The ants were natural explorers, not out of curiosity – they were incurious creatures – but out of an instinctive urge to expand their living space. Every so often, while exterminating worms or pouring medicine onto a dinosaur’s teeth, they would peek into the abysmal reaches of its mouth. That dark, moist, interior world awakened in them a desire to travel into the great beyond, but fear of the attendant perils had always stopped them in their tracks.

The Age of Exploration of the Dinosaur Body was eventually ushered in by an ant named Daba – the first named ant in the recorded history of Cretaceous civilisation. After much preparation, Daba capitalised on the opportunity presented by a toothworm treatment and led a small expedition of ten soldier ants and ten worker ants into the dank depths of a Tyrannosaurus’s mouth.

Battling extreme humidity, the expedition began its traverse of the long narrow isthmus of the tongue. Tastebuds speckled the surface like a vast megalithic structure of slimy white boulders extending far into the gloom. The ant explorers picked their way between them. As the dinosaur opened and closed its mouth, light from the outside world streaked through the gaps between its teeth, flickering like lightning on the horizon and casting long, wavering shadows behind the tastebud megaliths. When its tongue squirmed, the entire isthmus rose and fell like a stormy sea, causing shifting ripples to appear in the megaliths. And every time the Tyrannosaurus swallowed, viscous floodwaters gushed in from both sides, submerging the isthmus and forcing the ants to cling to the tastebuds for fear of being swept away. It was the stuff of nightmares, but the dauntless ants patiently waited for the floodwaters to recede, then pressed on.

At long last they arrived at the root of the tongue. The light was much weaker there, barely illuminating the mouths of the two enormous caves before them. In one cave, a fierce gale howled, by turns sucking and then expelling the air, reversing direction every two to three seconds. There was no wind in the other cave, just a reverberant rumbling that rose from its invisible depths – a rumbling familiar to the ants from their time working on the teeth, but much, much louder, more like continual booms of thunder. This mysterious and terrible noise unnerved the ants more than the gale, so they decided to try the windy passageway. They would later learn that this was the dinosaur’s respiratory tract and that the scarily noisy passageway was its oesophagus.