Terrible Lizard

Book, Music & Lyrics by Kate Douglas

Only one in a thousand species that ever lived survives today. The other 99.9% are extinct. Terrible Lizard introduces us to some of these ghosts who shaped life as we know it today.

This piece combines imagined encounters with endlings of their species with the last human beings to see them alive.

The piece opens with a contemporary discussion of deep time and "terrible lizards" (the literal translation of 'dinosaur') and turns into a séance to bring back Mary Anning, an early 19th century English fossil collector and paleontologist. She was written out of the scientific community until recently, but her discoveries contributed to our contemporary understanding of prehistoric life.

Terrible Lizard uses music and text to explore Earth's rhythms, unprecedented age of extinction we find ourselves in - and what being a more "time literate society" (Marcia Bjornerud) might look like.