"The premise of the book is simple: take the Earth today, remove the humans, and let evolution take its course for 50 million years. What new animals evolve? Of course, in other hands this approach could have resulted in a throwaway romp. In Dixon’s, it produced an incredibly detailed, thoughtful book, in which the principles of evolutionary theory and ecology are rigorously applied. Crypsis (adaptations to avoid being seen by either predators or prey) is a common theme, as is mimicry. And convergent evolution (the idea that unrelated organisms in similar ecological niches evolve similar adaptations) is everywhere. Each species has a scientific name which follows the conventions that taxonomists use, and the text describes their behaviours and inter-species interactions. The striking illustrations, with copious annotations, resemble a naturalist’s field notes...

Dougal Dixon, who studied geology at the University of St Andrews, followed up After Man with two similar speculative biology books. In 1988, The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution was published, and explored a world where the end-Cretaceous mass extinction hadn’t wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. Man after Man: An Anthropology of the Future came out in 1990, and speculated on the evolution of our own over the next five million years...

Speculative biology has been around ever since HG Wells tackled human evolution in The Time Machine in 1895, but its power to spark our imaginations, as well as inform our understanding of organisms through deep time, is undiminished."

[theguardian.com]