On Sunday 10 June 2018 20:36:31 dep wrote:
> weird. as i was reading this just now, alton brown on "good eats" was
> speculating whether dinosaurs would have tasted like chicken. and no, i am
> not making this up. the episode is entitled "a bird in the pan," and the
> discussion is about three minutes in. amazing coincidence.
>
> dep

Now that is funny! I am just riffing off the top of my head. I didn't see the 
show, and only vaguely know it. I watch a several cooking shows, but that's 
not one of them. 

Don't they say that the crocodilians (including alligators, caimans, etc.) are 
basically living fossils, that haven't changed much since the time of 
dinosaurs, except to get smaller on the whole? There are people, I know, who 
have eaten them, so maybe there is a clue. 

*SNIP*
> > > > > > > This reminds me of a DOS game I bought (for I think $5 at a
> > computer > > > show) back in the late 1980s. It had a small install
> > routine that > > > copied the program to the hard drive and overwrote
> > autoexec.bat with > > > the name of the executable file. In those days
> > autoexec.bat could > > > run to a couple of pages, with us all trying to
> > make our machines a > > > little faster and getting use of memory above
> > 640k, which was a > > > delicate thing. To say nothing of the TSR
> > programs many of us ran. > > > Setting comspec right after we copied
> > command.com to a RAM drive. > > > That kind of thing. So autoexec.bat was
> > a nontrivial thing, and > > > turning a well-tuned machine into a
> > single-game console was > > > troublesome. > > > > I swear, this mailing
> > list is sort of like Jurassic Park: a place > > where dinosaurs still
> > roam the earth. > > > > Bill > > They still roam the earth, Bill, except
> > now we call them birds. :) I wonder if they tasted like chicken or
> > turkey, or more gamey like pheasant? Bill

And here I was, ready to pounce on the first person who was itching for a 
fight, who would try to say that mythological dragons, for instance, were 
some kind of dim memory of dinosaurs, or creative attempts to explain 
dinosaur fossils. 

Yes, in fact I do know that many dinosaurs (we now discover) had feathers. 
Also, humans and dinosaurs were never* living at the same time. 

[* At least, "never", as far as current science know. But then we also used to 
say that Homo sapiens never interbred with other humans, such as 
Neanderthals; and we now know that they did, and that all non-Africans 
(Europeans and Asians, mostly) have some Neanderthal genes; and that 
Neanderthals often had red hair.] 

Most attempts to explain mythological dragons by the backwards logic of 
referring to dinosaurs are, we find, unconsciously influenced by later 
literature - mostly science fiction and fantasy. Again, since humans were 
never around at the same time as dinosaurs, they could have no memory of them 
to feel the need to explain them away; and enormous dinosaur fossils, when 
they were discovered, were usually thought to be the bones of the Giants 
(that is, the Titans of Greek myth, the Vanir of Norse myth, and so on). 

Mythological dragons are altogether different; but if I go there, we will need 
to start not just a new thread, but a separate forum! 

It will be interesting, if we all survive long enough to witness such events, 
whether we can actually succeed in cloning and resurrecting extinct species 
from their recovered DNA. I don't know about dinosaurs as such; but I think 
it would be great to have woolly mammoths and some other species. And dodo 
birds would make an excellent food source, it seems. 

When the human race is forced to evacuate the wasteland of our future earth, 
and a lucky few will get to colonize other planets, maybe we can take some of 
our animals with us. 

Bill