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Back Of Ants and Dinosaurs
Chapters (26)
  1. BY CIXIN LIU
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. PROLOGUE
  6. 1
  7. 2
  8. 3
  9. 4
  10. 5
  11. 6
  12. 7
  13. 8
  14. 9
  15. 10
  16. 11
  17. 12
  18. 13
  19. 14
  20. 15
  21. 16
  22. 17
  23. 18
  24. EPILOGUE
  25. About the Author
  26. An Invitation from the Publisher

This type of symbiotic relationship has its limitations, however. The two symbionts come together solely for the purpose of exchanging the basic services necessary for survival. But the transition to civilisation requires symbionts to exchange something more profound, to engage in a higher level of cooperation, so that they might establish an alliance that is not merely symbiotic but co-evolutionary.

It was at this point in time that something happened in Boulder City to raise the dinosaur–ant alliance to new heights.

4

Tablets

Tablets were as vital to the dinosaur world as the paper on which we write. They came in two types: stationary and movable. Also called ‘wordhills’ or ‘wordstones’, station­ary tablets (which we might also, rather pleasingly, term ‘dinosaur stationery’), were hills with a relatively even slope, gentle cliff faces or enormous rocks with smooth surfaces, on which the dinosaurs carved their super-sized words. Movable tablets could be made from many differ­ent materials, but wood, stone and leather were the most common. Because the dinosaurs did not yet use metal, let alone saws, they were unable to manufacture wooden boards; instead, they used their megalithic stone hatchets to cleave tree-trunks in two, lengthwise down the middle, and they then carved characters into the cross-section of one-half of them. Their stone tablets were flat slabs with facades soft enough for engraving; these came in all shapes and sizes, but the smallest would have been at least as big as one of our family dining-tables. Leather tablets were made from animal hides or lizard skins, and characters were drawn on them in plant- or mineral-based paint; often a single tablet required that many skins be joined together.

The dinosaurs’ thick, clumsy fingers made it impossible for them to grip small implements for carving or writing, and they lacked the dexterity needed to form small characters. As a result, the characters they produced were very large: the smallest they could manage were still the size of a football. This meant that their tablets were by necessity huge and unwieldy, and even then they could fit only a few characters on each one.