But the area in which the ants’ skills made the most meaningful contribution to the advancement of civilisation, besides writing, was scientific experimentation. Thanks to the ants’ capacity for intricate work, it was now possible to take measurements with an exactitude that had eluded dinosaurs, allowing a shift in experimentation from the qualitative to the quantitative. Research once thought impossible became a reality, leading to rapid strides in Cretaceous science.

Ants were now an integral part of the dinosaur world. Dinosaurs of high standing were never without a miniature ant nest. Most of these nests resembled a wooden sphere and housed several hundred ants. When a dinosaur needed to write, it would unfold a strip of bark or hide parchment on the table and set down its ant nest beside it. The ants would scurry out onto the parchment and etch the words dictated to them by the dinosaur. They used a very particular system of concurrent writing, quite different from our own. Where we humans write one character at a time, the ants teamed up and inscribed multiple characters simultaneously. This allowed them to complete a transcription very rapidly, at a pace that would far outstrip our own handwriting speed. Naturally, a dinosaur’s pocket-sized ant nest also came in handy for all sorts of other tasks that required a light touch.

For their part, the ants received much more than just bones and meat from the dinosaurs. After their new collaboration began, the first invaluable asset the ant world gained was written language. Ants had never had a written language before, and even as they became the dinosaurs’ scribes, they remained illiterate, which meant they were limited to simple reproduction work, copying out the characters from the dinosaurs’ outsized tablets. Their efficiency was relatively poor, as they could only transcribe one stroke at a time. But the dinosaurs were in dire need of ants who could take dictation like secretaries, and the ants, who were well aware of the importance of written language to society, were eager to learn. Thanks to a concerted effort on both sides, the ants quickly mastered the dinosaurs’ script and co-opted it for use in their own society.