DID YOU KNOW ?

“I am the Lizard King. I can do anything,” declaimed the Doors singer in his poem The Celebration of The Lizard. He didn't believe so well.

American paleontologists gave the name Barbaturex Morrisoni - a nod to Jim Morrison - to the largest known lizard on Earth. The animal, which measured about six feet from snout to tail, lived in the Middle-Upper Eocene era, 35 million years before the Doors' self-titled debut album in 1967.

At that time, the atmospheric thermometer was far above seasonal norms: there was no longer ice at the poles, a climate conducive "to the evolution of large-sized, herbivorous lizards, capable of competing effectively with mammals," says Jason Head, head of research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Californian lizard who sang Light My Fire was also acclimatizing to the dampness of concerts for which the stars were not solely responsible. Was it necessary to give the name of a sex symbol - to the hypnotic and aphrodisiac swaying - to a cold-blooded reptile?

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Breaking down the scientific terminology, “Barbaturex” was chosen for the jaw of the specimen whose ridges resemble a full beard, and “Morrisoni”, of course, gives back to the lizard, what belongs to him. Researcher Jason Head listened to the Doors as he scraped the bones of the prehistoric reptile in Burma with a toothbrush.

“Their musical imagery includes reptiles and archaeological sites, and Jim Morrison was the Lizard King,” explains the academic. The Doors singer proclaimed himself a reptilian sovereign in The Celebration of The Lizard, a poem from which a passage was preserved for the group's third album, Waiting for the Sun, in 1968. For Morrison, "snakes and lizards are identified in the unconscious, with the forces of evil. There is something deeply embedded in human memory that reacts very strongly to reptiles.”

A snake charmer, Jim Morrison was undoubtedly one: with the crowds, whose psychology he studied extensively, he orchestrated, as a guru, experiences of collective trances. Thanks to this fascination for reptiles, Jim Morrison therefore inherits a rather charismatic animal.