At one party or another one hears it boasted how epic it is, and how it will certainly go down in history

At one party or another one hears it boasted how epic it is, and how it will certainly go down in history. The tale of heavily pomaded guests sewn about on every side with jewels, in whatever numbers they may be presented, is, however, as old as the Proverbs of Solomon. For your party to enter the history books, fountains of champagne and a cake in the shape of the Sagrada Família are not enough: you must arrive at the ball on a snow-white horse, attended by a naked page, strike President Lyndon Johnson from the guest list, play polo with Prince Charles, or serve mammoth for supper. Yes, that has happened too!

In January 1951 New York saw an epoch-making dinner whose menu featured dishes made from the flesh of rare and extinct species, among them the giant sloth. The gala evening of the Explorers Club in the grand ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel went down in history as the day when people tasted mammoth once more. What is more, legend has it that the mammoth meat served was two hundred and fifty thousand years old.

The first oddity is that the hosts of the evening were an organisation of defenders of nature, the environment and other champions of the protection of the Earth, who, one would think, ought not to boast of dining on rare game. The second is the menu itself. Pacific spider crabs, bison steaks... very well. But mammoth and giant sloth, seriously?

We would never have learned the truth had it not been for one of the guests, who did not attend the dinner but asked for the delicacies to be sent to his home. And instead of tucking into a slice of boiled mammoth haunch and a fillet of prehistoric megatherium, he kept the curiosity, which ended up in a museum collection. In 2001 the specimen passed from the collection of the Bruce Museum to the mammal collection of the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, Connecticut.

A decade later, curious postgraduates of Yale University decided to subject the curious dish to DNA analysis. The analysis of a fist-sized piece of meat showed that it had belonged to a green sea turtle. Beneath the signboard of the mammoth lay a plain turtle, as so often happens with the sensations of the social world, when fairy-tale princesses turn out to be ordinary toads. Rest in peace, turtle.