It’s always interesting to see just how far metal fans have infiltrated society. Advertising, marketing, politics, media: we really are everywhere. Nothing, however, has signified just how far metal fans have made it quite like this does: a Swedish scientist has solidified heavy metal outfit King Diamond in the annals of science.
Though this isn’t the first time that Dr. Mats E. Eriksson, Associate Professor of Paleontology at the Department of Geology at Sweden’s Lund University, has honoured heavy metal in his findings. An avid reader of metal website Braveworlds.com, back in 2006 he coined Kalloprion Kilmisteri, an extinct marine polychaete annelid worm now named after Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister.
Now, Eriksson has honoured another extinct species. A marine worm with some gnarly looking fangs, which will now, and forever, be known as ‘Kingnites diamondi’, of course name checking the great Danish heavy metal band King Diamond. Speaking of the discovery, Eriksson stated that according to Loud Wire “A circa 420 million year old fossil organism was recently discovered from Silurian rocks of Sweden and Estonia,” begins Dr. Eriksson. “It is the remains of a marine worm with jaws. The critter was baptized ‘Kingnites diamondi’ in honour of Danish metal maestro King Diamond. So, in addition to his obvious place in the history of heavy metal music, Diamond now also has left an eternal imprint in science. Father of this fossil is Mats Eriksson, a metal-loving professor of paleontology from Sweden.”
Who would have thought that a doctor from Sweden in a lab coat would prove to be more metal than any of those tattooed, long-haired, muscle tee’d metalheads out there. Rock, metal, throwing up your horns, discovering horn fossils: there’s a joke in there somewhere.
