Rhea darwinii

At Christ's College, Cambridge, Charles Darwin belonged to an eight-man dining society called the Glutton Club, which met weekly to eat "birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate." They got through hawk. They got through bittern. They broke, finally, on a tawny owl Darwin could only describe as "indescribable."

Then he went to sea.

Puma turned out to be "very white, and remarkably like veal in taste." Armadillo, roasted in its shell, was excellent. Agouti was "the very best meat I ever tasted." On the Galápagos he stowed thirty live tortoises on the Beagle's deck as a walking pantry and drank fluid straight from their bladders, finding it "quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste."

In January 1834, at Port Desire in Patagonia, the ship's artist Conrad Martens shot a small ostrich. The crew cooked it. Darwin ate it. Halfway through the meal — the man had, by this point, tasted essentially everything — he realised it was the smaller South American rhea species he had been hunting for months.

He made everyone stop. He salvaged the head, the neck, the legs, one wing, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin, and shipped the remains to Cambridge.

John Gould described what was left, and named the species Rhea darwinii.

The type specimen is what Darwin did not eat.