On the tundra, giants such as the carnivorous bardelot that descended from cats have taken over the niche of the polar bear, and prey on the woolly gigantelope, a distant relative of the antelope that resembles today’s musk oxen. There is the unlikely insectivorous pfrit, descended from a primitive shrew, that can walk on water. Taking the reader through the seven major biomes of future Earth, Dixon introduces us to the rabbits that evolved to take over the gap left when the ungulates largely disappeared, evolving into large grazing animals such as the rabbuck, while rats evolved into wolf-like animals such as the falanx that have become the dominant predator.
And just wait until you see the bizarre bat fauna of the islands of Batavia”įifty million years is obviously a long time, so we do not merely have rabbits and rats.
“With the disappearance of the whales, some penguin species evolved into filter-feeding giants such as the vortex. A lot of the dominant fauna of our time, already under threat when this book was written in 1981, has gone extinct and Dixon imagines a world where rats and rabbits, amongst others, have exploded in diversity and taken over large swathes of the world. What if humans went extinct and we were to travel 50 million years into the future? What would life look like then? Dixon has meticulously constructed a future version of our world, where the continents have kept on drifting (the Mediterranean Sea has closed up, Australia has collided with Asia, and South America has once again become disconnected from North America) and life has kept on evolving. Dixon, a geologist who over the decades has contributed to many children’s book and children’s encyclopaedias, has been particularly influential on this genre with his book After Man. It may seem a bit whimsical, but some biologists have not been afraid to entertain themselves wondering what life might look like in the future. So, what is speculative zoology? It is the biological equivalent of the fiction genre of alternate history – the books and movies that ask, for example, “What if Germany had won World War II?” and take it from there. “ After Man: A Zoology of the Future“, written by Dougal Dixon, published as a facsimile reprint of the 1981 edition by Breakdown Press in May 2018 (hardback, 128 pages)
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