History Literature / AfterManAZoologyOfTheFuture

** The nightstalker is shown preying on a rabbuck and the shallot is shown preying on an unspecified rodent. However, it's explicitly stated that bats are the only mammals found on Batavia, so what these mammals are doing there is a mystery.

* AscendedToCarnivorism: After the carnivorans mostly went extinct, rats filled their former niches to become the dominant predators in most environments. Similarly, the horrane and the raboon are predators descended from monkeys.

** The flower-faced potoo and flooer are a species of bird and bat which have evolved to have faces which mimic flowers to attract pollinating insects. Such a lifestyle is probably unlikely for warm-blooded animals with such high metabolisms such as as birds and bats, since the catch rate is low (hence why only small invertebrates such as spiders and mantises have evolved such a niche in the present day).

** French peeople may look at the yellow-and-black, arboreal, and long-tailed Striger and think its some weird attempt at a realistic Franchise/{{Marsupilami}}.

* SandWorm: Desert sharks are sausage-shaped, hairless mammals descended from insectivores, which spend most of their time hiding beneath the sand to avoid the desert heat. They swim through the sand with their strong, paddle-shaped limbs and feed on rodents whose burrows their track down by smell. Exactly how big they are is never specified, however.

A 1981 book written by Scottish geologist Creator/DougalDixon, which presented his hypothesis on how the fauna and geography of Earth could change 50 million years from now. Nowadays it's very outdated in terms of biology, geology and many other sciences. It set the stage for the popular topic of SpeculativeBiology.

* EverythingsBetterWithPenguins: Giant, marine descendants of modern penguins took over the place of whales. Anatomically speaking, there are a couple of problems (namely, the flexibility of the spine and the vivipary thing), but otherwise these birds are probably among the most accurate creatures from the book. Which is really saying [[ArtisticLicenseBiology something]].

** The nightstalker is shown preying on a rabbuck and the shallot is shown preying on an unspecified rodent. However, Batavia is explicitly located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (as shown on world maps provided), so far from land only flying animals like bats and birds could reach it. How a large terrestrial animal like a rabbuck could reach it is completely unexplained.

* ArtisticLicense: It's noted in the foreword of the 2015 reprinted edition that the setting ignores changes in climate and floral overturn which surely would have occurred in fifty million years, supposedly so it would not alienate general readers with an environment that was ''too'' unfamiliar. Instead, the plant life and climate is exactly as it is in the present day despite the drastic shifting of continents and differences in animal life.

* CartoonCreature: Classification of many of the animals depicted is very loose; sometimes they're only obvious as "mammal" or "bird", without any stricter definition given. For example, the creature on the cover, the reedstilt, is merely said to descend from an "insectivore". [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insectivora Insectivora]] was a group that encompassed about five-hundred different species (which, thanks to ScienceMarchesOn, turned to not be closely related in many cases). Some of the marsupials also suffer from it, as there are equivalents to placental sloths, pigs, and monkeys, but it's never mentioned what they evolved from.

** Many animal names are some kind of wordplay, most of them being {{Portmanteau}}s (see aboves).

* SandWorm: Desert sharks are sausage-shaped, hairless mammals descended from insectivores, which spend most of their time hiding beneath the sand to avoid the desert heat. They swim through the sand with their strong, paddle-shaped limbs and feed on rodents whose burrows their track down by smell.

** French peeople may look at the yellow-and-black, arboreal, and long-tailed Striger and think its some weird attempt at a realitic Franchise/{{Marsupilami}}.