A Rap for Euparkeria

It can’t be helped. When you have a household with a 3-year-old obsessed with dinosaurs and a daddy with a weird sense of humor and desperate need for validation, silly songs emerge.
A late addition to Toby’s Netflix repertoire is Walking with Monsters, a Branagh-narrated spinoff of Walking with Dinosaurs that features pre-dinosaur creatures in a faux-documentary.

As noted in an earlier post, the original show led to my little ditty about Eustreptospondylus. Well, now we have a protodinosaurian rhyme. It’s a rap of sorts for the Euparkeria (pronounced “you-par-care-ee-uh”), a small-ish reptile with particularly-shaped hip bones that allowed it to go bipedal with great agility when necessary, and served as an evolutionary foundation for the dinosaurs. Or so says Kenneth Branagh.

The rhyme is done in a style reminiscent of “Rapper’s Delight,” with a meter similar to Strong Bad’s “fhqwhgads.”

I bring you “Euparkeria.”

Eu! Par! Ker-i-a!
He’s gonna catch a dragonfly
Eu! Par! Ker-i-a
YOU are my fav-o-rite guy!
(Come on now)
Eu! Par! Ker-i-a
He dunna need to go on all fours
Eu! Par! Ker-i-a
Ancestor to the dinosaurs!

Toby was loving the first two lines, and was hopping up and down on the couch this morning reciting it. The addition of the second two lines, however, seemed to greatly upset him at first, for some reason inducing a toddler spinal-fluctuation tantrum. But he’s come around on it.