Tablets were usually held communally by a dinosaur tribe or settlement and were used to keep simple records of collective property, membership, economic output, and births and deaths. A tribe of 1,000 dinosaurs would need twenty to thirty sizeable trees for a register of its members, and the minutes from one meeting might require over a hundred hides. As a result, the manufacture of tablets placed a significant strain on the dinosaurs’ resources, and furthermore, when tribes or settlements relocated (a frequent occurrence during the Hunting Era), transporting libraries of tablets proved an even greater burden. For this reason, although dinosaur society had possessed a written language for 1,000 years, its cultural development was painfully slow and had nearly come to a standstill in recent centuries. Their script had remained extremely crude. With only simple, unary numerals and a handful of pictographs, it lagged far behind the sophistication of their spoken language. The sluggish emergence of writing had become the biggest obstacle to scientific and cultural progress in the dinosaur world, one which had arrested dinosaur society in a primitive state for a long time. It was a textbook example of how a species’ ill-shaped hands could hinder its evolution.

The dinosaur Kunda was one of a hundred or so scribes in Boulder City. In the dinosaur world, the job of a scribe fell somewhere between that of the modern-day occupations of typist and printer. Scribes were chiefly responsible for copying tablets by hand. On the day in question, Kunda and twenty other scribes were working in front of a mountain of tablets, making a copy of the register of Boulder City’s residents for safekeeping. Most of the original register had been recorded on wooden tablets. Hundreds of split tree-trunks were stacked in hill-height piles, giving Kunda’s workplace the appearance of one of our timber yards.

Kunda, a blunt stone knife gripped in his left claw and one of those humongous stone hammers in his right, was transcribing the pictograms from a ten-metre-long wooden tablet onto two new, shorter tablets. He had been at this dull, draining work for days and days, but still the inselberg of blank trunks in front of him didn’t seem to have got any smaller. Hurling down the stone knife and hammer, he rubbed his weary eyes, leant back against a stack of tablets and heaved a deep sigh, feeling very dispirited about his tedious life.

Just then, a squadron of 1,000 ants paraded past on the ground before him – on their way back from surgery, Kunda presumed. A sudden inspiration seized him. He stood up, picked out two dried strips of glow-lizard jerky and waved them at the colony. Glow-lizards were so called because they emitted a fluorescent light at night, and their meat was a favourite with ants. No surprise then that the ant squadron immediately changed its direction of travel and veered towards him.