Songfacts®:

• Particle Kid is Micah Nelson, son of Willie, but you won't hear any twang in his music, which hews to the psychedelic. In "Velocirapture (The Serpent Flew)," he gets prehistoric. In a Songfacts track by track, he told the story:
  
  One night I ate a weed edible and got really, really high. I was up all night and couldn't sleep because there were all these weird movies playing in my head. Sometime around 3 a.m. lying awake in bed, this whole story just flashed in my brain about a lonely velociraptor. It was a very human story.
  
  He is misunderstood by his parents and friends and becomes an outcast in his community and is exiled. I started thinking about dinosaurs, but as if they had very human egos, complete with fears and doubts and dreams and culture. The story of this velociraptor became like an epic personal journey in which it is forced to face those fears and doubts and psychological delusions (or maybe they are real?).
  
  His whole family thinks he's losing his mind, and maybe he is. I started thinking about what he must have felt during his own extinction event and how surreal and psychedelic it must have been... like a prehistoric rapture/apocalypse. It was as if I lived his life story in my mind as I wrote the lyrics down frantically. There was no melody or music until a day or so before we recorded it.
  
  I believe the version on the record is our second or third take ever, just running through it trying different arrangements live in the studio. It's got plenty of great f--k-ups on it. I feel like it captures the flawed and tattered spirit of our lead character, the velociraptor. I heard on the radio the day after we recorded it that some archeologist discovered the ancient fossil remains of a previously unknown feathered dinosaur! Weird."
• Another famous progeny appears on this track: Sean Ono Lennon, who adds mellotron, guitar, and backing vocal. Mickey Raphael, a harmonica player who often worked with Willie Nelson, also appears. "Sean Ono Lennon's brilliant sonic painting and Mickey Raphael's dinosaur screams on harmonica really fleshed out the world of the story," Micah explained.
• This was the first song released from Particle Kid's double album Time Capsule. The tracks were conceived and recorded in various time periods and locations, so there's no common thread. Instead, Nelson considers it a collage, with songs pasted together to form the whole.
• Nelson made a suitably trippy video for this song where he performs it in a strange world with his bass player Aroyn Davis and drummer Tony Peluso. It was directed by David Wexler.