Why Does Alligator Taste Like Chicken?

 

    I'm a picky eater - especially when it comes to new food. Of course, this means that my friends and family make a game of who can cajole me into eating the strangest dish. One of the strangest things I've ever tried was alligator. And what they told me was true - it did taste like chicken. A slightly fishy, slightly tougher chicken.

    Of course, now I'm left with the obvious question: why does alligator taste like chicken? I mean, what the heck? What do a chicken and an alligator have in common? One lays in swamps all day, hissing like a cobra and sunbathing like a model. The other struts around pecking at the dirt and yelling. Don't get me wrong; I know chickens are bloodthirsty little b*tches. But, really? Can a chicken even hold a candle to an alligator? 

Yes. Yes they can. 

To our modern eyes, the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) and the domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) are about as different as two species can get. One swims, one flies...ish. One is big enough to kill a human. The other is frequently kept as a pet. But what we don't know, and what Darwin figured out, is that two species never exist completely independently. Even a chicken and an alligator are connected by a common ancestor. And for these two, that ancestor might be more common than you think. 

First of all, we should establish that birds and dinosaurs are nearly one and the same from an evolutionary standpoint. As pointed out by paleobiologist John Ruben in his paper Paleobiology and the origins of avian flight, scientists are pretty convinced that birds and dinosaurs share an evolutionary line. BUT, if we go even further back into evolutionary history, we'll see that birds, dinosaurs, and crocodilians (which includes crocodiles, alligators, and gharials) all share a common lineage known as archosaurs (which, bonus points, also includes pterosaurs). 

Archosaurs as seen in the fossil records obviously aren't around anymore. Fossils suggest that archosaurs diverged into two groups about 250 million years ago. One group became crocodilians and other similar, but now extinct, lineages, while the other group went on to produce lineages of dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and birds. 

Now, I know you're asking, "Big deal, Madison. They diverged, like, ages ago. There's no way that's relevant now!" But you're wrong. 

Scientists used to think that the bird-like group that became dinosaurs, birds, and pterosaurs lost their connections to crocodilians pretty quickly, instead rapidly evolving into the familiar dinosaur forms known today by children everywhere. After all, early bird-line archosaurs (like Marasuchus, Dromoeron, and Lagerpeton, according to an article on this subject published by EurekaAlert in 2017) appeared small and dinosaur-like. But a newly-categorized fossil has shed different light on this old view. 

Teleocrater rhadinus

Meet Teleocrater rhadinus, the earliest known member of the bird-like archosaur lineage. It's not a direct relation to dinosaurs or birds - more like a strange, still-slightly-crocodilian cousin that you'd try to avoid at family gatherings. According to the authors of the paper published in Nature, Teleocrater isn't exactly like a dinosaur  (and thus a bird) or a crocodilian. It's somewhere in between, with the jaw muscle morphology of bird-like archosaurs but the splayed, hypermobile ankle joins that give crocodilians their characteristic gait. Teleocrater proves that bird-like archosaurs initially retained a lot of crocodile-like traits from the common ancestor of all archosaurs, and gained bird-like traits step by step over a longer period of time. In layman's terms, Teleocrater is the "missing link" between dinosaurs and the common ancestor they share with crocodilians. This crazy-looking thing is why alligators and chickens taste similar. 

Now I know you're asking, "Sooo...if I go kill a lizard and eat it, will he taste like chicken too?" And honestly, I don't know. Go try and report back on your findings. 

Or, on second thought, maybe don't. Reptiles like snakes, lizards, turtles, and their common ancestors aren't considered archosaurs. And yes, that means crocodilians are more closely related to birds than other reptiles. So I wouldn't chance it when it comes to lizards. 

So would Teleocrater taste like chicken? Maybe. Until we invent a time machine, I can't answer that. But I can definitely tell you that alligator doesn't taste like chicken. Why not? While the evolution of birds is still hazy, most scientists concur that crocodilians came first by at least 150 million years.

So really, alligator doesn't taste like chicken. Chicken tastes like alligator. 

Source articles, if you're so inclined: 

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-05/kfu-pmi053117.php

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-04/fm-ed041017.php

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-12/uoc--srg120514.php

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100209183335.htm