‘… and how easily we’ll be able to transport our tablets. You know, I might be able to carry the entire register of the city’s residents by myself! No need to employ a hundred-strong division of dinosaur movers any more.’

‘And that’s just the start of it, I’d say. We can now consider changing the materials we use for the tablets too.’

‘Quite so. After all, where’s the merit in using tree-trunks? For characters this small, bark would surely be lighter and more portable.’

‘Precisely. And a lot cheaper too. Small lizard skins could be used as well.’

The prefect interrupted the chatter with a wave. ‘Right then, from now on the ants will be our scribes. We shall start by raising a writing force of a million ants or more. Let’s see…’ He surveyed the room, his eyes finally falling on Kunda. ‘You will lead this campaign.’

So Kunda realised his dream, and Boulder City, along with the rest of the dinosaur world, saved a great deal of wood and stone and an enormous quantity of hides. But compared with the real significance of this event in the history of Cretaceous civilisation, those savings were trivialities.

The advent of fine antprint made it possible to transcribe vast volumes of information, and at the same time the dinosaurs’ script grew richer and more sophisticated. At long last, the alpha and omega of the dinosaurs’ experience and knowledge could be fully and systematically recorded using the written word and mathematical equations. It could also be disseminated far more widely, reliably and permanently, no longer subject to the vagaries of dinosaur memory and oral tradition. This remarkable advancement gave fresh impetus to Cretaceous science and culture, sending the long-stagnant Cretaceous civilisation into a period of whirlwind development.

Meanwhile, new applications for the ants’ fine-motor skills were found in all sectors of the dinosaur world. Take timekeeping technology as an example. Dinosaurs had invented the sundial long ago, but because they used large tree-trunks as gnomons and drew rough hour lines around them, these had to remain fixed in place. Thanks to the ants, sundials could now be made smaller and the hour lines rendered more precisely, allowing dinosaurs to carry them around. Later, dinosaurs would invent the hourglass and the water clock, and though they might have been able to make the containers themselves, only ants could bore the crucial holes. The manufacture of mechanical clocks was even more dependent on ant labour, for though a grandfather clock might be taller than a dinosaur, it still contained numerous tiny parts that could only be machined by ants.