If an expansive Mesozoic menu was laid out in front of you, what would you order? Tyranno tenders or triceratops-burgers with triple cheese? Would you go for a slow-cooked stegosaurus steak or the velociraptor ribs — the Cretaceous fast-food option? Determining what dinosaurs tasted like is not an easy question to answer.
“I don’t know if you can really say too much definitively about it,” says David Varricchio, a paleontologist at Montana State University.
But there may be some clues about the taste of them — after all, we eat dinosaurs all the time, whether it’s Thanksgiving dinner turkey or chicken dino nuggets. Varricchio says that what we can infer about dinosaur taste is mostly based on factors like their diet, physiology, and what species they were related to.
Did Dinosaurs Taste Like Chicken?
“The cheap and easy take” about the taste of dinosaurs is that they’d likely taste like chicken, says Nick Longrich, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Bath in England.
Both he and Varricchio point to the case of alligator meat, which is a little like chicken, for example. But Longrich still doubts that dinosaurs would taste like chicken for several reasons. For starters, “not even all chicken tastes like chicken,” he says, referencing the difference in flavor between light and dark meat.
If by chicken, most people think of the white breast meat, it’s still unlikely that other types of dinosaurs tasted like it. Plus, even other birds like duck or turkey taste a little different than chicken, so there is no reason to think that other dinosaurs would taste more like chicken, Longrich says.
Read More: The Time of Giants: How Did Dinosaurs Get So Big?
Taste of Red Meat
Humans have been farming some of the largest birds on our planet for some time, and the taste of ostrich or emu is more like red meat, Varricchio says, as opposed to turkey and chicken, which are roughly more like each other than either is to ostrich or emu.
Some of the more active dinosaurs that relied on speed and running, for example, might have had meat that tasted a little more like ostrich or emu due to a similar physiology.
What Did Large, Slower-Moving Dinosaurs Taste Like?
It’s more difficult to guess what triceratops or stegosaurus might have tasted like. These creatures — or even large sauropods — typically have slower metabolisms than fast-moving theropods.
Since they would have had less burst activity, they may have tasted more like alligator, Varricchio says, or even pork.
Longrich says that some dinosaurs would have likely had more of a red meat flavor. “Spinosaurus, for example, was aquatic, so it may have had very high amount of myoglobin to store oxygen in its tissues, the way whales, seals, and otters do,” he says. Myoglobin is a protein usually found in red meat, and the amount of it can have a big effect on taste.
In these large, slow-moving creatures, age may also have played a factor in the taste of their meat, in the same way that veal tastes different from other beef, or the way that lamb tastes different from mutton.
Read More: How Scientists Reconstruct What Dinosaurs Looked Like
Tasting Herbivores vs. Carnivores
The diet of dinosaurs likely also played a role in their taste. In the same way that grass-fed beef might taste different from corn-fed beef, creatures that ate certain types of plants may vary from other dinosaurs that feasted on other vegetation.
Most of the meat humans eat comes from plant eating or omnivorous species — our typical meat doesn’t usually eat meat. “Bears that eat a lot of berries, for example, are supposed to be tastier than those eating a lot of fish,” Longrich says, adding that baboons, which eat lots of fruits “have an incredibly sweet, succulent meat.”
The trouble for dinosaur meat was many fruits didn’t exist in the Mesozoic. Grass hadn’t even taken off when non-bird dinosaurs were around — herbivores mostly would have eaten ferns, conifers, and cycads.
“How does that affect the taste? Hard to say,” Longrich says. “I have never had beef fed on ferns and conifers.”
It’s even harder to tell what a carnivore like Tyrannosaurus rex would have tasted like. Varricchio notes that some research has found evidence of individual T. rexes having parasitic fungus infections. Whether that would have infused a Tyranno-steak with a mushroom or yeast flavor is unclear, but it would probably be best to avoid that dinner altogether.
Regardless of some of the guesses we can make about the taste of certain types of dinosaurs, it’s likely that they were just as diverse — if not more so — than the taste of bird meat, or mammal meat, today.
“You’re dealing with over 100 million years, a huge range of species with different lifestyles, and diets that range from more primitive plants like ferns and cycads and conifers, to more flowering plants and fruit towards the end,” Longrich says.
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Joshua Rapp Learn is an award-winning D.C.-based science writer. An expat Albertan, he contributes to a number of science publications like National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, New Scientist, Hakai, and others.
