GROVEBACK - Strangely regular hummocks surmounted by small stands of shallow-rooted trees tell of the buried giants known as Grovebacks. Spending the greater part of their lives dormant, these enormous creatures rise from the loamy soil to wander ponderously from one breeding ground to the next. Like many huge animals on Darwin, the Grovebacks are dependent upon a protein-rich food-source composed of tiny aerophytes, micro-flyers that sometimes darken the sky with their numbers. The Groveback's rare emergence and subsequent feeding coincides with the equally infrequent, periodic expansion of the microflyer swarms. Gigantism is a big feature in EXPEDITION and, come to think of it, in all of my imaginative artwork. Obvious scale differences are a fun way for the public to easily put themselves in a painting and I'm sure that it's that very element that so many find appealing about dinosaurs.

Physical motifs, like the broad curves on the Groveback, were used repeatedly throughout the book to convey a sense of shared evolution the planet.