THE KILL DEVIL HILLS - The Day the Dinosaurs Died

This song was born out of watching a doco on evolution or deep time kind of planetary long-view stuff one night. There was a whole section on the era of the dinosaurs and the extinction event (in Chicxulub, Yucatan/Mexico - I seriously have to go there in my lifetime) that is commonly believed to have broadly triggered/ended their dominant presence on Earth. Other theories abound too of course, it’s an early proto-Wuhan event for scientists to scratch their heads over forever…

It kinda made me sad watching it because I felt this enormous nostalgia for the scaly buggers: every kid at some point (surely?) goes through a fascination with dinosaurs (at least for a moment), they’re so real and present in our living culture, and we can see skeletons of them in museums, and learn to name them all, they’re our true dragons, but they’re all also just gone, vanished, erased, absent. And at some point too all that young and open wonder fades away too and we move on and grow out of - unless you’re a paleontologist or such - these silly things and we usually don’t care for them any more except as the bad dudes in a Jurassic Park instalment once in a while.

So, it’s less a song about needing more dinosaurs or retrieving them somehow, but more a sadness or grief about how quickly and casually we lose that curiosity, that wide-eyed infant belief and wonder in life forms so unique, vast and still lingering in the world. They’re so important for a time, and then they’re kind of just dumb. And we’ve grown up. And something dies in that too. Not just the lizards. [BH]