History Literature / AfterManAZoologyOfTheFuture

* EverythingsBetterWithMonkeys: Monkeys and apes still enjoy success in the tree tops, and have also become [[AscendedToCarnivorism the top predators of the African grasslands]].

** 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.

* PantheraAwesome: The striger, the last of the felines, and the first predator in Earth's history to develop adaptations specifically for preying on monkeys and apes.

* ArtisticLicenseBiology: Batavia is based on the concept that an archipelago formed and bats arrived there ahead of birds for once and evolved into flightless forms. Even if this were to occur, birds are much better adapted to reverting to a flightless existence than bats since they don't stand on their wings, walk on land much better than bats, and only need to lose some wing feathers, hence why birds have become independently flightless dozens of times while it's never known to have happened among bats even once. It would also mean that birds didn't reach Batavia for millions of years (long enough for bats to dominate niches there), which is extremely unlikely, especially considering the existence of seabirds and migratory birds.

* TRexpy: The raboon is an unusual mammalian variant of this trope, being a baboon that evolved into a ''Tyrannosaurus''-like carnivore walking on two legs, with short arms, a thick tail and massive fangs. The largest raboon species is primarily a scavenger that chases away smaller, weaker predators from their kill, which is a now-debunked theory about how ''Tyrannosaurus'' foraged.
* UnspecifiedApocalypse: The book doesn't go into detail about how humans went extinct, as the extinction of humanity is mostly just a way of getting anthropogenic climate change and artificial selection out of the way.

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 Nowadays it's very outdated in terms of biology, geology and many other sciences.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 speculative biology.

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 Nowadays it's very outdated in terms of biology, geology and many other sciences. For its time, however, it was just about the only text that took the idea of future evolution seriously. Outlandish as they can be, the imagined animals were treated with utmost respect and painted as if they were real. It set the stage for the popular topic of speculative biology.

The book is given an extensive review, with emphasis on creature design and how well the imagined animals hold up twenty-odd years later, here ([[http://babbletrish.blogspot.com/2009/09/humans-are-dead-but-there-are.html part one]], [[http://babbletrish.blogspot.com/2009/10/megafaunas-back-baby-lets-continue.html part two]]).

A 1981 book written by Scottish geologist and [[ArtisticLicenseBiology biologist wannabe]] 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. For its time, however, it was just about the only text that took the idea of future evolution seriously. Outlandish as they can be, the imagined animals were treated with utmost respect and painted as if they were real. It set the stage for the popular topic of speculative biology.

* BizarreAlienLocomotion: The nightstalkers walk on their forelimbs, using their hind legs to subdue prey.

* RodentsOfUnusualSize:

* ArmlessBiped: The Wakka and the Fin Lizard lack forelimbs.
%%* ArtisticLicenseBiology: A ''literal'' example.
* AscendedToCarnivorism: The horrane and the raboon are top predators descended from monkeys. Likewise the predator rats fill the same niche as present-day canines.
* BackupBluff: Threatened by birds, the Terratail rodent ducks behind a branch, hisses, and sticks its long tail (which resembles a snake) in its predators' faces.
* BatOutOfHell: There's a newly formed Pacific archipelago inhabited by various strange species of flightless bats. Probably the least scientifically plausible of the creatures presented (there could be flightless bats, but it'd be unlikely they'd produce forms like the nightstalker). That said, [[{{Homage}} at least they inspired]] ''Series/{{Primeval}}''[='=]s "Future Predator" and Subulba from ''Star Wars Episode One: Film/ThePhantomMenace''. The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Lesser_Short-tailed_Bat New Zealand Lesser Short-Tailed Bat]] does crawl around to hunt (though it's perfectly capable of flying as well).
* BizarreAlienLocomotion: The night stalkers walk on their forelimbs, using their hind legs to subdue prey.
* BizarreSexualDimorphism: The Matriarch Tinamou (female is similar to an adult turkey; male lives as a wren-like symbiont that rides around on her back), the predatory Bardelot (male looks like a polar bear, female is a huge, badass saber-toothed beast) and the Common Pine Chuck (female resembles living songbird, male has a massive beak for crushing seeds & nuts) are the three weirdest examples.
* CallASmeerpARabbit: Using taxonomic orders developed by pre-20th century humans to describe animals from 50 million years after man's extinction results in something like this. For example the wakka (ratite-like bipedal grazer), desert leaper (resembling a dromedary but with kangaroo-like hopping motion), and bardelot (polar bear analogue with sabretoothed females) are all classed as rodents even though they're very different from each other and don't always have what we identify as rodent features.

