Dr Braxton Beesworth is the foremost naturalist of his age. An driven man of breathtaking ambition he has determined to write the definitive beastiary cataloguing not only all the fauna on the Earth but all the fauna that has EVER lived upon the planet.Dr Beesworth has assembled a band of adventurers hand picked for their diverse skills and together with his very great friend Mr Wells has created a working Time Machine. Unfortunately on an early trip there was a catastrophic failure of the temporal homing matrix (this failure has been dubbed a poing, pings being easy to fix). The Time Machine returned them to the 21st century rather than the 19th where they belong.