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Would You Eat This Cretaceous Turducken?
['Sabrina Imbler']
Defector
Various journalists have tried and failed to investigate the origins of turducken, that matryoshka-inspired dish of a chicken nested inside a duck nested inside a turkey.
But turducken is best understood as a modern combination in an ancient lineage of engastration, a cooking technique in which one animal is stuffed inside another.
Scientists recently discovered an exemplar of this all-natural turducken from around 100 million years ago in the Cretaceous.
The recipe is as follows: Stuff some early cephalopods inside a flying reptile called a pterosaur, then stuff that pterosaur inside a marine reptile called an ichthyosaur.
All of this brings me to back to my question: Would you eat this Cretaceous turducken?