One of the drivers of me starting this blog was that I was working on a temporary exhibition on the changing scientific and artistic reconstructions of dinosaurs over the last two centuries. I'm delighted that that exhibition, 'Drawing Out The Dinosaurs' is open from tomorrow, Saturday 30th June, at the Lapworth Museum of Geology, on the campus of the University of Birmingham (UoB) in south Birmingham. Entry is free, and the exhibition will run until October 2018. Do come and see it! The exhibition is co-curated with Dr Will Tattersdill, a lecturer in English Literature at UoB who is interested in the portrayals of dinosaurs in literature and popular culture through time. Will and I trace changes in artistic reconstructions of three exemplar dinosaur species, Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Diplodocus, from the 19th century to the present, explain the processes of scientific discovery and artistic restoration, and invite visitors to create their own dinosaur reconstruction. We also have a corner of our small exhibition that focuses on dinosaurs and pop culture, and shows many of the records that have been discussed to date on this blog. There's lots of people to thank for help in making this happen. These include Jon Clatworthy and Anna Chrystal of the Lapworth Museum, Dr Jordan Kistler, who advised on and helped source the frames and layout for the timeline of the exhibition, Jon Radley and Warwickshire Museum for loaning Early Jurassic dinosaur specimens, my former MSci students Emily Brown and Luke Meade, who did the exhibition graphic design and digitised fossils, respectively, Dr Mark Witton, who created stunning new palaeoart for the exhibition, and the Cadbury Research Library, for loaning us historical books. Also, many thanks to the University of Birmingham for funding through two of its impact funds. This exhibition is part of a summer of dinosaurs and palaeoart in Birmingham. 'Dippy', the Natural History Museum's famous Diplodocus cast, is currently visiting the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in the city centre. I will be giving a talk on my research there in early August. Meanwhile, here at the Lapworth, palaeoartist Robert Nicholls will be an artist-in-residence over the summer, starting in August, and will be sculpting a life-sized Ichthyosaurus model live in the Museum. Once he's finished we're planning to hang it from the ceiling in the Jurassic section of the exhibition.
0 Comments
So far, this blog has been almost entirely dominated by dinosaurs. That's perhaps unsurprising, given how large they loom in the popular consciousness. By contrast, their Mesozoic mammalian contemporaries are pretty much absent from the annals of rock - I'm sadly not aware of any bands named after Morganucodon or Zofiabaatar. There is one exception though. The Early Mammals released a single album, Dinosaur Omelet, in the late 1980s, on Minneapolis's Channel 83 Records, home of the "best new bands in the upper Midwest" (check out the label's website, which looks like it has been fossilised since about 1998). There is almost no information available about the group, although a few details can be found in a web profile of the band's guitarist and singer Leo Whitebird. The front cover of Dinosaur Omelet features artwork by Marlene Morley, with a monstrous, tail-dragging theropod dinosaur, a volcano, and in the foreground, two small mammals chowing down on some dinosaur eggs. There's also something mysterious going on in the top right-hand corner - is this a Neanderthal face in the clouds? I asked my colleague and friend Elsa Panciroli what she made of the artwork. Elsa is currently completing her PhD at National Museums Scotland and the University of Edinburgh on Mesozoic mammals from the Isle of Skye, where she and I have done fieldwork together over several years. This is what Elsa had to say: "It looks like the artist modelled these Mesozoic mammals on a small nocturnal primate, like a tarsier or a galago. Of course primates only appeared around 55 million years ago, so they missed all the dinosaur egg-eating parties... Being generous to the artist, I imagine that when they heard that many mammals in the Mesozoic were likely nocturnal, they probably turned to well known, big-eyed nocturnal animals like the tarsier for inspiration. The massive, forward-facing eyes, rounded-face, and extremely derived arboreal adaptations of nocturnal tree-dwelling primates aren't seen in mammals until well after the dinosaurs went extinct. There is no evidence for massive eyes like this in any Mesozoic aged mammals. Tree-living mammals in the Mesozoic did have longer fingers and limbs, and possibly some had prehensile tails. But the animals on this album cover are sitting in a very 'primate-like' stance, for want of a better term, with much longer hind limbs than forelimbs, and the foot of the one in the foreground is very thin and splayed out, like a tarsier foot. No Mesozoic mammals had feet like this - that we know of so far. I'm sure you know about the old theory that the dinosaurs went extinct because mammals ate all their eggs. But there is evidence for mammals eating baby dinosaurs: Repenomamus is a large Cretaceous Mesozoic mammal found in China, with some species up to the size of a small pitbull. One specimen was found with the skeleton of a baby dinosaur in its stomach. So while this isn't egg-eating per se, it shows that some mammals at this time were eating dino-babies. Those little monsters." The music is raw, hard, garage rock. Elsa and I disagreed on what we thought about it - I'm not keen, but Elsa likes the title track, mainly because of its lyrics, written from the perspective of the chirpy little Mesozoic mammals that are driving the dinosaurs to extinction by gobbling up their eggs, with reference to the oceans filling with "dinosaur tears". The idea of dinosaurs being wiped out by voracious, egg-stealing mammals is an old one, but one that lacks any scientific support.
