A Yale researcher says a lavish 1951 Explorers Club dinner in New York City didn’t include 250,000-year-old extinct woolly mammoth, despite folklore about the event. Nor did the feast include meat from a giant ground sloth, as the menu promised.
A new DNA analysis from a fist-sized piece of meat that survived the soiree featuring “prehistoric meats” showed something more mundane: sea turtle.
“I’m sure people wanted to believe it. They had no idea that many years later, a Ph.D. student would come along and figure this out with DNA sequencing techniques,” said Jessica Glass, a Yale graduate student and co-lead author of a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.
The Explorers Club gala, in the grand ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, promised a menu of Pacific spider crabs, green turtle soup, bison steaks and meat from an extinct giant ground sloth.
The event appears to have similarities to a fictional account in the 1990 Matthew Broderick film “The Freshman,” in which high rollers paid $1 million for the privilege of eating meat from endangered species, only to be served Hawaiian tigerfish mixed with smoked turkey.
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