After a long hiatus, I’m relaunching this blog. If this is your first time here, this blog explores the influence of palaeontology and the fossil record on popular (or not so popular) music. Feel free to explore the archives, where we’ve previously covered pterosaurs and prog rock, Australian new wave, dinosaur sex, and Marc Bolan, among others. We’ll start back with the oldest music that we’ve covered on the blog to date, pretty much Palaeozoic in the timeline of pop culture. The Piltdown Men were an instrumental rock band, somewhat in the vein of The Shadows, who emerged from Hollywood in the beginning of the 1960s. Led by Ed Cobb (who would later write the Northern Soul classic Tainted Love), the band featured two lead saxophonists. They were, of course, named after the infamous Piltdown Man palaeoanthropological hoax. The Piltdown Men released seven 7” records between 1960 and 1962, with three of them reaching the UK top 20, including the 1961 EP Piltdown Rides Again. Piltdown Rides Again features four tracks including Brontosaurus Stomp and is pretty much a novelty record, but it’s enormous fun. Whereas most of their records seem to have been sold in generic plain sleeves, this one has artwork featuring three cave men and a cave woman playing music at night (one of them is wearing sunglasses despite the darkness, like a proto-Lou Reed). Brontosaurus Stomp had previously been released as a single in 1960, when it reached the US top 75, helped in part by the launch at the same time of a new cartoon called The Flintstones, although this was pure serendipity, rather than a planned tie-in. Not much more to add. I've got lots planned for future posts: let's hope it won't be over a year until I get around to writing them...
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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" |