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"Mom..." the girl began. "The poor thing has to eat. Why don’t you –"

At that moment, the gigantic dinosaur finished the last lettuce, made a sound like an amplified goat’s bleat, and made for the garden fence the professor’s wife had put up with her own two hands. She was still opening her mouth to utter an anguished moan when it had disappeared into the morning mist, leaving splintered posts and palings in its wake.

That was early on Monday morning.

"The animals," the TV presenter said, "have been identified as a type of dinosaur, called..." She looked down at her desk and moved her lips a couple of times, practising. "...Medusaceratops," she concluded triumphantly. "Medusaceratops," she repeated, "are a kind of horned dinosaur, and there appears to be an entire herd of them which has suddenly appeared at various parts of the city early this morning.

"I have with me," she went on, "a scientist from the Department of Palaentology from the University." The camera panned to the scientist, who had a red face, thinning white hair, and looked more than a little uncomfortable to have been dragged in front of the cameras. "Doctor," the newsreader said, "how do you explain the appearance of these dinosaurs in this city all of a sudden?"

The scientist shrugged. "I can’t explain it," he said. "They should not be here. And yet they are."

"You don’t think," the newsreader asked, leaning forward to show how earnest she was, "that there has perhaps been a herd of the animals hiding out somewhere in a forest all these years which has finally found its way into the city?"

For a moment the scientist looked as though he would burst out laughing, but he managed to keep it down to a tight-lipped smile. "These animals have been extinct for between seventy and eighty million years," he replied. "If they’d been around since then, with their size and appearance, do you really think nobody would’ve noticed?"

The newsreader seemed to mutter something under her breath. "But still," she said aloud, "if they had somehow stayed hidden, in some forest, then..."

"What forest?" the scientist, who was obviously tiring of the interview, cut in. "Where? Can you point out any forest within a hundred kilometres of this city?"

The newsreader glared down at her desktop to avoid having to glare at the camera. "There’s been a suggestion," she said, "that a clutch of dinosaur eggs somehow survived and have now hatched. What do you think of that idea?"

Now the scientist did laugh. "Keep an egg for a month or two," he said, "and see if it will hatch after that. We are talking of at least seventy million years. That’s seven followed by seven zeroes. Years."

The newsreader was beginning to look as if she wished the station had invited anyone else for this interview – a tarot card reader or a psychic spoon bender, or anyone. "But dinosaur eggs have been found, haven’t they?"

"Fossilised eggs," was the response. "Which means, literally, eggs turned to stone. Like the dinosaurs themselves. Well, obviously, not these dinosaurs, but you know what I mean." 

The newsreader gratefully clutched what seemed to her to be an escape opportunity. "Please tell us something about these dinosaurs, Doctor. Are they dangerous?"

"Well, that depends, doesn’t it?" The scientist was now in good humour. "They’re herbivores, so it’s not as if they’re going to bite anyone or eat anyone’s dog. But they’re also built on the basic plan of rhinoceroses, and rhinos, as we all know, are highly aggressive beasts, so one shouldn’t approach them closely. They’re liable to charge."

The TV channel switched to a live feed depicting a group of the dinosaurs walking through one of the city’s major parks. A line of police held the throng of onlookers, amongst whom were a large number of media people, back.

"We’ve not had the chance to study them in detail," the palaeontologist said, in a voice-over, "but we think that the markings on their neck shields are unique to individual animals. They probably serve as recognition markers."

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