While Dixon's earlier book After Man is set fifty million years in the future, The New Dinosaurs speculates on how the dinosaurs would have evolved over the last 65 million years had the Cretaceous-Palaeogene extinction event not taken place. The book contains a few suggestions inconsistent with current scientific knowledge.
Pterosaurs and feathered dinosaurs replace birds in dominance, even though fossil evidence proves both groups apart from maniraptora were declining rapidly before the mass extinction took place. Dinosaurs were also filling the roles that mammals and squamates occupied during the dinosaur age, and most of the dinosaurs were covered with hair.
I dunno what to say about this thing. Its speculative biology? Alternate zoological history? Its creative, beautiful, well explained and highly entertaining. Do it. Apr 11, Preston rated it it was amazing. A great book of prehistoric 'what-ifs' that makes for a lot of fun for anyone interested in prehistoric life and evolution. Feb 03, Andre rated it it was ok Shelves: animal , evolution , good-idea-bad-execution , science-fiction , paleontalogy.
Wow, what difference it can make when you read a book again after some years. I remember to like it very much when first reading it years ago, but now it has dropped a lot. Now, that is not due to most of the speculations in it but rather due to its inconsistences and some speculations seeming extremely unlikely. Plus there are some things that I think could have been skipped and a few really uncreative things. In terms of its content, there is of course the problem that this book is from the lat Wow, what difference it can make when you read a book again after some years.
In terms of its content, there is of course the problem that this book is from the late s and so some things are pretty damn outdated like claiming that all Mesozoic mammals were small insectivores , but of course things like giving dinosaurs feathers or fuzz where pretty progressive for its time and something many people still have a problem today.
But most of this book's problems have nothing to do with that. After all, that the author needs about one quarter of the book to finally get to his fictional dinosaurs is something that is really unnecessary in my mind. I could understand if he shortly introduced dinosaurs from before the KT extinction, but did he have to put out so much text regarding modern continents and climates? This book is only pages long, dammit!!! Everybody picking this up will want to see the new dinosaurs and not the old ones.
Shortly after this we had the first problem with some of the author's speculations: It's not that I am against the idea of ground dwelling pterosaurs, in fact even at the time of the end of the cretaceous period we did have big pterosaurs spending lots of time on the ground hunting like storks.
And of course in a speculative scenario such as this, those could diversify more and become fully terrestrial, but not only is it not explained why such specialized flyers became continental ground dwellers in the first place here, but how on earth could the fourth finger, which supported the wing membrane, become a part of the animal's carriage-support and even develop a hoof? How would that ever work?
I think it would be more likely if the fourth finger just atrophies. Not to mention that the way the author did it, the front legs simply have too many long joints and I doubt that this would work well during locomotion. But still, you could say that this idea was at least somewhat creative, even if a bit illogical albeit nothing compared to the Harridan pterosaur later with its rather birdlike form, that might only be possible unless the evolutionary line of this species included an earthbound time evolving two-legged locomotion to then return to flight , but his take on Madagascar was just lazy even lazier than the later sauropod with a trunk or the swan and penguin pterosaurs, or the whale pliosaur and bird snatching plesiosaur.
The dinosaurs remained unchanged ever since the island broke off from Gondwana? I think pure gene drift and change of climate would have changed them somewhat.
And why are the Megalosaur and Titanosaur still this big? The latter is twice as tall as an elephant and the biggest creatures Madagascar had in our times were the elephant birds, if more was possibly why weren't they bigger? And isolation doesn't explain this in the least.
In fact based on that, they should be a lot smaller. And sadly this was not the only thing I negatively noticed after reading this again after so many years. This book is also quite inconsistent. You see, why do some of the dinosaurs have "fur" and some don't? And if they have this covering alot in some cases, like that one "ankylosaur" why would the tundra be too harsh for them as this here states if birds are just fine? I know this was released in the 80s and the big "revolution" only started in the 90s, but still, inconsistent.
The author introduced that "fur" possibly simply feathers for so many dinosaurs, so why would none of them have adapted to the arctic? That makes no sense. In fact it makes even less sense when he introduced alpine dinosaurs. As these creatures clearly show every adaptation you would have in an arctic region so why on earth are there none in the tundra?
How does that make sense? Plus, why do they have "fur" but no other sorts of feathers? Did Dixon not know about the feathers back then? If yes, where does the "fur" come from? And sadly it was not just a few times this problem showed up. There seems to be no logic or consistency as to which dinosaurs have "fur" and which do not. In theory all dinosaurs could have had some amount of feathers or "fur," but why do some here have that, even those whose ancestors had no fossil evidence of feathers but clear evidence of scales, and others don't?
At least you could mostly guess how the evolution might have worked, but the many-jointed pterosaur was not the only case of extremely odd evolution. You see, I really asked myself what sort of pterosaur this "Koon" descended from. It has teeth that look like the ones of an ungulate. Where there any teethed pterosaurs left at the end of the cretaceous period? As far as I know, there were none. Sadly towards the end I asked myself more and more how much the author actually knew. You see according to him these islands in the end have no big predators and as such the big terrestrial pterosaurs have no defensive mechanisms of any kind.
Which is bullshit. A good comparison would be Madagascar and New Zealand with giant flightless birds and both had big predators. The Moa were hunted by the biggest eagle ever in fact. But this here has no such thing? No big carnivorous pterosaur, mammal or reptile? And the guy who wrote this was an alleged expert? And if this weren't enough, shortly before the end we had the dinosauroid again, that humanoid dinosaur that would probably never evolve.
Something like this would need genetic engineering. Again: This guy is supposed to be an expert. So all in all, this was worse than I remembered it. Apparently Man after Man was not the only sketchy book of the author. Sure it had some interesting and plausible ideas but it's pretty damn inconsistent and some things would probably never have evolved in any way. Mar 13, Christopher Saenz rated it really liked it. Pretty nice book, the art for it is very interesting.
The designs and biology of the creatures presented is very interesting. Earth still keeps the same continental arrangement as in our timeline, but with a different biogeography due to the different fauna diversity, the book groups these in zoogeographical realms, which are:. Speculative Evolution Wiki Explore. Popular pages. Evolution and Biology. Alternative biochemistry Alien planets Habitable solar systems Intelligence Speculative civilizations Speculative Physiology Guide to naming.
An Archaeological Evolution. Erin and the Dinosaurs. Erin And The Dinosaurs. Before The Dinosaurs. Recommend Documents. The new dinosaurs: an alternative evolution Fastovsky andDavidB. Your name.
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