We'll start this blog with something well outside my comfort zone: prog-rock. As someone who grew up listening to a lot of British and Northern Irish punk, I've always avoided prog. But for music/palaeontology crossovers, prog is potentially fertile ground. The Flock formed in late 1960s Chicago, and Dinosaur Swamps was their second album. It's a mess of a record that veers stylistically from classic rock to psychedelic, country and jazz, with lots of typical (and, to my ears, somewhat annoying) prog elements, such as a lyrical 'concept' (apparently about some kind of a journey - go figure) and extended drum solos. Even the reviews that I've found on specialist prog sites aren't very positive, so I don't think I'm missing much through my ignorance of the genre. The outer record sleeve is a gatefold, and the outside cover of the sleeve is a reproduction of a mural of pterosaurs (flying reptiles) at the American Museum of Natural History, painted by Constantine Astori and A. Brown in 1942. It shows a host of pterosaurs flying and clinging to cliffs above an ancient beach, with several different species, clearly including Pteranodon, Pterodactylus, Rhamphorhynchus and Dimorphodon. Fish carcasses litter the cliffs, and pterosaur footprints cross the beach. Into this iconic piece of palaeoart, the band members of The Flock have been inserted. One stares up at the pterosaurs overhead, and screams with horror, one stares towards heaven with his arms outstretched, while a third (rather Jesus-like in appearance) crawls across the beach, pointing to something out of sight. The remaining four members of the band look remarkably calm, bored even. The inside of the gatefold has a map stretched out on what appears to be the desk of a pirate - the map shows a series of islands that have the same names as some of the album tracks (e.g. Uranian Sircus, Hornschmeyer's Island). It lacks any clear link to the pterosaur scene on the outside cover, but perhaps this beach is one of the bands' stops on their mystical journey. It's unclear to me exactly what links the music on the album to the prehistoric world on the cover, or why the album is called Dinosaur Swamps. As palaeontological enthusiasts will know, pterosaurs are not actually dinosaurs (they are close relatives of dinosaurs, within the group Ornithodira), and so there are no actual dinosaurs on the cover. As far as I can tell from the album's lyrics, there's no obvious mention of prehistoric creatures, although the second track (Big Bird) is apparently about being carried away by a "Big Bird" to "another land", so perhaps this is a reference to the pterosaurs. Musically then, I'd skip it. But it's a great example of a palaeontology-themed record cover, and thus not a bad place to start this blog. There's more information about Astori's mural at the AMNH here. You can find Dinosaur Swamps on Discogs here, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube.
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