Kings of Leon Cancels Show Saturday Due to Pissed Off Pigeon

So the Kings of Leon played three songs at a St. Louis outdoor ampitheater on Saturday night, then walked off-stage because a pigeon pooped in the bass player's mouth. The show was cancelled and the band BLAMED THE VENUE. Did I mention the venue was an OUTDOOR AMPITHEATER??

Yeah, it's gross, I don't argue with that. But to blame the venue?? Cancel an entire show over it?? In the words of a friend, "What posers. There was a time rock stars welcomed poop in the mouth and would have killed that pigeon on stage! Sure it's gross, but act like a man...swish some Jack D in the mouth and move on."

The always-professional Postelles opened and also suffered some at the hands (butt?) of this upset pigeon, but they finished their set.

Maybe this pigeon is more of a classical music fan and this was a way of him saying, "Stop that loud racket??"

Grammy-winning U.S. rock band Kings of Leon cut short their concert last night in St. Louis after a pigeon dropping landed in bassist Jared Followill's mouth, the Riverfront Times reported today. The band walked off stage at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater after playing just three songs.

The house lights came on a few minutes later, and a venue employee announced that "due to concerns over the band's safety, we are canceling the show. Please file out in an orderly fashion."

Kings of Leon drummer Nathan Followill took to Twitter to respond to messages from fans upset at the cancellation. So sorry St. Louis. We had to bail,” he wrote, explaining that the show was stopped because a pigeon had defecated in Jared Followill’s mouth. “Too unsanitary to continue,” he added.

Later, he blamed the venue for the incident and apologized to fans who had traveled to see the band.

The bassist for opening band The Postelles was also hit with bird droppings during their performance, but they managed to finish their set. Concert promoters Livenation issued a statement shortly after the incident Friday night offering refunds on all tickets. (Source)

Newly Identified Dinosaur Bird, Hollanda luceria Named for Lucero

First purveyors of truthiness now a cool rock band is dinosaurtastic! A newly discovered bird from the Late Cretaceous era has been partially named for Lucero. Closely resembling the modern Southern Screamer, Hollanda luceria may have also been ear-splitting with a "call that has been likened to a blaring trumpet and a stadium horn." Apparently too, it was a fast road-runner. Loud? With horns? Always on the road? Yup, that all sounds about right. Congrats guys!

During the Late Cretaceous, Mongolia's Gobi Desert was home to numerous dinosaurs, mammals and lizards. One of the most eye-catching, and possibly ear-splitting, residents was a newly identified bird.

The new species, which lived 71 to 75 million years ago, has been named Hollanda luceria, after the punk/country band Lucero and the Holland family, whose donations helped to support the research.

"Judging from the size of the hindlimb, Hollanda luceria most closely resembled the modern Southern Screamer," project leader Alyssa Bell, a researcher in the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, told Discovery News.

The modern Southern Screamer's call has been likened to a blaring trumpet and a stadium horn.

For the study, which will appear in the February issue of the journal Cretaceous Research, Bell and her team analyzed the bird's remains, which were originally found in the southern Gobi Desert in 1997.

Previous research on avian anatomy concluded that bones in the third toe reflect how much time the bird spent moving on the ground.

The scientists studied these bones and compared them with those of other birds. Bell said the data "shows that our new bird was most likely a ground-foraging bird like a roadrunner or a chucao, implying that it spent a great deal of its time foraging or hunting on the ground."

Other fossils excavated at the site reveal that the newly identified bird was part of an ecosystem consisting of dinosaurs, such as Protoceratops and Velociraptor, mammals, lizards and other birds, like waterfowl Teviornis and the large, clawed Gobipteryx.

Bell doesn't think H. luceria preyed upon dinosaur eggs, "as they would have been too large for the bird to swallow; however, it probably would have been an active hunter of the small lizards and mammals as well as insects that lived in the environment."

The presence of so much diverse wildlife in the Gobi region during the Late Cretaceous, along with geological studies, suggests that this area was once similar to the Channel Country of central Australia or to the Nebraska Sand Hills.

"Thus, Hollanda's environment would have consisted of sand dunes, which had been stabilized by a covering of vegetation, and a continuous water supply that formed shifting streams and ponds," she said. "This interpretation is very different from early research that saw the Late Cretaceous Gobi as a desert of shifting sand dunes and sand storms."

Gareth Dyke, a paleontologist at University College Dublin, told Discovery News that the new research "is interesting," in part because, "Hollanda has quite an unusual ecology and is also well-preserved."

"It has very long legs compared to other birds known from the time and, from this part of the world, shows that early in their evolutionary history birds had evolved a range of ecological adaptations like fast 'road running,'" he added.

Given the Mongolian bird's connection to a musical group, Bell said Lucero "now joins the ranks of artists such as Mick Jagger, Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkel and Mozart in having a species named after them." [Source]