Would You Eat a 250,000-year-old Steak?

There’s a story behind this bizarre question, but reality and myth may be mixed up here.

I used to work in the Paleobiology department at the National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution. Our exhibits, especially after we opened the new Deep Time exhibit, had some of the most unique artifacts imaginable. But the backstage, what most people don’t see, was equally fascinating. There, between drawers and collections from over two centuries ago, there was one of the most unique pieces I have ever seen, which still blows my mind today. But even more fascinating is the story behind…

Imagine this: you’re sitting at a fancy dinner, your fork and knife in hand, ready to dive into a dish that’s not been tasted by humans for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. The waiter presents your plate with a flourish, and there it is — a mammoth steak, aged 250,000 years, looking as fresh and juicy as if it were from your local butcher. Sounds like a plot from a sci-fi novel, doesn’t it? But hold on because this tale, as outlandish as it sounds, has roots in reality and myth.

Let’s start with the mammoth in the room. Mammoths, those woolly, elephant-like giants, roamed the Earth during the Ice Age and have fascinated scientists and the public alike for centuries. The idea of eating mammoth meat isn’t new. It pops up in stories and rumors, depicting a time when the line between the past and present blurs.

Many stories circulate like this: A group of hungry scientists, after a long day of excavating a perfectly preserved mammoth carcass from the permafrost, decides to grill a piece of this prehistoric creature. The meat, they claim, tasted as good as it looked—remarkably fresh and delicious, shared among the team and even the camp dogs.

But let’s not get carried away. While this story tickles the imagination, the reality is a bit more… pungent. Take the Berezovsky mammoth, for example, a well-preserved mammoth discovered in the permafrost of northeastern Siberia along the banks of the Berezovka River in 1900 and excavated in 1901. Rumors swirled that the excavation team indulged in a mammoth feast, but truth be told, the meat, once thawed, smelled more like old roadkill than a fine dining experience.

Excavating a fossil this size isn’t easy. It can take weeks and even months, especially if we don’t want to damage the specimen. To prevent the mammoth from being damaged by the weather, they had to build a tent around it. But as the flesh thawed, it started smelling so terrible that paleontologists occasionally had to leave the tent. You can imagine it didn’t look appetizing, either.

But of course, this was an excavation being done by humans who, one night, after long hours of work at the excavation site, drank a bit more than one should. And, of course, what did they do? They dared one another to take a bite of the stinky prehistoric animal. Despite a brave (or perhaps foolish) attempt to mask the taste with pepper, nobody could take a single bite, although some reports say one took a little snip. The camp dogs, however, were not so picky. After all, dogs have a smaller digestive tract that prevents them from getting as sick as we would.

Still, they managed to save some of the rotting meat and put it in formaldehyde. That’s precisely the specimen at the Smithsonian Institution I was talking about. Preserved muscle tissue was taken from the left hind leg of the mammoth (See image below). The whole specimen is now displaced in a Saint Petersburg, Russia museum.

It’s January 13, 1951, and New York City’s Roosevelt Hotel grand ballroom is excitedly buzzing. The Explorers Club is hosting its swanky annual dinner in the grand ballroom, known for its wild and unusual dishes. That night, the talk of the town was that the main course featured slices of mammoth meat sourced from a whopping 250,000-year-old carcass uncovered in Alaska.

But here’s where things start to get a bit tangled. There was a mix-up as, supposedly, the main course was actually meat from a Megatherium, which is a giant ground sloth that used to roam South America — not Alaska. The confusion partly stemmed from a mix-up at the Christian Science Monitor magazine, which thought that “Megatherium” was another word for mammoth and mistakenly reported the mammoth meat story.

At the dinner, opinions were split—some diners thought they ate ground sloth, others believed it was mammoth. The official word from the club was that they simply served “prehistoric meat.” Not the most mouth-watering description, right?

However, some stories come to conclusions here. One club member who missed the dinner didn’t want to miss out on the meal, so he asked for his share to be preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. The promoter, Wendell Phillips Dodge (yep, the same guy who once represented Mae West in Hollywood), labeled it as “megatherium meat” on the specimen card. The bottle was displayed at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the absentee club member worked.

That bottle sat there until 2001 when it found a new home at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Fast forward to 2014, some curious Yale students decided to run DNA tests on the bottled meat. Spoiler alert: it turned out to be from a green sea turtle, not a mammoth or a giant sloth. Interestingly, green sea turtle soup was also on the menu that night, which suggests the turtle meat might have been cheekily labeled as megatherium meat as a sort of inside joke. Dodge even joked after the dinner about turning turtle into sloth meat. Despite the confusion, the legendary tale of mammoth meat at the Explorers Club dinner has endured in popular memory.

Interestingly, it’s not all tales and rumors. There’s a recorded instance of scientists eating the meat of a 36,000-year-old mummified steppe bison, nicknamed Blue Babe, in a stew that, while not gourmet, didn’t make anyone sick. One of the comensals reported that, with enough onions, anything is edible. The specimen was prepared for taxidermied and can now be seen at the University of Alaska Museum at Fairbanks.

But in today’s world, the closest we’ve come to reviving the taste of the Ice Age is through lab-grown meat, including a mammoth meatball created from DNA. While not yet on the menu for public consumption—as scientists are not certain whether mammoth proteins would make modern humans sick—it represents a fascinating intersection of science, history, and culinary exploration.

So, would you eat a 250,000-year-old mammoth steak? The question tickles the imagination and blurs the lines between past and present. Whether the opportunity ever becomes real or remains a tantalizing what-if, one thing is clear: the stories of mammoth meat have a flavor all their own, a blend of fact and fiction.