What would a dinosaur taste like? We have pictures from books, ideas of how they sound from films and we can imagine what their skin might have felt like by comparing it to crocodiles and snakes, but what about our other 2 main senses? Taste like no other sense has the ability to generate immediate dramatic responses. One combination volatile compounds and fats might be sweet ambrosia to one person and cause another significant displeasure. The variety of meat we consume (to our knowledge) is rather narrow today. Most supermarkets contain the 3 main mammals, maybe a couple of birds, a few fish and the odd marine invertebrate. Such a narrow selection would have horrified the famous 19th century geologist William Buckland who was famous for his passion of Zoophagy, or put simply: eating his way through the animal kingdom! This passion was continued by his son and between them they have bequeathed the advice that we should never dine on bluebottles, earwigs or moles. Neither ever tasted a dinosaur (despite the fact that William Buckland wrote the first full account of Megalosaurus, which later was classified as a dinosaur!) and unfortunately we are no closer to the essential cloning necessary for first hand observations. So we are left with using some logical deduction. Dinosaurs are closely related to birds and crocodiles and so these two groups seem the likely starting point for the epicurean palaeontologist. However, evolutionary relationships are only part of the story. The old expression goes: you are what you eat. This is why we prefer herbivores over carnivores (carnivores have a strong gamey taste). The level and nature of activity also influences flavour (part of the reason why battery farmed chicken is as bland as cardboard). So if you want to taste a dinosaur you need to understand its palaeobiology. For example to get the idea of how a T-rex steak tasted (with chips obviously), you need a carnivorous bird, that doesn't mind a bit of rotting carrion and has strong endurance muscles.... Anyone up for hawk or vulture maybe? Alternatively, if the idea of eating an animal that has fed on the rotting remains of other animals doesn't get you salivating. Consider sticking to cow, which is probably what some of the herbivorous dinosaurs tasted like.
There is surely no steak rarer than that which has been cut from a creature that has not walked this Earth in the past 65 million years. Of the food-lovers among us, there is a certain subset of people whose fondness for unique flavors drive them to try to consume the most exotic of meats. And, though we’ll probably never know for sure, some people can’t help but wonder what the meat of a dinosaur would taste like. In Slate a few years back, Brian Palmer sought to answer this question, determining that Tyrannosaurus rex likely tasted not like chicken, but “more like hawk.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-did-dinosaur-taste-like-28428/?no-ist