Trivia / After Man: A Zoology of the Future

• Follow the Leader: Being one of the pioneering works for the genre of Speculative Biology as a whole, many of its concepts have been popularly recycled within various works of the Spec Evo community:
  • Large marine cetacean-like birds inspired by the Vortex and Porpin have been a favorite, appearing in many other works such as the Gannetwhale from The Future is Wild and the porporants from Serina.
  • Flightless bats, with the Future Predator of Primeval being one of the more famous examples. The Night Stalker in particular inspired a whole array of fictious creatures that walk with their front limbs and grasp with their hind, such as the Dugs from the Star Wars universe.
  • Carnivorous baboons being apex predators of the plains, with some examples being based on manticores or werewolves.
• Science Marches On: A lot of the science was already shaky in the 80s and thirty years of scientific advancement haven't done it any favors. For instance...
  • Due to requiring calcium for their eggshells, it's very unlikely birds such as penguins can develop viviparity. Metriorhynchid crocodylomorphs from the Jurassic appear to have been viviparous (due to the lack of signs of terrestrial locomotion), but this is because basal crocodylormorphs are thought to have had soft shelled eggs if Brazillian sebecian eggs are to go by.
  • The Porpin and Vortex are shown with flexible spines, and swim by undulating their tail flukes, modified from their feet. Realistically, birds have fused rigid vertebrae, making this unlikely.
  • Despite mostly using echolocation, bats are NOT blind (contrary to popular belief), and are unlikely to lose their eyes (likely because eyes provide an enormous benefit for a flying animal which can benefit from multiple senses to navigate, since echolocation is only effective at relatively short distances).
  • Felids — and carnivorans as a whole — cannot brachiate due to the lack of a collarbone, making the Striger implausible. Not that it really seems that necessary, since, as many cat owners can easily attest, cats are already great climbers and have no problem hunting in trees. Another analogous animal would be Madagascar's fossa, a highly agile, arboreal feliform (related to cats) that mainly hunts arboreal primates (lemurs), yet it managed to keep up with its primate prey in the trees without diverging much from its carnivoran bauplan.
  • One creature is the tusked mole, a very poorly-suited idea for a digging mammal (because the forward and outward pointing teeth would constantly be getting caught on everything).
  • The hornheads are a lineage of boreal gigantelopes with a horny plate that grows over their upper jaw to assist in chewing up plant matter. The logic behind these creatures comes from the idea that since bovids lack upper incisors, instead having a horny pad, they would have difficulty dealing with the tough conifer branches of the north. This ignores the fact that cervids also lack upper incisors, and yet moose can deal with conifer branches just fine.
  • A large portion of mammals in the book are stated to have descended from Insectivora, a group which is now considered a wastebasket taxon (a dumping ground of superficially similar but not closely related animals; in this case, small insect-eating placental mammals). Hence, this throws the ancestry of many of the creatures featured into question and renders the tree of life shown at the end completely defunct.
  • The cleft-back antelope has a close symbiotic relationship with a species of future oxpecker, stated to be "a strengthening of the symbiosis that had developed between birds and grazing mammals during the early part of the Age of Mammals". Subsequent studies suggest this relationship is not as mutually beneficial as initially believed; the birds may actually be parasites which actively harm their hosts.
  • It is noted in the foreword of the reprinted edition that climate change was intentionally ignored, therefore presenting a very flawed and simplified view of the future. The idea of large-scale future global warming was not an idea that many considered during the 1970s, when the book was being produced. Fifty million years hence, it's unlikely that tundras would be as widespread as depicted in the book, where conditions are somehow unchanged since the present day.
  • The raboon is a giant, carnivorous descendant of the baboon which lives entirely off of scavenging. It is clearly based off of Tyrannosaurus, with a theropod-like stance, bone-crushing teeth, and was inspired by the then emerging idea that Tyrannosaurus was not an active hunter, but a lowly scavenger (which Dixon would use again for the gourmand in The New Dinosaurs). This idea has been thoroughly discredited, and the notion that any large, flightless land animal could subsist solely off of scavenging questioned (especially since there's no such animal which exists today). With that in mind, there is little reason to think that a primate would experience such a drastic shift in anatomy and mimic bipedal dinosaurs of all things. The reason T. rex and other giant theropods looked the way they did was simply because that was the ancestral bauplan for dinosaurs since the Triassic, not because it was the optimal design for a scavenger (quite the opposite). If a baboon evolved to be a larger, more carnivorous creature that frequently steals kills from smaller carnivores, it would far more likely resemble a bear, as bears are large, plantigrade, omnivorous placental mammals with bone-crushing jaws that are known to steal kills from smaller carnivores like wolves (the Chacma baboon's scientific name is even Papio ursinus).
  • The horrane is a predatory primate that hunts by leaping onto larger prey animals and slashing them with its sickle-like hand claws until its quarry bleeds to death. This was obviously inspired by the idea that dromaeosaurs like Deinonychus hunted larger game by slashing them with their raised toe-claw, but later research has seriously questioned this theory, and it's more likely that dromaeosaurs used their iconic sickle claw for gripping prey, and pinning down smaller prey animals, not unlike modern birds of prey.
