Considering the traditional size of the Thanksgiving turkey we eat for dinner, you may find a shock at the various records involving the largest turkeys in history. With some of these being too large to fit on the dinner table, it’s interesting to see some of them in relation to companies that serve us poultry still to this day.
You can see online that the largest live turkey ever recorded weighed 86 pounds. This was for a stag named Tyson, probably a name that sounds familiar to you, right? This live turkey belonged to a man named Philip Cook in Peterborough, U.K. It also won London’s “Heaviest Turkey” competition in 1989.
Additionally, you can see some turkeys with records for the largest killed turkey, the tallest turkey, and the largest species of wild turkey. Apparently, the largest turkey killed was on April 21, 2015, in Lyon County, Kentucky. This was the heaviest turkey ever registered with the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF).
Then, the tallest turkey or Turkish resident was Turkish Sultan Kösen, born December 10, 1982, named the Guinness tallest living male at almost 8’3”. And there is also the largest species of wild turkey, which is the Gould’s turkey, a bird of the mountainous regions of Northern Mexico, first described in 1856 in this area.
And you can also plan on the good-sized turkey to be about a 20-pound bird with a 10-inch beard and 1-inch spurs. Of course, those are turkeys that are scored in competitions!
