Her words sent a jolt of realisation through Daba. She stared at the ant, a soldier ant with a pair of venomous mandibles. ‘You twit, you can cause another flood!’ Daba shouted.

The soldier ant stared at the expedition leader in bewilderment.

‘Bite it! Make it throw up!’

The soldier ant, grasping the idea at last, immediately started nipping savagely at the stomach wall. She quickly chewed through several cilia, leaving deep gouges in the wall. The stomach wall quivered violently, then began to convulse and contort. The cilia forest grew denser, a clear sign that the stomach was contracting and the dinosaur was about to vomit. The digestive sea began to roil, taking the ants with it. Engulfed by the rapidly rising sea, in a very short space of time the five ants were whooshed all the way up the oesophagus, swept over the isthmus of the tongue, catapulted across the two rows of teeth and expelled into the great outdoors, landing in the grass with a flump.

Once the five expeditioners had disengaged themselves from the slithery slick of vomit, they saw that they were encircled by a vast swarm of ants. A crowd of several hundred thousand had come to cheer the return of the great explorers. The Age of Exploration of the Dinosaur Body had begun in earnest, an era that was to prove as important to antkind as the Age of Discovery was for humankind.

3

The Dawn of Civilisation

Following Daba’s pioneering feat, one ant expedition after another plumbed the depths of the dinosaur body via the oesophagus. They discovered that the fastest way in was to hitch a ride when the dinosaur was eating or drink­ing something, surfing in on a gulp of river water or a ball of chewed-up food. The ants knew that a dinosaur was made up of at least two systems: the digestive system, which they had now probed many times, and the respiratory sys­tem, which they had never visited. After Daba recovered from her injuries, the five-legged, stumpy-feelered ant decided to try the windpipe again. This time her team was consisted of smaller ants and they marched at widely spaced intervals to minimise the irritation to the dinosaur’s respiratory tract and prevent a repeat of the disastrous cough.

Compared with the oesophagus, the journey through the respiratory tract was gruelling: there was no food or water on which to cadge a lift, and they had to march in gale-force conditions. Only the strongest ants stood a chance of making it. But the great explorer and her team triumphed again and for the first time antkind entered a dinosaur’s respiratory system.