  • The reedstilt is stated to have fifteen neck vertebrae instead of the normal mammalian condition of only seven. More recent studies seems to indicate that seven neck vertebrate is a hard limit for mammals due to how their genes function, and trying to bypass it greatly increases the chances of detrimental genetic disorders, childhood cancer, or being stillborn.^note The only mammals to have more than seven neck vertebrae, sloths and manatees, are able to bypass this limit by cheating: they shifted their shoulders downward rather than evolve more neck vertebrae and have abnormally low metabolic rates for mammals which lower the chances of genetic abnormalities developing.
  • The giantala is a huge, three-metre tall descendant of modern macropods (kangaroos, wallabies, and their relatives), and is similarly described as moving in a peculiar "loping motion". More recent studies on giant extinct macropods (that were actually smaller than giantala) suggest they were probably too heavy to move like that and more likely walked like humans or bipedal dinosaurs.
  • The entry for the water hornhead, a broad-snouted wading grazer, states it has a lifestyle similar to the duckbilled hadrosaurs of the Mesozoic Era. The idea of hadrosaurs being semi-aquatic, duck-like animals has long been discredited nowadays, the other hornheads (which browse on conifers) would be closer to actual hadrosaurs.
  • On the page regarding South American forests, Dixon relates how during the Great American interchange, placental mammals invaded South America and wiped out most of the less well adapted marsupial life (a hypothesis which Dixon would repeat in at least one non-fiction text). Subsequent research suggests something more complicated happened, with most marsupial predators having died out before the interchange even occurred, and the native ungulates also having declined in diversity prior to this event.
  • The gurrath is a predator said to be evolved from mongooses of the genus Herpestes, which were introduced to the Caribbean in human times and became invasive. The species that was introduced, the small Indian mongoose, has been reclassified in the genus Urva.
  • The swimming anteater is shown in a section showing otherwise only African animals, despite anteaters being purely South American animals, but it probably made more sense back in the 70s/80s when xenarthrans (the group to which anteaters, sloths, and armadillos belong) were once thought to be allied with the African aardvarks and pangolins in a group called Edentata (united by loss of teeth), but it's now known they're not closely related at all (aardvarks are more closely related to elephants, and pangolins closer to carnivorans than either is to xenarthrans).
  • The long-necked dipper's entry states that it is the only bird only able to fly for the first part of its life, but it has since been found that snowcocks (a type of Eurasian gamefowl) are also virtually flightless as adults, only able to glide from elevation for short distances.
  • A lot of the preliminary information given in the introduction, particularly involving prehistoric life, is outdated now. Some of these examples include the following:
    • Placoderms are presented as a totally separate branch from cartilaginous fish, ray-finned fish, and lobe-finned fish, but it is now known all three branches directly descended from placoderms, rather than it being some dead-end offshoot.
    • The chart of life in the beginning only shows a shadow for salamanders to represent amphibians during the Jurassic, since there were "no well-preserved forms" to present them; now there are numerous species known from exceptional specimens, mostly from Asia.
    • It indicates the reason why the age of reptiles came to an end is unknown, although implying sudden climate change as the explanation. It's now widely agreed upon that a huge celestial body (either comet or asteroid) colliding with the Earth at the end of the Late Cretaceous was the principal, if not sole, cause.
    • The phylogeny presented for reptiles is heavily out of date; mammals and their ancestors are presented as splitting equally from every other reptile branch, but in reality, they were much more distantly related and are no longer considered as reptiles (hence why the term mammal-like reptile is now rarely used).
    • Quetzalcoatlus and its ilk are referred to as "almost certainly scavengers", which was a prevailing opinion at the time, but it is now considered likely that they were land-based stalking predators like giant storks and poorly adapted for scavenging.
    • The dinosaurs are drawn as being tail-dragging and tripodal; they, along with the pterosaurs, are depicted as being completely scaly, errors which are noted in the foreword of the 2015 reprint.
    • The Cenozoic is divided into the early and late Tertiary periods, which is a geological term that is no longer used anymore; the period has now been divided into the Paleogene and Neogene. Dixon would repeat this more prominently in The New Dinosaurs.
  • The tree of life in the end shows numerous errors; cetaceans are now considered to be an aberrant subgroup of artiodactyls, the South American ungulates are now known to be sister-taxon to perissodactyls, and all placental mammal groups are shown diverging equally from "insectivores" at the beginning of the Cenozoic, despite the fact some were more closely related to one another and some likely appeared before then, while the opposite should be true of perching birds, which are depicted as having appeared before the Cenozoic in the tree but are currently thought to have first evolved millions of years after the era began.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The conceptual draft version and unused illustrations showed far more depictions of animals in the natural environment interacting with one another, versus the rather staged, plate-like drawings used in the final book.
  • According to Word of God, After Man was optioned for a possible film adaptation in the 1990s, and the rights were sat on some twenty years before the Hollywood executives eventually gave up on the idea and the rights reverted.

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