The story of the 1951 annual Explorers Club dinner is famous, at least among explorers, paleontologists and connoisseurs of exotic cuisine. In brief, mammoth was served.
A club member and journalist reported on the menu shortly afterward in The Christian Science Monitor, and club members have been talking about it ever since.
"At my first dinner, when I was a new member, they told me about it," said Jack Horner, a dinosaur paleontologist at Montana State University and an inspiration for the character of the paleontologist in the original "Jurassic Park" book. "And they were talking about having another."
Sadly, as with so many great stories, this one was too good to be true, as a group of Yale researchers reported Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. Fortunately, the tale they uncovered, using the most modern research techniques, has some of its own surprises.
The story has to begin with the meat itself, originally billed on the menu as Megatherium, an extinct ground sloth, but recalled over the decades as mammoth, perhaps because that was what it was called in the article in The Monitor.
Eating fossil meat may seem hazardous, but animals that died thousands of years ago have been found frozen, and the Yale researchers point to credible reports of paleontologists sampling the ancient flesh of extinct bison and mammoth. Care is called for, however, since the meat may rotted before the cold preserved it.
The reason it was even possible to check what the diners ate is that some leftovers ended up on a shelf in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Paul Griswold Howes, a club member, was unable to make the 1951 dinner, which must have been a great disappointment because, as the researchers note, the annual dinners have made the club "as well known for its notorious hors d'oeuvres like fried tarantulas and goat eyeballs as it is for its notable members such as Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong."
Howes was, however, the curator-director at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, and even if he could not attend the dinner, he wanted to exhibit some of it at the museum. So Wendell Phillips Dodge, a theater impresario who had organized the dinner, sent Howes a sample, which he labeled Megatherium.
That sample found its way to the Peabody in 2001, prompting years of puzzlement among students and professors. Was this jar of ethanol with a bit of flesh really cooked, extinct ground sloth from Alaska?
Recently, Matt Davis, a graduate student at Yale studying ice age ecology and one of the authors of the new paper, was having lunch with Eric Sargis, another author, who was giving a course in mammalogy. Davis was a teaching assistant for the course, and at the lunch, Sargis lamented, "It's amazing that I can't get anybody interested in the piece of sloth meat we have."
Davis recalled, "I was immediately hooked."
DNA analysis was called for, and they recruited Jessica R. Glass, another graduate student, and the first author on the paper, whose day job is studying the genetics of marine fish. As an undergraduate at Yale, she said, "I always knew about this specimen," adding, "I was fascinated by it."
She and other scientists joined the team. They assumed the flesh was thousands of years old, which meant that testing for DNA was more complicated than testing a more recent bit of flesh. "Also," she said, "the meat was cooked."
There was some legitimate science to be done. If the meat was really Megatherium, that would extend the species' known range from South America all the way to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.
In the end, after multiple tests, the team determined that the meat was neither mammoth nor sloth, nor ancient, nor even a mammal. Turtle soup had also been on the menu that night, before sea turtles were in such trouble, and the bit of flesh that the scientists tested turned out to be green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas.
It seems that Dodge had been having a bit of fun, and that he was the only one in on the joke.
"I do want to point out that it wasn't a big hoax from the Explorers Club," Glass added.
Dodge even confessed, sort of. In a club publication soon after the dinner, he seemed to say that he had passed off turtle as sloth. The scientists write that he "fancifully described the sloth's fossil history but hinted that he may have discovered 'a potion by means of which he could change, say, Cheylone mydas Cheuba (sic) from the Indian Ocean into Giant Sloth.'"
But nobody paid attention to him, and the story persisted.
Several of the researchers are members of the Explorers Club, which gave grants to support the DNA analysis and archival research.
Will Roseman, the club's executive director, said it was pleased with the research, although he pointed out that the world and the club had both changed since 1951, and the old taste for the exotic "has given way to a determined effort to introduce people to the foods that can sustain mankind well into the future."