Huge-Lipped Swamp Critter Named for Mick Jagger

Cheeky scientists are big Stones fans
By Polly Davis Doig,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 11, 2014 1:54 PM CDT
Huge-Lipped Swamp Critter Named for Mick Jagger
Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger performs at the Tele2 arena in Stockholm, Sweden, Tuesday, July 1, 2014.   (AP Photo/TT, Anders Wiklund)

Congratulations, Mick Jagger: You and your kisser can now claim as your namesake a long-extinct swamp-dwelling creature LiveScience describes as something between "a small hippo and a long-legged pig" with really sensitive lips. Jaggermeryx naida, or "Jagger's water nymph," lived about 19 million years ago, adds the Washington Post, and its jawbone indicates it "probably had a highly innervated muzzle with mobile and tactile lips, thus the Jagger reference," says Gregg Gunnell, the Duke paleontologist and Jagger fanboy behind its discovery.

Jaggermeryx naida was found in Egypt's Wadi Moghra desert, which apparently used to be considerably more verdant; the critter used its snout to forage for plants to eat. But Jagger wasn't a shoo-in, says study co-author and Wake Forest physical anthropologist Ellen Miller: "Some of my colleagues suggested naming the new species after Hollywood star Angelina Jolie, because she also has famous lips. But for me it had to be Mick." (Stephen Colbert has a beetle named after him.)

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