* EverythingsBetterWithMonkeys: Monkeys and apes still enjoy success in the tree tops, and have also become [[AscendedToCarnivorism the top predators of the African grasslands]]. Ironically, grassland predators is also where humanity got its start.

* EyelessFace: The truteal, purrip bat, and slobber.
* FantasticFaunaCounterpart: The book lives and breathes this trope, with so many examples that they have [[FantasticFaunaCounterpart/AfterManAZoologyOfTheFuture their own page]]. The text {{Lampshade}}s these as examples of convergent evolution.

* ManiacMonkeys: The cheetah-like Horrane and the theropod-like Raboons.
** While not true predators, the Khiffah sometimes leads a foe into a trap, and then eats it.

* MessyPig: Various species and even entirely new families of herbivores evolve from them. Most are pretty believable.
* NounVerber: Many of the animal names follow this trope.

* {{Portmanteau}}: Some of the animals are named like this, such as the rabbuck (a lagomorph that's taken over the deer ecological niche: rabbit + buck), and the shrock (a large, black-and-white striped insectivore-descendant: shrew + brock). We also have the Flunkey (flying + monkey), Porpin (porpoise + penguin), Tapimus (''Tapirus'' + ''Mus'', the scientific names of tapirs and mice), and don't forget the Raboons, which are [[RuleOfCool raptor baboons]].

** The islands of Batavia are named after the hisoric capital of the Dutch East Indies, but the name also refers to the fact that it's inhabited by bat-descendants.
* RodentsOfUnusualSize: Rodents are, in fact, the dominant predators of the new world (despite many other more plausible candidates, like shrews & other ([[ScienceMarchesOn former]]) insectivorans). Some weird things like the aquatic, hippo-like Mudgulper or the kangaroo-like desert leaper are present as well.

** The Oakleaf Toad comes from the genus ''Grima'' and has a tongue that looks like an earthworm. This is almost certainly a reference to Grima Wormtongue from ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings''

** [[Series/SaturdayNightLive Land shark!]]

** The Common Pine Chuck has insectivore females and seed-eating males. The idea of male and female birds evolving different diets is not unheard of: the now extinct huia bird of New Zealand had males with short crow-like beaks used to eat seeds and insects, while the female had a thin, curved beak to probe for nectar or wood-boring grubs.

* SpeculativeBiology: [[TropeCodifier One of the earliest]] and most famous works in the genre.
* SpiritualSuccessor : The 2003 TV series (and companion book) ''Literature/TheFutureIsWild'', produced by Animal Planet, takes one step further and shows three different future eras of life on Earth : 5 million AD, 100 million AD and 200 million AD.

* UnspecifiedApocalypse: The book doesn't go into detail about how humans went extinct.

* {{Zeerust}}: Several creature designs are quite dated.

* UsefulNotes/AustralianWildlife: Australia has collided with Southeast Asia & become a rainforest continent. Among others, there's the giantala, a giant lumbering kangaroo, the posset, a "marsupial pig" of sorts, and the slobber, an EyelessFace creature that catches insects with its salivation.

