The first group of ants swiftly reached the end of the finger. Standing on the smooth, conical claw-tip, they gazed into the dinosaur’s mouth in awe. Before them was a night-time world where a storm was brewing. A fierce, damp wind reeking of gore blasted their faces, and rumblings rose up from the dark, chasmic depths. When the ants’ eyes adjusted to the gloom, they could just make out a patch of even denser darkness in the distance, the borders of which kept changing shape. It took them a long time to realise that this was the dinosaur’s throat. It was also the source of the rumbling, which was coming from the Tyrannosaurus’s stomach. The ants instinctively recoiled in fright. Then, one by one, they climbed onto the dinosaur’s huge teeth and crawled down the smooth white enamel cliffs.

With their powerful mandibles, the ants tore at the pink lizard flesh that was lodged in the ravines between the teeth. As they chewed, they stared up at the enormous white columns rising skywards to either side of them. High above them, on the dinosaur’s palate, another row of gnashers gleamed menacingly in the sunlight, looking for all the world as if they might come chomping down at any moment. But the Tyrannosaurus had already moved its finger to its upper jaw, and an unbroken stream of ants was now scaling those teeth and devouring the meat stuck between them, creating a mirror-image of the scene on its lower jaw.

More than a thousand ants bustled about the dozen or so crevices and soon the scraps of meat had been picked clean. The dinosaur’s dental discomfort had been dealt with! The Tyrannosaurus was not yet evolved enough to say thank you, so it merely let out a long sigh of satisfaction. This sudden hurricane blasted every last ant out of the dinosaur’s mouth and into the air in a cloud of black dust, but because their bodies were incredibly light, they landed unscathed about a metre from the Tyrannosaurus’s head. With their stomachs now full, the ants pattered back to the entrance of their town, thoroughly sated. The Tyrannosaurus, meanwhile, rolled over into the cool shade and fell into an easy sleep.

And that was that.

As the Earth quietly turned, the sun slid silently towards the west, the cycad shadows lengthened, and butterflies and bugs flitted through the trees. In the distance, the waves of the primeval ocean lapped against the shores of Gondwana.

Unbeknown to all, in this most tranquil of moments the history of the Earth had taken a sharp turn in a new direction.

2

The Age of Exploration of the Dinosaur Body