Alexandra Freeman

The executive producer, Tim Haines, wrote the narrative story of the book accompanying the series. However, he was very keen to include 'boxes' scattered throughout the text including scientific and historical stories around the various animals and environments featured in the series. Since both researcher Paul Chambers and I had experience of writing for a nonspecialist audience it seemed most sensible that we wrote these.

I had already written 'Fact Files' on each animal in preparation for the accompanying website, and so these were easy to adapt for the book. With his geological expertise, Paul wrote the introductory section to each chapter discussing the environment and world in that era. We then had to choose suitable subjects to focus on for the remaining 'boxes', in consultation with Tim, and split them evenly between us.

We then had to help research images to illustrate the boxes, as these were often only available from specialist researchers with whom we had been in contact whilst researching the series. There were also diagrams, showing changes in climate and the relationships between Beasts and living animals which we drew. Unfortunately, because the book had to go to press so far ahead of the series these diagrams were drawn just before the publication of new research which completely rewrote the historyof mammalian evolution! However we are now hoping to correct that by writing our own Encyclopaedia of Mammalian Evolution.