Of Ants and Dinosaurs

1 The First Encounter

It was an ordinary day in the Late Cretaceous. It is impossible to determine the exact date, but it was truly an ordinary day, and Earth was at peace.

Let us examine the shape of the world that day. At that time, the profiles and positions of the continents differed radically from their current forms. Antarctica and Australia made up a single landmass greater in size than either continent today, India was a large island in the Tethys Sea, and Europe and Asia were two separate landmasses. Dinosaurs were found predominantly on two supercontinents. The first, Gondwana, had been Earth’s only continuous landmass several billion years earlier. It had since broken up, and its area was greatly reduced, but it was still as big as present-day Africa and South America combined. The second, Laurasia, had split from Gondwana and would later come to form what we now know as North America.

That day, every creature on every continent was occupied with the business of survival. In that uncivilised world, they knew not where they’d come from and cared not where they were headed. When the Cretaceous sun was directly overhead and the shadows cast by the leaves of the cycads were at their smallest, their sole concern was where they were going to get lunch.

In a sunlit clearing amid a stand of tall sago palms in central Gondwana, one as yet quite unexceptional Tyrannosaurus rex had just lynched a plump, good-sized lizard for its midday meal. With its fearsome claws it ripped the still wriggling lizard in two and tossed the tail end into its gaping jaws. As it munched away with relish, the dinosaur felt entirely happy with the world and its own place within it.

Things below ground were far from calm, however. The Tyrannosaurus’s pursuit of the lizard had caused a powerful earthquake in the subterranean ant town located a mere metre from the dinosaur’s left foot. Fortunately, the town had just avoided being trampled, but now hordes of its thousand or so residents scuttled to the surface to see what had happened.

The Tyrannosaurus had blocked out more than half their sky; it was like a towering peak piercing the clouds. For the ants massed in the mountain’s shadow, it was as if the day had suddenly become overcast. They squinted up, up, high into the sky, watching as the lizard’s tail arced through the air and into the fathomless mouth of the Tyrannosaurus. They listened to the sound of the dinosaur chewing, to the cracking and rumbling that was like thunder from the heavens. On previous occasions, this thunder had often been accompanied by a heavy downpour of splintered bones and chunks of flesh. Even a light drizzle of the dinosaur’s leftovers would provide lunch for the entire town. But this Tyrannosaurus kept its mouth tightly closed, and nothing rained down from the sky. After a few moments, it tossed the other half of the lizard into its mouth. Thunder boomed overhead again, but still the shower of bones and flesh held off.

When the Tyrannosaurus had finished, it took a couple of steps back and lay down contentedly for a nap in the shade. The ground shuddered, the peak collapsed into a distant mountain range, and brilliant sunshine flooded the clearing once more. The ants shook their heads and sighed. The dry season was long this year, and life was getting harder by the day. They had already gone hungry for two days.

Just as the crestfallen critters were turning back towards the entrance to their town, another earthquake rocked the clearing. The mountain range was rolling agitatedly back and forth across the ground! The ants watched intently as the Tyrannosaurus stuck one of its monstrous claws into its mouth and began to dig furiously between its teeth. Immediately, they understood why the dinosaur could not sleep: lizard flesh had got stuck in its teeth and was getting on its nerves.

The mayor of the ant town had a sudden idea. It climbed onto a blade of grass and released a pheromone towards the colony below. As the pheromone spread, the ants understood the mayor’s meaning and passed the message on. Antennae waved as a tide of excitement swept through the crowd.

Led by the mayor, the ants marched towards the Tyrannosaurus, streaming across the ground in orderly black rivulets. At first the mountain range seemed impossibly far away, visible on the horizon but unreachable. But then the restless Tyrannosaurus rolled towards them again, closing the gap between itself and the procession of ants in an instant. As it shifted, one of its huge claws fell from the sky and landed with an earth-shaking thump right in front of the mayor. The impact bounced the entire procession clear off the ground, and the dust it raised mushroomed before the ants like an atomic cloud.

Without waiting for the dust to settle, the ants followed their mayor onto the dinosaur’s claw. The dinosaur’s palm had come to rest perpendicular to the ground, forming a craggy, precipitous cliff. But to the ants, who excelled at climbing, this was no obstacle. They quickly darted up the cliff-face and onto the dinosaur’s forearm. Still in formation, they navigated the rough skin of the forearm, winding their way across its plateau-like surface, down and up the steep sides of its countless gullies and on towards the upper arm and the Tyrannosaurus’s maw.

Just then, the Tyrannosaurus raised its massive claw to pick at its teeth again. The ants advancing across its forearm felt the ground beneath them tilting, followed by an alarming increase in G-force. They clung on for dear life. Half their view of the sky was now taken up by the dinosaur’s colossal head. Its slow breathing was like wind gusting through the heavens and its oceanic eyes peering down at them made them tremble with fear.

Spotting the ants on its forearm, the Tyrannosaurus raised its other arm to brush them off. Its palm blotted out the midday sun like a vast stormcloud, casting a threatening shadow over the ant army. They stared up at it in horror, twitching their antennae frantically. The mayor quickly raised one of its front legs and the rest of the troop immediately did the same, the entire colony now one long, quivering black arrow pointing at the dinosaur’s mouth.

The Tyrannosaurus was stunned for a few seconds but eventually grasped the ants’ intention and lowered its arm. The stormcloud dispersed and sunlight returned. Then the dinosaur opened its mouth wide and placed a single clawed finger against its titanic teeth, forming a bridge between arm and jaw. There was a fraction of hesitation, but the mayor took the lead once again and the rest of the colony marched on without demur.

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.