Well I don’t know that for sure if the coastal cave people would have eaten this guy – no cookbooks of the period have survived – but I figure this GIANT fossil throwback is sort of like a crab, and anything living was at one time or another cooked up and tasted. I have no such ehem culinary designs on this guy, but look at him! That’s my foot in the frame for reference, my size 9.5 lady foot, this guy’s the size of a stock pot! I also had no idea then nor now if he’d expired on the beach or if he was just biding his time waiting for the tide to come back in, and so, a little scared he’d bite me if I tried to move him, let Nature take its course. He wasn’t there when the next low tide cycled through, so I hope he’s somewhere in Long Island Sound scaring the crap out of everything smaller than he (or she).
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The Amusing Mouth 
Then, in the cave years, they just clubbed it, turned it over and hop on the fire. As you said it has the size of a stockpot. I’ve no idea if they are tasty or if they are on any menu.
Would you even need to club it, though, or like a lobster or a turtle, once you’ve got it flipped onto its back is simply it a matter of “add heat”?
What an odd question for a vegetarian foodie to ask about a creature from the Sound, as I will never know the answer via personal experience, and since the trogla-crabla-dino fossil has disappeared from the beach and out of kitchen radius. Unless being sold under another name, I’ve not heard of these things being flogged on any menu, but “local” food is sometimes surprising, and I think these creatures are not uncommon (ones as gigantor as our featured friend might be). The chances are definitely nonzero that somewhere in time someone has tried to cook and eat one of these guys. I’ll leave it to more devoted googlers to find the resulting accounts.
The question does make me think of a recent post on DC’s City Paper’s food blog, recounting a potluck featuring a locally sourced muskrat. The post went on to request anyone’s suggestions for cooking muskrat (the potluck served it roasted). Stranger things have been declared eatable (chicken feet, pork belly, poisonous fish). Someone had to look at the early artichoke and say, “I can eat that.”
As far as “tasty,” for the muskrat and for our horseshoe crab-ish friend, I think the principle “you are what you eat” comes into play. Wild catfish, for example, tastes like the muddy bottom of a pond; you can taste in the milk if the cow got into an onion patch all day, or if a hive of bees spent the summer in a field of lavender. What does a giant crab fossil sea creature like this eat? I don’t know. But people eat oysters (sold at the local farmers market!) from this body of water, so maybe these giant seabugs are a delicacy just waiting to be discovered. Maybe the cave people knew it all along.