‘Our civilisation is teetering on a precipice,’ said Kachika. ‘The heavy industries of the dinosaur world are killing the Earth. Ecosystems are being destroyed, the atmosphere is thick with smog and toxins, and forests and grasslands are disappearing rapidly. Antarctica was the last continent to be opened up but the first to be reduced to nothing but desert, and the other continents are headed for the same fate. This predatory exploitation has now spread to the oceans. If the overfishing and polluting of the oceans continues at the current rate, they too will be dead in less than half a century. But all that is as nothing compared with the dangers of nuclear war. The world is at peace right now, but preserving peace through nuclear deterrence is like tiptoeing across a tightrope above the fires of hell. A nuclear war could be triggered at any moment, and that will be the end of everything, for the nuclear arsenals of the two dinosaur powers are capable of destroying all life on Earth a hundred times over.’

‘We’ve heard all this before,’ sneered Laurasian president Dodomi, a mountainous Tarbosaurus. His lip curled contemptuously.

‘It’s your insatiable consumption of natural resources that’s at the root of all this,’ Kachika continued, waggling her antennae at Dodomi. ‘The amount of food just one of you gets through in a single meal is enough to feed a large city of ants for an entire day. It’s simply not fair.’

‘You’re talking twaddle, little bug,’ boomed the Gondwanan emperor, a powerful Tyrannosaurus named Dadaeus. ‘We can’t help being so big. Would you have us starve? To survive, we must consume, and for that we need heavy industry and energy.’

‘Then you should use clean, renewable energy.’

‘That’s just not possible. Those little pinwheels and solar cells you ants rely on couldn’t even power one of our electronic wristwatches. Dinosaur society is energy hungry. We’ve no choice but to use coal and oil – and nuclear power, of course. Pollution is unavoidable.’

‘You could reduce your energy consumption by controlling the size of your population. The global dinosaur population is now in excess of 7 billion. It cannot be allowed to get any bigger.’

Dadaeus shook his monstrous head and rolled his monstrous eyes. It was indeed a quite monstrous sight. ‘The urge to reproduce is the most natural instinct of every lifeform,’ he growled. ‘And growth and expansion are intrinsic to the advancement of civilisation. To survive, to maintain its strength, a country must have a sufficiently large population.’ Then he threw down the equivalent of a dinosaur’s clawed gauntlet. ‘If Laurasia is willing to smash its eggs, we dinosaurs of Gondwana will smash an equal number of ours.’

Dodomi, President of the Laurasian Republic, was quick to respond. ‘But, as you well know, Your Majesty, Gondwana has nearly 400 million more dinosaurs than Laurasia—’