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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| After Man | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Man | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T11:11:16.243451+00:00 | kb-cron |
After Man: A Zoology of the Future is a 1981 speculative evolution book written by Scottish geologist and paleontologist Dougal Dixon and illustrated by several illustrators including Diz Wallis, John Butler, Brian McIntyre, Philip Hood, Roy Woodard and Gary Marsh. The book features a foreword by Desmond Morris. After Man explores a hypothetical future set 50 million years after extinction of humanity, a time period Dixon dubs the "Posthomic", which is inhabited by animals that have evolved from survivors of a mass extinction succeeding our own time. After Man used a fictional setting and hypothetical animals to explain the natural processes behind evolution and natural selection. In total, over a hundred different invented animal species are featured in the book, described as part of fleshed-out fictional future ecosystems. Reviews for After Man were highly positive and its success spawned two follow-up speculative evolution books which used new fictional settings and creatures to explain other natural processes: The New Dinosaurs (1988) and Man After Man (1990). After Man and Dixon's following books inspired the speculative evolution artistic movement which focuses on speculative scenarios in the evolution of life, often possible future scenarios (such as After Man) or alternative paths in the past (such as The New Dinosaurs). Dixon is often considered the founder of the modern speculative evolution movement.
== Summary ==
After Man explores an imagined future Earth, set 50 million years from the present, hypothesizing what new animals might evolve in the timespan between its setting and the present day. Ecology and evolutionary theory are applied to create believable creatures, all of which have their own binomial names and text describing their behaviour and interactions with other contemporary animals. In this new period of the Cenozoic, which Dixon calls the "Posthomic", Europe and Africa have fused, closing the Mediterranean Sea; whereas Asia and North America have collided and closed the Bering Strait; South America has split from Central America; Australia has collided with Southern Asia (colliding with the mainland sometime in the last 10 million years), uplifting a mountain range beyond the mountains of the Far East that has become the most extensive and the highest chain in the world, greater even than the Himalayas at their zenith 50 million years ago; and parts of eastern Africa have split off to form a new island called Lemuria. Other volcanic islands have been added, such as the Pacaus archipelago and Batavia. Over a hundred future animal species are described and illustrated in the book. Major groups include the "rabbucks", versatile descendants of rabbits filling the ecological niches of deer, zebras, giraffes and antelope; "gigantelopes", descendants of antelope filling niches held by elephants, giraffes, moose, musk oxen, rhinoceroses, and other large herbivores; "vortexes" and "porpins", descendants of penguins evolved to fill the aquatic niche of cetaceans; and the predatory rats, the major group of terrestrial predators and descendants of rats. There are also more bizarre creatures such as the "raboons", gigantic theropod-esque descendants of baboons; the "night stalker", a gigantic predatory leaf-nosed bat native to Batavia; the "desert leaper", a giant kangaroo-like dipodid; and the "chiselhead", a descendant of the eastern gray squirrel that has evolved a wormlike shape and large incisors for chiseling into coniferous trees (hence its name).
== Development == As a child, Dixon was inspired by H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, particularly the far-future creatures featured in the book, to create his own imaginary future animals descended from creatures of the modern day. These animals often served as background characters in Dixon's own retellings of Wells' work. In the 1960s, Dixon was influenced by the contemporary conservationist movements, especially a campaign to save the tigers. Dixon began to ponder that should the tiger and other endangered animals go extinct, something would inevitably take their place. After seeing a "Save the Whale" badge on a friend in the late 1970s, the idea materialized again. Thinking of what might evolve to take their place if whales did go extinct eventually led to the idea of the giant aquatic penguins in the final book. Dixon devised After Man as a popular-level book on the processes of evolution that instead of using the past to tell the story projected the processes into the future. After finishing a dummy version of the book, with text and his own illustrations, Dixon took the book to two different publishers in London, both of whom immediately greenlit the project. When designing the various animals of the book, Dixon looked at the different types of biomes on the planet and what adaptations animals living there have, designing new animals descended from modern day ones with the same set of adaptations. Though Dixon made illustrations of his future animals to pitch the project, the final book used illustrations by other artists due to a publisher decision. Dixon created detailed illustrations that the artists followed in the creation of the final artwork featured in After Man. One of few major speculative evolution works which preceded After Man, German zoologist Gerolf Steiner's 1957 Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia, which included a complete fictional order of mammals (the "Rhinogradentia", or "snouters"), included some ideas similar to what was later featured in Dixon's work, such as an animal with a face mimicking a flower (also present on a future bat in After Man). Dixon was completely unaware of Steiner's work, however, and had not used it as an inspiration.