Turkey Tale

Soon, families in the United States will sit down around a table to consume a famous dish: the Thanksgiving Turkey. According to a study done by the National Turkey Federation (yes, it's a real thing), 88% of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving, which amounts to around 46 million turkeys every year for Thanksgiving alone. Turkey has become more popular as an alternative to red meat in recent years as more varieties of turkey burgers, sausage, and cold cuts are added to supermarkets, not to mention all the dishes you could make with leftover turkey after Thanksgiving! Yet how much do you really know about that bird on your plate?

Gobble gobble! What a beautiful bird. Photo from:
http://jacksbbq.com/home/turkey/

Turkeys are native to North America, mainly the vast area east of the Rocky Mountains and some parts of central Mexico. There are two species of turkey in North America: the familiar Meleagris gallopavo and the slightly-less-common ocellated turkey, Meleagris ocellata, which can only be found in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The wild and domesticated turkeys belong to the same species, M. gallopavo, whose name literally means "chicken peacock." There are also five different subspecies of turkey that are found in different places of the United States, Mexico, and Canada: the eastern wild turkey, the Osceola (Florida) wild turkey, the Rio Grande wild turkey, Merriam's wild turkey, and Gould's wild turkey. 

Turkeys were first domesticated by the indigenous people of central Mexico in the modern-day states of Jalisco, Guerrera, and Veracruz around 2000 years ago. The birds were an excellent food source in both their meat and their eggs, and their feathers were used in decorations. Perhaps because of its silly appearance and perceived personality, the turkey was associated with the Aztec trickster god, Tezcatlipoca, a central deity of Aztec religion. New DNA analysis of turkey bones from the southwest United States suggest that a second, separate domestication event took place between 200 BCE and 500 CE. The evidence suggests that these turkeys lived in civilizations that were in central Arizona and New Mexico around and on the Colorado Plateau, which strongly implies that these animals were specifically bred by people instead of naturally migrating north from Mexico.

A ceramic whistle that looks like a turkey, from the Colima
shaft tomb culture in Jalisco, Mexico. 300 BCE–400 CE.

After the Spanish landed in the New World, they took some of the animals back with them to Europe.
The name turkey probably came from some of the birds coming into British ports via ships that traveled from the eastern Mediterranean Sea. They were incorrectly associated with the African guinea fowl, whose name back in the 1500s was the turkey cock, which was thought to have come originally from the country of Turkey. From there, the name stuck, and persists to the modern day. As a result of selective breeding in Europe, there are now many different varieties of turkeys, all part of the same original species. All of the domesticated turkeys today come from the original population that was domesticated in central Mexico thousands of years ago.

The names used to describe turkeys themselves are quite silly. Males are called toms, and females are called hens, which are actually normal names for birds. The two names for the young are rather odd though: poults and turkeylings (the best name I've ever heard for baby animals). The red pieces of flesh on the beak of the toms also have names. The flesh that connects to the bottom of the beak is called the wattle, and the flesh that connects to the top of the beak is called the snood. The average size of a turkey is 29.8 pounds and 3.5 feet long, but the largest turkey weighed 86 pounds and was 4.1 feet long!

An adorable turkeyling!
Photo by Kristie Gianopulos.

Finally, as you go to break the wishbone of the turkey after the meal, remember that the scientific name of that bone is the furcula, the "little fork" in Latin. The furcula is an ancient bone that is present in some theropod dinosaurs (think Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus), which was used as evidence to show how birds are modern dinosaurs. Furcula in birds are used to anchor the muscles that power the wings and help the birds to fly, but in domesticated turkeys, those muscles aren't really needed. Two people breaking the bone as a sign of good luck is a tradition that dates back to the 1600s, though it was not called officially called a wishbone until 1860.

Personally, the most interesting thing I knew about turkeys before today was that Benjamin Franklin once thought they should have been the national bird instead of the bald eagle. Knowing what I know now, I have to agree with him: the turkey deserves a lot more attention than as a centerpiece once a year. Thank you for reading!

Sources:
http://extension.illinois.edu/turkey/turkey_facts.cfm
http://www.nwtf.org/hunt/article/wild-turkey-subspecies
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2840336/ <--Turkey DNA study
Webster's II New College Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2005, ISBN 978-0-618-39601-6, p. 1217