In 1951, a now-legendary dinner prepared for the Explorers Club was capped by an extraordinary treat: An actual portion of woolly mammoth, fresh from its icy prison, served hot and ready to eat.
Unfortunately, a Yale-led analysis has shown that this legend is just that—as what they ate was actually only green sea turtle.
This party happened on January 13, 1951, taking over the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City with a spread of Pacific spider crabs, green turtle soup, bison steaks, and pieces of what has either been remembered as 250,000-year-old woolly mammoth meat or hunks of extinct giant ground sloth.
“I’m sure people wanted to believe it,” said co-lead author Jessica Glass, a Yale graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology, in a statement. “They had no idea that many years later, a Ph.D. student would come along and figure this out with DNA sequencing techniques.”
“To me, this was a joke that no one got,” said the other co-lead author, Matt Davis, a Yale graduate student in geology and geophysics. “It’s like a Halloween party where you put your hand in spaghetti, but they tell you it’s brains. In this case, everyone actually believed it.”
Will you be having chicken or giant sloth?
Accoring to the paper in PLOS ONE, news sources at the time were quick to leap on the story, and reported that the meat had been supplied by the Reverend Bernard Hubbard, an Alaskan explorer otherwise known as the Glacier Priest. It was said that he had found the mammoth frozen in ice on Akutan Island in the Aleutians, and had it shipped specially to NYC by a U.S. Navy captain for the event.
The man who was responsible for promoting the Explorers Club’s event, Commander Wendell Phillips Dodge—who formerly had worked as film star Mae West’s agent—quickly sent out notices announcing the dinner would feature “prehistoric meat,” which was then variably understood to be either giant ground sloth (Megatherium) or woolly mammoth by the attendees.
The actual specimen saved from the dinner. (Credit: Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History)
One man who could not make the event requested a sample be sent to him, and Dodge personally saw to his request, filling out the specimen label as sloth and not mammoth—a fact that was long considered a discovery of possibly huge scientific import, since Megatherium was not and is not believed to have lived above South America. Finding one frozen in the Aleutians, then, would have blown this hypothesis to bits.
Despite the potential implications of this find, woolly mammoth carved straight from the ice seemed to capture the attention of the public more, where it was more often remembered as such. Of course, there was a scientific issue with it being mammoth—as preserved mammoths are actually found in the frozen dirt of the permafrost and not in ice.
And the answer is…
Although frozen mammoth would have been edible. “The meat wouldn’t taste good, but you could eat it,” Davis said.
But either way, the little specimen container with its meat has stayed in museum collections ever since, until it landed at Yale in 2001. In 2014, Davis and Glass—both current members of the Explorers Club—decided to pursue the actual source of the meat, using DNA analysis and archival research to determine whether it was sloth or mammoth.
After extracting the mitochondrial genome, they were able to determine that the meat seems to have come from green sea turtle, which matches well with the archival evidence—and preserves the notion that sloths indeed never left South America.
The meat served at the 1951 Explorers Club Annual Dinner. (Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Division of Vertebrate Zoology. Illustration by Matt Davis / Yale University)
“If this had not been from the banquet, we would still want to know the identity of the meat, because it would have large scientific implications,” Davis said.
Meanwhile, Glass added that the Explorer’s Club banquet this year is in March—but she can’t attend. “Maybe someone will save a piece of meat for me,” she said.
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