On the opposite page last week, my colleague David Wighton entertainingly suggested that 1,000 years from now, palaeontologists will look back and see that failure to adapt to a changing environment was what finally drove the 21st century global investment bank to extinction.

A combination of structural and cyclical factors is certainly changing the environment in which these great beasts struggle to survive, as the first quarter results for 2016 demonstrate yet again. But will those scientists of the next millennium find that extinction claimed the entire herd? Are one or two adapting in ways that might enable them to scrape through - if not for 1,000 years, at least for the foreseeable future?