For David Bonderman it was a disconcerting moment. At an investment conference in Frankfurt last year, the co-founder of Texas Pacific Group, the private equity fund, glanced up at an overhead screen to find his face crudely superimposed on the head of a dinosaur.

Jon Moulton, head of Alchemy, a much smaller rival, was using a presentation to assert, none too subtly, that the world’s large buy-out groups were suffering from gigantism. Soon they would falter and only extinction lay ahead.