The turkey out of Mesoamerica: the one American livestock animal Spanish ships carried east

Almost every animal in the Columbian exchange moved west. The turkey went the other way. Penned and maize-fed in Mesoamerica long before contact, it was carried to Europe on Spanish ships in the early sixteenth century, bred into European varieties, and returned across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century as the forerunner of the commercial bird. Genetics puts the founding maternal lines in central Mexico.