Denver, the last living dinosaur known to man, who ruled as rock music's best, and only, electric guitar-playing hadrosaurid, has died. He was 75 million and 24 years old.
Denver's publicist and long time friend, Jeremy, announced Saturday that the rock star had passed. The once-beloved dinosaur was found dead in the pool house of a friend. No cause has been released.
At his peak, Denver was the darling of the music industry. From 1988 to 1990 (and a brief stint in syndication until 1992) he was the world’s best-selling, sunglass-wearing dinosaur. He wowed audiences with shredding guitar riffs, squeaky vocals, awkward pantomime, and general mischief, most often involving hilarious costumes to hide the fact that he was a seven-foot tall dinosaur hanging out on a California beach with a ragtag group of teenagers.
Denver, a Corythosaurus, was first discovered by a small group of friends who, while fleeing a group of bullies at the La Brea Tar Pits, stumbled across his 75 million-year-old, and yet still un-hatched, egg. Immediately upon its discovery, the egg hatched and the virtuoso that was Denver was birthed to the world.
Despite the fact that he came from a time that preceded the earliest mammals by 65 million years, the hadrosaurid had an immediate grasp of English and, luckily for the music industry, the ability to play the guitar, and play it well.
It didn’t take long for notorious concert promoter and cartoon villain, Morton Fizzback, to see Denver’s money-making potential. Almost immediately, the newly-hatched dinosaur was shoved on stage in front of television cameras and the rest is music history.
But by the end of his career, Denver became a stunning cautionary tale of the toll of drug use. His album sales plummeted, the hits stopped coming, and his show was pulled from syndication. His once-hilarious disguises now seemed like a desperate attempt to mask the demons raging within. He confessed to abusing cocaine, marijuana and pills, as well as long-extinct narcotics that he retrieved from the Cretaceous period with the help of the time-traveling fragments of the egg that once hatched him.”
It was a tragic fall for a superstar who was one of the top-selling dinosaur guitar acts in rock music history.
“It hasn’t really sunk in yet,” said Wally, the man who took Denver in and hid him in his pool house from a world that wanted to exploit him, the very same pool house that the dinosaur returned to after his fortune had dried up… and the same pool house where his body was discovered. “Maybe we can use the pieces of his eggshell and try and go back and stop this from happening… but only Denver knew how to activate them. I don’t know… maybe it’s better this way. After 75 million years, maybe he's finally at peace.
I just hope people remember him for who he used to be, not the dinosaur he became."
