Top 5 Coolest Megafauna of America (which I would like to eat)

1. Musk ox. There's nothing still walking around in North America that says 'prehistoric' quite so plainly as the musk ox. Despite the name, these large, shaggy remnants of the last ice age are not actually bovine at all but rather more properly classed as a sort of immense goat (although they have their own genus). Their numbers have rebounded from early twentieth century lows to over 100,000 worldwide and there are enough of them in Alaska that it is possible to get tags to hunt them.

I wonder what musk ox tastes like? I bet it reeks of the musk if you aren't really careful skinning it. Is the meat marbled like cows and hippos? Hippo is supposed to be superb, by the way.

2. Wallabies. The brush-tailed rock wallaby was accidentally introduced to the island of Oahu in Hawaii in 1916 when a breeding pair that had been intended for a zoo escaped. The wild population hovers at probably around 100 or so. Ok, technically these don't count as megafauna because they don't get over 100 pounds. But it's just really neat that there are essentially wild kangaroos in the United States.

I wonder what wallaby tastes like? I don't think you need to feel bad about bagging one of them despite the low numbers, since they are non-native invaders in the first place. I imagine there's not much fat on them, what with all the climbing they do.

3. Oryx. The oryx is a species of very exotic-looking antelope native to Africa. A bunch of them were brought to the US from the Kalahari desert during the 1960's and released into the wild. This was probably a stupid idea, but now here they are. Around 3,000- 6,000 of them (depending on who you ask) live in the vicinity of the White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico, with a smaller population in Red Rock.

It probably tastes like pronghorn antelope or whitetail deer. Good, but nothing special.

4. Crocodiles. Did you know that there is an American crocodile? Yup. We're not talking about alligators. There are only about 2,000 of them, but they are native to Florida and are the real thing, essentially like what you'd find on the Nile. They can get up to at least 22 feet long and could most definitely kick your ass. But if you try to eat one then you'll probably go to jail, since they are very much endangered.

Most of the crocodilians taste like something between chicken and pork. Like anything else, it probably depends a lot on the age of the animal and whether or not you bother to properly dry age the meat first.

The deliciousness of both crocodiles and chickens, creatures which represent essentially the 'before and after' of the evolution of dinosaurs, suggests to me that dinosaur meat must have been really, really good. That's a good case for some 'Jurassic Park' type science spending getting slipped into the next federal budget.

5. Hogzilla. I trust we're all familiar with Georgia's hogzilla? It weighed either 800 or 1,000 pounds, depending on who you believe. But who cares? The 200 pound difference is probably pretty academic when you are staring one of these things in the face. With tusks of 16 and 18 inches (it's not unusual for beasts with tusks to have a 'working' tusk that gets worn down faster than the other), hogzilla could easily rip your guts out and literally eat you alive. Yes, wild boars do eat meat. And as far as it's concerned, you are meat.

Hogzilla probably represents the vanguard of a new type of animal in the US. The hybrid offspring of wild boars and escaped domestic pigs that have been bred and engineered to grow to absurd sizes in as little time as possible. That's basically what we as a society get for engineering these animals into cage-bound monsters as if they were prize pumpkins for the county fair. They escape, breed with Russian razorbacks and their offspring will return to destroy us all. O hubris!

Tastes like pork.