Found a new creature? Name it after a rock star...

Those of you who follow along here know that I write a lot about music here, and a pretty fair amount about science.
Cruising the Internet today, I stumbled across a story that touches on both topics.

It seems that the fossils of a previously unknown species have been found at a remote site in Egypt. An article at Science Daily says that the animal was about the size of a small deer. The fossils found included fragments of jawbones that had a series of small holes on each side of its jaws that held nerves providing feeling to its chin and lower lip. The large number of nerves probably involved led to the conclusion that the animal had a sensitive snout and mobile lower lip that were likely used to forage along moist river banks. The area where the fossils were found is now desert, but evidence suggests that at the time the animal lived there, 19 million years ago or so, it was a lush tropical delta.

Because the animal looks to have had large, mobile lips, the discoverers of the fossils named the new species Jaggermeryx naida, which means "Jagger's water nymph", after Rolling Stones vocalist Mick Jagger. Needless to say, Ellen Miller and Gregg Gunnell, co-authors of the report and who named the species, are big Rolling Stones fans.

However, I have not been able to find out what Jagger thinks about having an animal that was described as probably looking like "a cross between a slender hippo and a long-legged pig" that lived in a swamp named after him.

Being the curious person that I am, I started wondering if there were any other animal species, living or extinct, named after musical celebrities. It didn't take much Googling to find that the answer to this question is, "Well, of course," according to at article at Music Times It turns out that there is a large iguana-like creature named Barbaturex morrisoni, after Jim Morrison who was after all the self-proclaimed Lizard King. By "large", I mean that B. morrisoni was about six feet long and around 60 pounds. I suspect that Morrison would have loved that.



U2 singer Bono has a spider named after him. Aptostichus bonoi. A. bonoi lives only in one part of Joshua Tree National Park, in Southern California, and so presumably the spider was named after the singer in honor of the fact that U2's best-known album was called "The Joshua Tree". Another species of spider from the same genus, this one living in several counties in Northern California, was named Aptostichus barackobamai in honor of US President Barack Obama, incidentally.



Bono isn't the only musician who has a spider named after him. In fact, Lou Reed has an entire genus of spiders named after him, Loureedia, although it must be noted that this genus is made up of only one known species, Loureedia annulipes. It is a velvet spider that lives underground, so the naming makes sense. David Bowie also has a spider, Heteropoda davidbowie, named after him. Bowie's spider namesake has been described as "large, yellow, and hairy." Singer and songwriter Neil Young is another musician who has a spider, Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi, which is found mostly in Alabama, named after him.







A species of wood roach, a type of cockroach, is named Cryptocercus garciai after Grateful Dead icon Jerry Garcia. Think about it.

The thing is, the recent fossil named after Mick Jagger isn't the only fossil that was named in his honor. There is a trilobite called Aegrotocatellus jaggeri, after him. At the same time the other half of the Glimmer Twins, Keith Richards, also had a trilobite named in his honor, Perirehadulus richardsi. Yet another trilobite was named for the Rolling Stones as a group, Aegrotocatellus nankerpheigorum, which only makes sense if you know that Nanker Phelge was the pseudonym used for several songs that were written by the entire band between 1963 and 1965. Probably the best known of these songs is "Play With Fire", from early 1965. Jagger also has a snail named after him.



An isopod, Cirolana mercuryi, found on coral reefs offshore from Zanzibar, was named after Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, who was born in Zanzibar (which is now Tanzania). Isopods are crustaceans that can live in the sea, in fresh water, or on land. Bob Marley also has a crustacean, Gnathia marleyi, named after him.



Among others in the music world who have living organisms named after them is Frank Zappa, who has at least a snail, a jellyfish, and a bacterium named after him. The man who named the jelly fish after Zappa admitted that he did it in hopes that he would be able to meet the musician.

