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Oct. 21st, 2008 08:17 pmSo, Christey and I went to Disney last Sunday for her birthday (Christey's mom was watching the younger kids, older boys were with their dad). We started out at Animal Kingdom, did some rides and saw some animals, the usual touristy stuff.
We did the Dinosaur ride, and there were castings of Dinosaur skeletons -- one that was pretty much a Disney/SciFi creation for the ride, basically of a dinosaur that probably never existed, and another outside that was a faithful, bone-by-bone casting of Sue, the largest and most complete T-Rex ever found.
Here's where I'm going to veer off, so brace yourselves.
Is it weird that as I gazed at the skeletons, I was tracing where the dino-loin meat would be (including tenderloin/filet mignon), where the baby-backs would come from, where the shanks and strips and chuck would come from?
It's a very odd anatomy. Modern birds come from dinosaurs, so in a sense, ostrich, chicken, and duck anatomy comes into play, which doesn't include the same kinds of meat cuts as mammals like, say, pork or beef or lamb. On the other hand, though birds come from dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs became birds -- the avian line may really only be descendant from the theropod line (including T-Rex), which means the other branches of dinosaur (such as the ceratopsids, stegosaurs, sauropods, etc) died out and just aren't represented in anything living today, except accidentally.
Ostrich and emu may be the closest relatives to T-Rex, and top loin and tenderloin are ostrich cuts today (unlike, say, duck, where what tenderloin that may exist is smaller than a string bean), but how do you extrapolate a 6-foot mostly vegetarian warm-blooded ostrich to a 45-foot, 7-ton warm-blooded carnivore? Especially one that evolved in a warmer, higher oxygen environment? I would assume T-Rex would be a fairly red meat due to the oxygen supply and demand, but larger animals also tend to be a little tougher, with the muscle tissue having more support tissue like collagen to support more mass and leverage. And if T-Rex was really more of a scavenger than a predator, as some theories suggest...maybe T-Rex would taste more like vulture or buzzard than the beefy tasting ostrich.
I don't know. Sometimes, I think it'd be fun to do a Jurassic Park cloning experiment on dinosaurs...not to show them off in zoos, but just to see what they taste like.
We did the Dinosaur ride, and there were castings of Dinosaur skeletons -- one that was pretty much a Disney/SciFi creation for the ride, basically of a dinosaur that probably never existed, and another outside that was a faithful, bone-by-bone casting of Sue, the largest and most complete T-Rex ever found.
Here's where I'm going to veer off, so brace yourselves.
Is it weird that as I gazed at the skeletons, I was tracing where the dino-loin meat would be (including tenderloin/filet mignon), where the baby-backs would come from, where the shanks and strips and chuck would come from?
It's a very odd anatomy. Modern birds come from dinosaurs, so in a sense, ostrich, chicken, and duck anatomy comes into play, which doesn't include the same kinds of meat cuts as mammals like, say, pork or beef or lamb. On the other hand, though birds come from dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs became birds -- the avian line may really only be descendant from the theropod line (including T-Rex), which means the other branches of dinosaur (such as the ceratopsids, stegosaurs, sauropods, etc) died out and just aren't represented in anything living today, except accidentally.
Ostrich and emu may be the closest relatives to T-Rex, and top loin and tenderloin are ostrich cuts today (unlike, say, duck, where what tenderloin that may exist is smaller than a string bean), but how do you extrapolate a 6-foot mostly vegetarian warm-blooded ostrich to a 45-foot, 7-ton warm-blooded carnivore? Especially one that evolved in a warmer, higher oxygen environment? I would assume T-Rex would be a fairly red meat due to the oxygen supply and demand, but larger animals also tend to be a little tougher, with the muscle tissue having more support tissue like collagen to support more mass and leverage. And if T-Rex was really more of a scavenger than a predator, as some theories suggest...maybe T-Rex would taste more like vulture or buzzard than the beefy tasting ostrich.
I don't know. Sometimes, I think it'd be fun to do a Jurassic Park cloning experiment on dinosaurs...not to show them off in zoos, but just to see what they taste like.
