Asked by: Peter Makepeace, Northamptonshire
Dinosaurs probably would have tasted like chicken. Okay, so everybody always says that everything tastes like chicken. But I’m not being facetious. Birds evolved from dinosaurs, which means that they’re essentially modern-day dinosaurs.
Of course, not all birds taste like chicken, though. So maybe some dinosaurs would have tasted like duck or turkey or game birds, depending on the dinosaur’s diet and fat content. Plant-eating dinosaurs such as Triceratops and Diplodocus probably would have been tastiest.
The animal fat in the diet of carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor would have given them an overly ‘gamey’ flavour (one of the reasons we eat cows but not wolves).
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Steve is a professor and palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the book The Rise And Reign Of The Mammals (£20, Picador), a 325-million-year odyssey of mammalian evolution and the people who study mammal fossils.
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