I no longer remember why I ever thought it might be a good idea to try to represent the most severe of all known mass extinctions as a Scottish country dance, but it quickly occurred to me that I could dedicate it to the memory of my friend Martin with whom I used to have many fascinating conversations about biology and evolution. It was also an interesting and brain teasing challenge to organise the figures to allow the single surviving dancer’s solo in the last four bars.
The first 8 bars are supposed to represent a trilobite (on its back) though the real ones had many more legs than are here depicted by the highland arms of six dancers while the first two couples are illustrating the head. Bars 9-12 are a convergent evolutionary progression via different paths leading into bars 13-24 which represent a pair of ammonites. Fossil ammonites used to be called snakestones, so an extended version of the “snake pass” figure seems suitable. Disaster arrives in bars 25-32. The figure here starts with a warning preshock which is followed by immense supervolcanic eruptions and falling ash and lava. Enthusiastic and extrovert dancers might add their own sound effects here! In bars 33-34 the dust settles and in bars 35-36 all is still. I am not normally in favour of dancers standing idle, but a moments silence after the “great dying” which ended the Palaeozoic era feels very appropriate. Finally in bars 37-40 3rd woman dances up alone to start the repopulation of an almost empty world.