Only the title track is available on YouTube - to hear the rest of it you'll have to buy a copy of the vinyl. To finish up, here are the lyrics of Dinosaur Omelet in full: "You are a reptile and your blood is cold You may have been around but you're getting old But we got fur and speedy legs Our blood is warm and we eat your eggs I'll have a dinosaur omelet, cheese or plain Dinosaur omelet, the mammals will reign! We'll be human in a million years We'll have fire and clubs and spears Your eggs and young will disappear And the oceans will fill with dinosaur tears The weather's getting bad it's cold and damp Your dinosaur bodies will fill the swamps You'll never survive the coming storm But the mammals will because our blood is warm We'll be eatin' dinosaur omelet, cheese or plain Dinosaur omelet, the mammals will reign! We'll be human in a million years We'll have fire and clubs and spears Your eggs and young will disappear And the oceans will fill with dinosaur tears The ice is coming from the north As from our lairs we scurry forth To pick the meat from reptile bones And colonise your empty homes We'll be eatin' dinosaur omelet, cheese or plain Dinosaur omelet, the mammals will reign! We'll be human in a million years We'll have fire and clubs and spears Your eggs and young will disappear And the oceans will fill with dinosaur tears" So far on this blog, we've covered artists ranging from hugely successful (T. Rex, Roy Wood) to very niche but still sufficiently well known to warrant their own Wikipedia pages (Rote Kapelle, The Flock). For the next couple of posts though, we'll be venturing into truly obscure territory. The folk group Archaeopteryx released one album in 1976, First Flight - A Collection of Songs About Birds. It was released as a 12 inch vinyl record by a well-known UK charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), with some nice artwork of the early fossil bird Archaeopteryx by Peter Martin (an artist about whom I have not been able to find out anything) on the front and rear covers of the sleeve. Archaeopteryx is of course famous as it has generally been considered the oldest known bird, hence the name First Flight (ignoring, of course, that pterosaurs actually took to the skies more than 50 million years before birds, and that the flight abilities of Archaeopteryx are the subject of much debate). I assume that the record was intended as a fundraiser for the RSPB, although there's no information available online to confirm this. The album features classically-influenced folk versions of traditional songs about British birds, ranging from the nightingale to the turtle dove, recorded in a church in Buckinghamshire. The songs are interspersed with snippets of bird song from the BBC Sound Archives. There are no songs about fossil birds, so the link to Archaeopteryx is unclear. If all that sounds like it might be unlikely to be up my street, you'd be correct: as much as I like some British folk music of this era, this is just too traditional and too folk for me. If you want to listen to it yourself then you'll have to buy a copy, because as far as I can tell, no-one has digitised it and made it available. It is a nice sleeve that will frame up well, and copies are available quite cheaply on Discogs and eBay. If anyone knows more about the back story to this record I'd love to hear it. I actually donated a framed copy of this record to the 2017 SVPCA auction, the aim of which is to raise money to support attendance at the conference for those with limited funding resources. I felt slightly guilty when the bidding spiralled out of control, and one of our conference attendees ended up paying £60 for it, but at least the money went to a worthy cause. If the person who bought it is by chance reading this, please let me know what you make of the record... Does it get any better than this? Marc Bolan's glam rock band T. Rex are surely not only the most successful pop group with a palaeontological moniker, but also the best. Hugely influential on everyone from Kate Bush to The Smiths, they were the biggest band in the UK in the early 1970s. Hot Love was their second single after shortening their name from Tyrannosaurus Rex, their first number 1 record, and just one of an astonishing series of perfect pop songs released from 1970–1973 (for my money, Jeepster is