Henry Rollins has a jellyfish named after him, while Carole King and James Taylor both have stoneflies named after them. Both Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr all have trilobites named after them. There are a lot of species of trilobites. Each one of The Ramones also has a trilobite named after him.
Sting has a Columbian tree frog, Hyla stingi, named after him. Masiakasaurus knopfleri, a small theropod dinosaur (although small is a relative thing; M. knopfleri was around 5.9 to 6.6 feet in length), in named after Dire Straits sing, songwriter, and guitarist Mark Knopfler.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of musical celebrities who have had organisms named after them. So far as I could tell from my research, only one person who named a species after a musician admitted that they did so to meet the musician. The thing I'm left wondering is, how many others chose to name a plant or an animal for a musician also really did it so they could meet that musician. I'd be willing to bet that the number is more than one.

I wish I could attach some music for each of the artists included in this post, but that would make it way, way too long to be manageable. But you get the idea. There are music fans everywhere, even in the world of science, and the people who get to name newly discovered species have a habit of naming their discoveries after the singers and musicians that they love.

Music Sunday: The "1969 Revisited" Edition

Last month, I wrote about the Woodstock festival in 1969. Musically, at least, and maybe culturally, Woodstock stands at the height of what we know as "The Sixties" (not to be confused with the chronological decade of the 1960s, because the two really don't completely coincide). But, even had Woodstock never happened, 1969 would stand as an extraordinary year in music.

This is true for many reasons, and in many genres in music, but rock music had one of its best years in 1969. Crosby, Stills and Nash and Led Zeppelin each released their first album (and Led Zeppelin also released their second album). Janis Joplin released her first solo album. The Beatles released "Abbey Road", which wasn't well thought of critically then, but has since come to be regarded as one of their best, if not the best album they ever made. The Who released their rock opera, "Tommy". It was the year that Marvin Gaye recorded "I Heard it Through the Grapevine", Bob Dylan recorded "Lay Lady Lay", and Johnny Cash recorded "A Boy Named Sue". And it was the year that John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their "Bed-in for Peace" in Amsterdam and in Montreal. It was in Montreal where they recorded, on June 1, in their hotel and with a room-full of friends, "Give Peace a Chance":



Johnny Cash released "A Boy Named Sue", written by Shel Silverstein, into the world in 1969, at a time when country music was mostly seen as a southern phenomenon. Nonetheless, besides being a number-one song on the country charts in the United States, it reached number two on Billboard's Hot 100 and number one on the magazine's Adult Contemporary chart. Here is a live performance of the song that, from the looks of it, was recorded at one of Cash's prison shows:



The difference between this performance and the radio version of the song is that in the radio version, the phrase "son of a bitch" and the word "damn" near the end of the song were censored out. 1969 was a landmark year in many ways, but the powers that be were still convinced that the republic would collapse if someone said (or sang) a cuss-word over the public airwaves. Nevertheless, the song won both Best Country Song and Best Country Performance, Male, at the Grammy Awards in 1970, when the music of 1969 was honored.

One of the surprises on Janis Joplin's first solo album, "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!", is that she sings the Bee Gees song, "To Love Somebody". It just seems so unlikely. Yes, she has her own way with the song, as she did with every song she sang. As far as I'm concerned, she improved it greatly:



Blood, Sweat, and Tears' self-titled album was actually released in 1968 (and won Album of the Year at the 1970 Grammy Awards, as their deadlines for consideration are known to be slightly elastic), although my favorite song from the album was released in 1969. "Spinning Wheel" was written by the band's lead singer, David Clayton-Thomas. Here is the longer album version:



And now for something completely different...1969 was also the year that David Bowie released "Space Oddity". And, this is one of the things I like about the music released in 1969; it isn't all the same:



And, one more oddity, of a different kind, before I finish this up for the day: The Doors, with strings and horns. "Touch Me", from the album "The Soft Parade", was a bit of a departure. This live performance, from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, if I'm not mistaken. There was some feeling among Doors fans at the time that this song, and the album, was sort of a sell-out by Jim Morrison and the band, but I like it:



There's so much more good music from 1969 that I would have liked to share here. Which means that there is probably another 1969 post somewhere, sometime in Music Sunday's future.