“You treat me like I look,” a young trolless had once accused Conrad, on a crowded street at Festival time. Conrad's crime: stepping away from her so as not to loom. And his reply: “Obviously, miss. Our appearance is the first thing we say to the people around us, and yours is a scream of defiance." To her credit, the trolless had giggled at that, and winked an enormous eyelid

tired rehashings of old themes

Brocks said the new study suggested the Ediacaran biota “already contained some of the creatures that gave rise to the [Cambrian] explosion, to the rise of modern animals”. The Cambrian explosion, also called the biological big bang, was a period about 538.8m years ago when almost all major animal groups started to appear in the fossil record.

Having already fluffed his lines under the bomb that had led to Montgomery's try, Jenkins was found wanting again less than a minute after the restart.