the best, but they are all great). Most of the covers for Hot Love featured images of Marc Bolan and percussionist Mickey Finn. However, the Italian release (still using the name Tyrannosaurus Rex) was unique in featuring a rather Godzilla-like creature, presumably supposed to be a dinosaur, on the front cover. It was backed by the track Woodland Rock. You can get a copy fairly cheaply on Discogs. Perhaps surprisingly, very few of T. Rex's record sleeves have images of dinosaurs on them. In fact, I've only been able to identify two others so far in addition to Hot Love: the UK promo, Japanese and French releases of the very first single by the band back in 1968, Deborah, which all feature versions of the iconic life restoration of Tyrannosaurus rex by Neave Parker, and the inner sleeve of their first album, the bonkers folk-rock of My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows, which features the same image. I'd like to cover the former in more detail at some point, but copies currently start at £80 on Discogs, so it probably won't be soon. While we're on the topic of the Neave Parker Tyrannosaurus rex, check out the absolutely incredible poster (below) for the 1969 visit of Bolan's band to the Town Hall right here in Birmingham, hosted by none other than John Peel. I suspect that there may only be one copy of this in existence, but if anyone ever sees one for sale, please let me know. There are some other equally great and rare posters out there, including one to promote the 1969 album Unicorn. The poster was created by Tom Wilkes and features Marc Bolan and early band member Steve Peregrin Took nestled in the antorbital fenestra of a Tyrannosaurus skull. Another marvelous, psychedelic poster was created by George Underwood to promote 1968 album My People Were Fair... Finally, I've not listened to all of T. Rex's albums, so I can't confirm how often dinosaurs appear in song lyrics, but there is at least one example, from 1968's Strange Orchestras: "Saw a face in a conical of lace, it was a strange orchestra Mannequin skin pounding on a bass-drum, strange orchestra Lilliputian, evil in the eyes of the man with the leaf harp He lusts for the urchin hiding under mountains of moleskin A big cat like t-tyrannosaurus going to Lilliput The ensemble make a tiny rumble, the celloist solos The sky blackens and the bass string slackens and they stand statuesquely Then they giggle and they wiggle through the door in the big dark oak tree" Yeah. Make of that what you will... Now almost entirely forgotten, Rote Kapelle were part of the Edinburgh indie scene of the mid 1980s, and shared members with several other bands, including the rather wonderful jangle-pop groups Jesse Garon and the Desperados, The Shop Assistants, and The Fizzbombs. Although some of Rote Kapelle's later recordings would have similarly twee leanings, the four tracks on their debut, The Big Smell Dinosaur E.P, are much harder and noisier, more post-punk than indie-pop. I quite like it. The band took their name from the name given by the Gestapo to an anti-Nazi resistance movement (Die Rote Kapelle - the Red Orchestra) operating in Berlin during WW2. In their short career, the band released three EPs, two 7" singles, and a single album. Their first effort, The Big Smell Dinosaur E.P, was self-released (on 'Big Smell Dinosaur Records' according to the cover) and limited to 500 copies. The band designed and printed the sleeves themselves. The six band members then hand coloured all of them, with each sleeve being unique as a result. The cover is graced by two Brontosaurus, feeding on horsetails, with an erupting volcano on the horizon, and some sauropod footprints in the foreground. A tiny Stegosaurus on the rear cover reminds us that, although it is a 7", the record should be played at 33 rpm. Although one of the tracks is titled Evolution, I must admit that the link between the music and dinosaurs isn't particularly clear to me. The artist is not credited, and I assume that the sauropods are redrawings of some 1970s or early 1980s palaeo-art, but I can't identify them. If anyone has an idea of where they are from, please let me know in the comments. All of the songs on this E.P., King Mob, Evolution, Fergus! The Sheep! and A Gasfire, are available on YouTube, and the original vinyl is available via Discogs. |