, to help with insulation. As a result, their meat may have tasted rather greasy and oily.
Meat from the smallest dinosaurs may have tasted like the “dark” meat of a chicken or turkey, due to the tendency of smaller, more active animals to have more fast-twitch muscle than larger, slower ones.
Dromaeosaurs (“raptors”) were sprinters and ambush predators that probably had a lot of fast-twitch muscle. They too might have tasted like poultry, but their carnivorous diet would have made their meat a lot more pungent.
Sauropods (“longnecks”) were enormous animals that were almost certainly very slow-moving as adults. It would be logical to assume that they would have tasted very beefy. There is evidence, however, that baby sauropods could sprint (on their hind legs, no less!) to escape predators, and they might have tasted slightly more chickeny than their elders.
Big hadrosaurs (“duckbills”), ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs), and thyreophorans (armored dinosaurs) probably all tasted beefy. None of them were especially fast runners (the armored ankylosaurs and stegosaurs, in particular, were among the slowest of dinosaurs), and they were all predominantly herbivorous, though some, like the ceratopsians, could have been omnivores. Recent discoveries of petrified hadrosaur “mummies” show that these dinosaurs were particularly meaty around the rump and tail, which likely contained muscle for both long-distance migrations and sprints of as much as 28 miles per hour (possibly enough to outrun a large tyrannosaur!), as well as perhaps fat stores to see them through lean times.
Large pterosaurs (flyers) are believed to have had mostly fast-twitch muscle tissue, to give them enough power to launch their large bodies into the air. So if Chomper ever tried chicken, there's a good chance that he would say it tastes like flyer.
On the other hand, smaller pterosaurs that did more flapping would have had more slow-twitch muscle, and thus might have tasted more like birds that do a lot of endurance flying, like ducks. It's worth keeping in mind, however, that most known pterosaurs had diets consisting of fish, shellfish, small animals, and insects, so perhaps gull, hawk, stork, or even bat meat might be more accurate flavor analogues for certain species.
Big theropods like
Tyrannosaurus and
Allosaurus were probably very beefy-tasting (though the theoretical rule of thumb that the tail meat probably tasted “lighter” than the meat elsewhere would presumably still apply). However, because they were meat-eaters themselves, their flesh probably would have been overpoweringly like the smaller carnivores, their diet probably would have had an overpoweringly pungent, metallic taste, and some parts of the body, such as the liver, may have been so rich in vitamins that they would have been toxic to consume.
I think that’s about all I can come up with right now. I repeat, please keep in mind that a lot of this is just informed speculation. At any rate, I hope you find it interesting and/or helpful
(and my apologies again for the delay in answering your question).
Sources:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_pol...taste_like.htmlhttp://decapoda.nhm.org/pdfs/2331/2331.pdfhttp://www.pterosaur.net/anatomy.phphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/musclehttp://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/...le.php?id=31599http://www.protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/c...l/65070891.html
