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: Music Plus Book Review Edition

I grew up listening to rock music. I also spent a lot of that time reading the writing of Robert Hilburn, the legendary music critic for the Los Angeles Times. So, when I discovered that Hilburn had written a memoir, Corn Flakes with John Lennon and Other Tales From a Rock’n’Roll Life (Rodale, 2009; 280 pages), I had to read it.

I’m glad I did.

Hilburn, who wrote his first story as a freelancer for the Times in 1966 and was hired as full-time pop music critic and editor in 1970, is a fabulous writer. He spent his career at one of the epicenters of the music industry, and he writes about his adventures with grace and wit and a great deal of insight. As part of his job, he met and interviewed and reviewed the biggest and most legendary names in music, and became friends with not a few of them. These friendships did not stop Hilburn from calling these performers on the missteps in their recordings and in performance, although he writes about being worried that his relationships with these artists could be seen as a conflict or interest or result in bias toward them.

Hilburn also writes about his questions concerning continuing to write about music aimed mostly at teenagers and young adults as he aged, addressing his doubts in the context of covering musicians who kept making music, sometimes relevant, sometimes not so much, as they aged. I found this interesting as a person of a certain age who still loves rock music but finds fewer and fewer new artists whose work I can relate to as I get older. Hilburn quotes Paul McCartney on the subject, recalls that at one point Mick Jagger said that he couldn't envision still singing “Satisfaction” at the age of thirty but has continued singing it much longer than that, and celebrates the fact that Johnny Cash’s work remained relevant until the end of his life.

Then there are the stories. Hilburn recalls being the person John Lennon would call to spend an evening with during Lennon's year-and-a-half long “lost weekend”, spent primarily in Los Angeles, when he needed to remain relatively sober to get up for an early meeting the next day. He relates serious and deep discussions he had about the music with Bruce Springsteen. He talks about the difficulties inherent in interviewing people like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. He explores his ability to connect with musicians much younger than himself, such as Kurt Cobain, and from very different backgrounds, such as Ice Cube. He describes hanging out with the members of U2 in and out of the recording studio.

In the course of all this, Hilburn pulls no punches in writing about artists he admires and those he finds, following Bob Dylan’s three categories of musicians, “superficial”, which in Hilburn’s eyes includes some very big name acts and musicians. But Hilburn spends much less time on the superficial than he does on the natural performers and the supernatural performers, Dylan’s two other categories.

I’ll leave you to read the book to discover how various performers Hilburn discusses fit into which category. If you think this is my way of making you read the book rather than giving away the good parts, you’re absolutely correct. Every music lover should read Corn Flakes with John Lennon.

Because it is Music Sunday, I’m going to end this review with three of the artists and performances mentioned by Hilburn in the course of his book.

One of the musicians that Hilburn had a friendship with was Johnny Cash. He calls Cash's cover of "Hurt" "stirring" (p. 194):



Another artist Hilburn has high praise for is Bruce Springsteen, whose "Brilliant Disguise" Hilburn described as "a chilling reflection about commitment" (p. 148):



Hilburn said that U2's album, "The Unforgettable Fire" "confused" him, but he called two of the songs on the album, "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "Bad", "brilliant" (p. 141). Just last week, I shared the band's performance of "Bad" at Live Aid, so here is "Pride":

Music Sunday - The Late Sixties/Early Seventies Edition

I like new music, old music, most kinds of music. It seems to me, however, that the period between 1967 and 1973 or so produced an amazing variety of good music - or at least a lot of music I liked when it came out and still like listening to today.

The thing that got me thinking about this this week was a surprise re-hearing of a song from 1969, "Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town)", by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. It was a song I liked when it was released, but I had nearly forgotten about it in the intervening years and it kind of surprised me to discover how glad I was to hear it again after so long. When it came on, I cranked the volume on the radio in the car and sang along - for some reason I tend to remember the lyrics of songs that I haven't heard in years - and despite the content of the song, just having heard it seemed to put me in a much better mood simply because I'd heard it.

Not that this is a song with fun, upbeat lyrics. Released during the height of US involvement in Vietnam, it tells the story of a man who was injured in the war, something that wsn't talked about a lot at the time, even with protests against the war heating up across the country and around the world. But it is a good song, and a good song is always a good thing.



Looking around for other songs from the time, I found a couple of others that are just as good, and just as good today as they were when they were recorded, also in 1969, even though they are much different than "Ruby". I found this 1989 performance by B. B. King of his 1969 hit "The Thrill Is Gone":



And then, for something completely different from either "Ruby" or "The Thrill Is Gone", there is "Come Together", the last song the Beatles ever recorded with all four of the band's members in the studio at the same time.



I think it is only appropriate to also include this song, from the following year, while the Beatles were in the process of breaking up. This is one of the first of Paul McCartney's songs as a solo artist, "Maybe I'm Amazed" which, for my money, is one of the most interesting love songs I've ever heard, and far from his later "silly love songs" period.



And, because I can, I'm going to include this song from a little earlier, The Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", from 1965. I've never been able to figure out if this is a song of rationalization or apology, but I've always liked it.



From a little later than the first songs this week, this is a live performance of "Heart of Gold", by Neil Young, from 1971 or 1972. I was lucky enough to see Young perform this song live in 1973. You'll have to bear with the first minute or two of the video, with Young searching for the right harmonica before he performs the song, but its worth the wait. And, really, it's kind of amusing watching him pull boxes out of various pockets before he finds the instrument he wants.



That's what? Six songs? I could post quite a few more, but this is probably enough for one Sunday. Enjoy.

Oh, and I'd love it if you'd drop a comment telling me about your favorte songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s.