This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

The Explorers Club in New York City, whose members have included Neil Armstrong,

Teddy Roosevelt, and the first men to reach both the

North and South Poles has a reputation for serving exotic entrees, like fried tarantula and

goat's eyeballs. In 1951, the dinner menu featured Pacific Spider

crabs, turtle soup, bison steak, and allegedly scavenged from glacial ice off

the coast of Alaska a mound of mammoth meat.

One club member who couldn't make the dinner asked to be sent a doggy bag, which he promptly

donated to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.

What was particularly odd,

odder than displaying leftovers in a museum,

was that the mammoth meat was labeled

Megathirium, a giant extinct ground sloth

native to South America.

So which was it?

Mammoth or monster sloth.

To find out, 64 years later,

researchers sequenced some mitochondrial DNA

they extracted from the preserved prehistoric takeaway.

What they found is that the source of the sample was neither mammoth nor sloth.

It was actually sea turtle, meat that likely contributed to both the main course and that turtle soup

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