Early this year, the Memphian band Lucero joined Mark Knopfler, Paul Simon and Jerry Garcia as members of an elite, ultra exclusive group of musicians with a fossil named after them.
A fan of the band, who also happens to be a paleontologist, chose the name Hollanda luceria for a 75 million-year-old fossil of a bird recently discovered in the Mongolian reaches of the Gobi Desert.
Appropriately for a band that spends most of its time on the road playing loud country/rock, the animal is thought to be a prehistoric ancestor of a modern avian loudmouth, the Southern Screamer, whose call Discovery News described as a “a blaring trumpet and a stadium horn.’
An unusual honor, to be sure, but a cool one, nonetheless, said guitarist Brian Venable.
“You might win awards and make a bunch of records, but 200 years from now, some schoolkid is going to be studying dinosaur stuff and a dinosaur is going to come up that’s named after a 20th/21st-century band,” he said. “That’s pretty amazing.”