In this image, you can best see where I went for inspiration in these illustrations. The works of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, whose illustrations for The Little Mermaid heavily influenced this picture, were a huge influence, so much so that my illustrations are really just homage these to them and the generation of illustrators to which they belonged. This period of art history is generally ignored by art historians, but fortunately, I am no more an historian than I am a paleontologist.

The creature featured here is an ammonite, a fascinating shelled octopus. We get to sample one for dinner early in the novel, and almost become its dinner later on. The shelled squid are called belemnites and the corals and other things seen behind them are all species that exists in the late Cretaceous, mostly unchanged to the present day.

The girl is Lara and the gentleman next to her is Rillu. For most of the novel, Rillu is hardly as tall as her knee, but for a brief time in this enchanted lake, he looks like this. Lara’s pet is a leptoceratops, a late member of the psittacosaur (parrot) family of dinosaurs. He hails from distant Asia, the Gobi Desert in fact, so he is something of an exotic pet.