It’s been nearly 3,000 years since Aesop wrote “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” the fable in which an urban rodent exposes his rural cousin to the city’s superior dining options. A new study suggests Aesop was right about the geographical differences in rodent diets.

By analyzing the remains of brown rats that lived in and around Toronto between 1790 and 1890, researchers have determined that city rats enjoyed a higher-quality and more stable diet than rural rats did. Just as in Aesop’s tale, the city rats benefited from the largess of human waste, whereas country rats scraped by.

“Rats that lived in the city had a lot more meat in their diet,” said Eric Guiry, an archaeologist at Trent University in Ontario and lead author of the study, which was published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “You could see the difference in their bones.”

Dr. Guiry and his co-author, Michael Buckley of the University of Manchester, are specialists in the emerging field of paleoproteomics, which uses the proteins in ancient bones to glean insights into an animal’s behavior. Dr. Guiry wanted to use the technique on rats to see what it could reveal about human populations in the 1800s — a less onerous proposal than digging up and analyzing human remains. Knowledge gained from the research also could help cities better control their rat populations.