DINOS FOR DINNER

Q: What would dinosaur meat have tasted like?

A: Obviously, there is no way to be certain — there were not any hominids around to do a taste test. Our ancestors evolved tens of millions of years after the mass extinction of most dinosaurs.

In any event, the many kinds of dinosaurs, with different diets and means of locomotion, would presumably have had different flavors of meat.

Many informed speculations about dinosaur taste center on the acknowledged relationship between modern birds and flying dinosaurs. Scientists have even used genetics to reverseengineer chickens with dinosaurlike snouts.

One of the lead researchers of that study, Bhart-Anjan Bhullar of Yale University, has suggested that the flavor of flying dinosaurs might have resembled that of an ostrich, the most primitive of birds, or perhaps a carnivore like an eagle. The most primitive dinosaurs, he has speculated, would have had a flavor more like an alligator.

And the most famous of dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex? A literal shred of a clue emerged in 2007, when two teams of scientists were able to isolate, reconstruct and analyze fragments of collagen, a soft-tissue protein, from a T. rex fossil.

Some of the reconstructed fragments appeared to be related to chicken proteins, others to frog or newt proteins.