'Prehistoric meat' from 1951 dinner tus out to be a mammoth ruse - CNET

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On January 13, 1951, in the Grand Ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York city, a dinner took place for the Explorers Club, a group interested in exploring the far reaches of the planet.

On the menu, according to popular lore, were Pacific spider crabs, green turtle soup, bison steaks and prehistoric meat. Some thought that last item came from a 250,000-year-old woolly mammoth that had been preserved in ice, and others believed it was from an extinct giant ground sloth called Megatherium.

Tus out neither guess was true. In fact, you could call it all a "mammoth" prank.

Researchers at Yale University recently got their hands on a chunk of meat from that dinner. It had been preserved at the request of one of the members who couldn't attend the meal back in 1951, and the morsel eventually found its way into the mammal collection at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.

After DNA analysis of the meat, the research team, led by evolutionary-biology graduate student Jessica Glass, found that the meat's genetic makeup was a perfect match for green sea turtle.