This being the final instalment, I just had to bring back my favourites from the series – the active, sometimes nurturing, often vicious, always fascinating terrors of the mid-Cretaceous, Mapusaurus roseae, Carcharodontosaurus saharicus, Tyrannotitan chubutensis (Matilda), Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, Oxalaia quilombensis, and the petite nightmares, Buitreraptor gonzalezorum. I’ve explained a little about these magnificent creatures within the author’s notes sections of earlier books and hope their deadly reprises got the blood pumping for you again. Each became characters in their own right throughout the series, so there was little room to introduce new animals at this stage (although, for any dinosaur enthusiasts out there, my upcoming NEWFOUNDLAND will be full of similar creatures as well as many new ones). Obviously, in an action series we often imagine such animals at their very worst to work the plot, but I believe the important word there is ‘animals’ – not ‘monsters’. So often dinosaurs are portrayed that way. Some may have behaved in ways that would terrify us, almost certainly, but they were no more monsters than a tiger, or a cow for that matter, both of whom also have the capacity to dispatch a man easily – and do. I try to write opposing philosophies in my characters to reflect humanity, and hopefully to avoid tiresome single agendas, but it’s probably no secret that I’ve a deep respect for animals – may even have written about a few! I believe we can learn much from their behaviour, and if I occasionally anthropomorphise them, here and there, to aid the narrative or work out a piece of comedy, my aim has always been to show them simply doing their best to survive good days and bad, just like the rest of us. 

Talking of animals, sometimes, when I offer one of my own furry friends a little treat or reward for being good, I often suspect they understand full well that by sharing such moments they’re rewarding me, too – also for being good, in their eyes.  It’s so often true that it’s better to give than to receive, and we humans do like to feel important!  They occasionally drive me up the wall, too, but the only time any have ever hurt me is when I’ve lost them, and those are scars I’ll never forget. They remind me what a damned good job they did, every day of their lives, making my life better. I’d hate to live in a world without animals.

Not that I’d want to be a dino-snack! Again, it’s a matter of respect, and returning to dinosaurs, I did manage to cameo Rebbachisaurus garasbae this time. Barrel-bodied, Rebbachisaurus was a diplodocid – twenty metres and twenty tons of long-necked, long-tailed sauropod majesty, related to the even longer but lighter, and far more famous Diplodocus longus (any who have visited the Natural History Museum in London may be familiar with ‘Dippy’, the full-sized reproduction of the late-Jurassic herbivore who lived fifty million years before Rebbachisaurus). Rebbachisaurus were specifically differentiated by unusually tall dorsal vertebrae along their high backs, giving them pronounced ridges that set them apart from most other sauropods, and even from other diplodocidae cousins. The idea of Rebbachisaurus and the relatively tiny, three-ton Ouranosaurus nigeriensis joining forces to survive the nuclear wasteland was sweet, if sad. For all my fellow animal-lovers out there, fear not! Both made it safely back to their herds in the north, after Heidi and Captain Bessel rudely broke into the narrative and whisked us away to 1940s Germany, taking the granddaddy of all carcharodontosauridae with them!