I have 3 raccoon asks, so I'm gonna do them all together to make sure no one gets duplicates!!

You got it, friend! I'll try to do mostly non-meat things~ I hope eggs are okay? I know raccoons LOOOOOVE eggs, but idk if that's okay for you?

I know raccoons dip things in water, but it's actually a way of getting more information about the food! Raccoons have a much more sensitive sense of touch than anything else, so they use their hands more than their eyes and noses. So here's a bunch of finger foods!!

Mini Blueberry Hand Pies

Heart Strawberry Hand Pies

Fruit and Cream Cheese Pastries

Sweet Potato Banana Muffins

Easy Cinnamon French Toast Sticks

Egg and Hash Brown Bites

Pumpkin Breakfast Bites (no bake~)

Baked Oatmeal Cups

Muffin Tin Frittatas

Pumpkin Butterscotch Muffins

Honey-Pecan Mini Muffins

Easy Egg Mini Muffins

Granola Crust Fruit Tart

Breakfast Cookies

Sticky Buns

Easy Honey Biscuits (Great with This Sauce for dunking!!)

Maple Bacon Scones (Bacon Optional)

Apple Fritters

Easy Devilled Eggs

Did dinosaurs have red or white meat? Typically, we think of white meat as coming from poultry, such as chicken, duck, turkey, while red meat come from large mammals such as cows, pigs and deer. So if you were to hunt down a stegosaurus or a triceratops and cooked it over a barbeque, what colour would their meat be?

The redness of meat comes from a protein called myoglobin, which carries oxygen from the blood to the muscle cells. It is similar to haemoglobin, which gives blood the characteristic red colour. An important note is that when you see reddish water drip from meat from the butchers, you are seeing myoglobin, not blood (the blood is drained when the meat is prepared).

The difference in colour between red and white meat come from the type of muscle fibres and their myoglobin content. Red meat is made from slow-twitch fibres, which are useful for sustained activities such as walking or to keep standing. They exert a smaller force over a longer period of time, meaning they require more oxygen for aerobic respiration (a more efficient way of burning fuel using oxygen). Ergo, red meat is full of myoglobin, hence its deep rich red colour.

On the other hand, white meat is made of fast-twitch fibres. These fibres are better suited for quick bursts of energy, such as flying or quickly responding to a threat. These fibres use anaerobic respiration (no oxygen), which allow for a quicker, faster burn of energy, but only for a short time. In birds, the breast muscles are typically very white, but they do have some slow-twitch fibres in other muscle groups such as their wings and legs, which is why there is a distinction between light and dark meat.

So how about dinosaurs? Dinosaurs are the ancestors of birds and reptiles, so it would make sense for them to have had white meat. However, the majority of dinosaurs, especially large ones such as sauropods, would have had very powerful muscles with slow-twitch fibres, making their meat quite red. A good example are ostriches. Even though they are birds, their meat is as red as beef because they have powerful leg muscles for running. Smaller animals such as raptors probably had more white meat akin to modern poultry, as they would require sudden bursts of energy for ambushes.

As for how they would taste, that is something we could not answer until Jurassic Park becomes a reality.

The Science Behind Dark and Light Meat

“I wonder why some of the meat is dark and some is light.”

I hear this a lot around the holidays. Most people expect a shrug rather than an answer but that’s not what science is about!

Dark meat simply has more myoglobin, the protein in muscle (as “meat” is the cooked muscle) that binds oxygen. The areas that have dark meat are the areas of the body that involve repeated movement where muscles need to replenish oxygen more quickly. In birds that fly, for instance, this type of molecule would be found in wing muscles because that is an area of rapid movement.