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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