Yale puts prehistoric mystery meat to the test (spoiler alert: it’s not woolly mammoth OR giant ground sloth)

February 3, 2016

Sorry, Explorers Club, but woolly mammoth is no longer on the menu. Neither is the giant ground sloth.

A Yale-led analysis has shown that a famous morsel of meat from a 1951 Explorers Club dinner is not, in fact, a hunk of woolly mammoth. It is green sea turtle meat, most likely set aside from the soup course.

At issue is the taxonomic provenance of a fist-sized piece of animal flesh prepared for an Explorers Club shindig in New York City. The event, held Jan. 13, 1951 in the Grand Ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, featured a dinner of Pacific spider crabs, green turtle soup, bison steaks, and portions of a 250,000-year-old woolly mammoth that had been preserved in glacial ice. At least, that’s the menu that entered popular lore. Others in attendance at the dinner thought the main entrée was meat from an extinct giant ground sloth.

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