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| Photo Copyright 2011, 2012 by Jackson Landers. |
I had the idea for this piece almost a year ago. Originally I had envisioned a very long, sprawling article of many thousands of words for a Sunday newspaper magazine. The plan was to infer the probable history of meat tasting like chicken by eating the surviving members of various clades. I'd wanted to have a series of formal taste tests with the various species involved, personally bagging most of the species to be sure that bad butchery didn't skew the results. Helenah Swedberg and I talked about filming it -- and I do still think that this would make for great TV.
It turned out that nobody was interested in handing me the thousands of dollars that it would have taken to do this the way I had wanted to. But the basic concept was perfect for Slate in a condensed format.
Usually I write in the science section but this one was for the food section and the science content was (with good reason) pared down accordingly.
Some of what had to be cut included an explanation of cladistic taxonomy and a brief explanation of the difference between dark meat versus light meat.
Personal experience with a wide variety of birds has taught me that they do not all taste the same. Pheasant is usually close enough to chicken that a typical diner won’t know the difference. Yet mourning doves and Canada geese look and taste more like beef. The most obvious difference between a chicken or pheasant prepared for the table and a dove or Canada goose is that the former are mostly white meat, while the latter consist almost entirely of dark meat.
Dark meat is made of 'fast-twitch' muscle fibers that give steady performance over long periods of continuous use, while 'slow-twitch' light-meat muscle fibers are good for short-term bursts of speed and power. The differences between these muscle types tell me that that I ought to be looking at other animals that are more prone to rapid, short-term bursts of speed rather than dissecting nature’s marathon runners.
I don't propose that there has been a continuous and unbroken succession of species that tasted like chicken all the way from P. finneae straight to the modern chicken. Probably there have been a lot of species along the way that had lives requiring more slow-twitch muscle and therefore were predominantly dark meat.
Incidentally, P. finneae may or may not be a direct ancestor of modern tetrapods. I think that most 'missing links' uncovered in the fossil record are really representatives of groups of species rather than the evolutionary Rosetta stones that we like to make them into. I'm not even convinced that Lucy was a direct ancestor of modern humans. There were lots and lots of species of early amphibians and probably lots of different species of advanced bipedal apes. The fossil record is so very thin that the odds of happening to find exactly the piece of the puzzle we need for a 'missing link' are ridiculously low. But having a representative of a group of species still helps us to understand evolution.
Most of the non-extinct species that I discuss in the finished articles are things that I have personally eaten and can vouch for. I think the only things that I had to take someone else's word for were coelacanths and lungfish.
This whole thing is based on the premise of the human palate, of course. Mine, specifically. Maybe chicken and frog legs taste totally different to other animals. Could P. finneyae only taste like chicken if there was something around with taste buds capable of noticing? I don't know. Its the old 'tree falls in the middle of the woods with nobody around' question. Schroedinger's cat and whatnot.
Quantum physics not withstanding, I do think that Pederpes finneyae probably did taste like chicken, and I doubt that very many of its ancestors did.
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