Dougal Dixon, AFTER MAN: A ZOOLOGY OF THE FUTURE
Six out of five stars.
After Man: A Zoology of the Future is one of the best auxiliary materials to the study of evolution and other aspects of biology I've ever run across. In After Man, Dougal Dixon, whose gorgeous, richly illustrated books are a most welcome addition to anyone's library save that of the most die-hard adherent to Intelligent Design, shows us how our world will look some 50 million years in the future, long after humankind has passed from the scene. The relatively few creatures that the Modern Anthropogenic mass extinction spared, such as rats, antelopes, rabbits, birds, small marsupials, housecats, and some bats, have evolved into countless new orders, families, genera, and species of animals, which now occupy the niches that their analogs of the Holocene and the Pleistocene and Pliocene before them (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenozoic for an overview of these and other periods of the Cenozoic Era of life and the biota characteristic of them). Many of those groups would look utterly strange to us, but their ways of life and the habitats they occupy would be quite familiar.
The rats and some of the rare predators that survived the Holocene extinctions have evolved into magnificent new predators taking the place of the vanished carnivores -- the bears, canids, big cats, mustelids, and pinnipeds (seals) -- of our time; these include, e.g., the ravere, Vulpenys ferox, a fox or wildcat analog that preys on small mammals and birds, and the janiset, Viverinus trevipes, a long-bodied, burrowing predator strongly resembling the extinct stoats and weasels, both inhabitants of the Temperate Zone woodlands and grasslands; the two-meter long pamthreat, Vulpemustela acer, descended from mustelid stock, of the coniferous boreal forests; and the Bootie Bird, Corvardea niger, of the polar tundra. Herbivores include, e.g., the Vortex, Balenornis vivipera, a great whale-like animal descended from penguins, that inhabits the Southern Ocean; the Groath, Hebecephalus montanus, a mountain-goat analog sporting a great pyramidal horn whose base covers the top of its head from crown to snout, of the fold-mountain belt formed when Africa finally crashed into Europe, erasing the Mediterranean Sea and thrusting up huge blocks of new mountains where that sea had once been; and the Sand Flapjack, Platycaudatus structor, a burrowing creature descended from rodents that inhabits sandy desert regions. All these and more crowd the pages of this wonderful book, which also includes chapters of text on evolution, the history of life, and Earthly life's future, as well as an appendix comprising a glossary, a detailed diagram of the evolutionary tree of life, and a comprehensive index.
This book, a rare treasure of speculative biology, is a must for anyone who is interested in the biological sciences -- or simply loves beautiful books.