* FantasticFaunaCounterpart: The book lives and breathes this trope, with many of the life forms being the counterparts of real ones, both living and extinct. The text {{Lampshade}}s these as examples of convergent evolution. To name a few:
** Rabbucks are rabbit-descendants resembling ungulates, complete with hooves. Those living on temperate climates are similar to deer, whereas tropical ones resemble antelopes and zebras (the zebra-like version is named Strank). One species, the Picktooth, evolved large tusks, filling the ecological niche of warthogs.
** Luties are also rabbit-descendats that went the opposite way, shrinking in size and filling in the niche of mice and voles (despite coexisting with regular rodents).
** Rat-descendants take the place of large carnivores, including wolves (Falanx), cheetahs (Rapide), weasels (Janiset), foxes (temperate and polar Ravene), polar bears (Bardelot) and even walruses (Distarterops).
** Weasel-descendants also took the niche of some larger carnivorous mammals in remote places where predatory rats couldn't establish themselves, including the wolf-like Pamthret and the snow leopard-like Shurrack (the latter even has snow leopard rosettes).
** The Reedstilt is, bizarrely, a mammalian ''heron'', a fish-eater with long neck and snout, living in reed beds.
** Some squirrel-descendants, even more bizarrely, take the niche of insects: the Chirit moves on branches like an inchworm, whereas the Chiselhead gnaws tree-trunks like a beetle larva. Shrews also have a few insect-like descendants, including the Pfrit that runs on water like a water strider bug and the Trovamp, a blood-sucker similar to ticks.
** Gigantelopes are large, rhinoceros-like mammals descended from antelopes. They come in hairless tropical and wooly boreal variants. Hornheads, their close relatives, are similar in size, shape and ecological niche to moose.
** Raboons are bipedal, carnivorous baboon-descendants behaving like theropod dinosaurs, with smaller raptor-like and large, ''TyrannosaurusRex'' like variants.
** The Vortex and Porpin are penguin-descendants resembling cetaceans. The former is a giant filter-feeder like a whale, the latter is an agile fish-hunter like a dolphin.
** The Flunkey is a monkey with flying membranes similar to a flying squirrel.
** Tropical pig-descendants include the elephant-like Zarander (a large, long-trunked herbivore) and the anteater-like Turmi (a long-tongued insectivore).
** The Mud-Gulper is a large aquatic herbivore similar to a manatee, but with a hippopotamus-like head, descended from aquatic rodents.
** Australia has a number of marsupials taking the place of tropical animals, including the tapir-like Posset, the monkey-like Chuckaboo and the sloth-like Slobber.
** In South America, the Gurrath is a jaguar-like mongoose (complete with rosette-like pattern), its prey, the Tapimus, is a tapir-like rodent.
** The birds of Pacau all evolved from the Australian golden whistler, but went through a massive diversification. This includes the woodpecker-like Insect-eater and the raptor-like Hawk Whistler.
** The bats of Batavia include the Surfbat (a chiropteran seal) and the Shalloth (a sloth-equivalent, although with more varied diet).
** Averted with the Beaver, which is just a regular beaver with a few evolutionary changes, filling the same niche. The Meaching, a lemming-descendant, also fills the same niche as its ancestor.

** Rabbucks are rabbit-descendants resembling ungulates, complete with hooves. Those living on temperate climates are similar to deer, whereas tropical ones resemble antelopes and zebras.
** Rat-descendants take the place of large carnivores, including wolves (Falanx), cheetahs (Rapide), weasels (Janiset), polar bears (Bardelot) and even walruses (Distarterops).

** Some squirrel-descendants, even more bizarrely, take the niche of insects: the Chirit moves on branches like an inchworm, whereas the Chiselhead gnaws tree-trunks like a beetle larva.
** Gigantelopes are large, rhinoceros-like mammals descended from antelopes. They come in hairless tropical and wooly boreal variants.

* {{Portmanteau}}: Some of the animals are named like this, such as the rabbuck (a lagomorph that's taken over the deer ecological niche: rabbit + buck), and the shrock (a large, black-and-white striped insectivore-descendant: shrew + brock)
** Don't forget the [[RuleOfCool raptor baboons]].

* FantasticFaunaCounterpart: Many of the life forms are the counterparts of real ones, both living and extinct. For example, we have rabbit-descendants behaving like deer, rat-descendants behaving like wolves, pig-descendants behaving like elephants, penguin-descendants behaving like whales and baboon-descendants behaving like theropod dinosaurs. The text {{Lampshade}}s these as examples of convergent evolution.

* ArtisticLicenseBiology: A ''literal'' example.

You can read it online [[https://www.scribd.com/document/361509307/Dougal-Dixon-After-Man-A-Zoology-of-the-Future-PDF here]]. The book is given an extensive review, with emphasis on creature design and how well the imagined animals hold up twenty-odd years later, here ([[http://babbletrish.blogspot.com/2009/09/humans-are-dead-but-there-are.html part one]], [[http://babbletrish.blogspot.com/2009/10/megafaunas-back-baby-lets-continue.html part two]]).

* FantasticFaunaCounterpart: Many of the life forms are the counterparts of real ones, both living and extinct. For example, we have rabbit-descendants behaving like deer, rat-descendants behaving like wolves, pig-descendants behaving like elephants, penguin-descendants behaving like whales and baboon-descendants behaving like theropod dinosaurs. The text Lampshades these as examples of convergent evolution.

* {{Expy}}: Many of the life forms are Expies of real ones, both living and extinct. The text Lampshades these as examples of convergent evolution.

* ShoutOut: The Oakleaf Toad [[Literature/TheLordOfTheRings comes from the genus]] ''Grima'' and has a tongue that looks like an earthworm.