Fifty million years from now:An evening of speculative biology with Dougal Dixon.

"In the year 2525 if man is still alive" famously sang Zager & Evans back in 1969. Twelve years later, in 1981, the Scottish palaeontologist, geologist, and author decided to look a lot further forward than that and decreed, for matters of expediency more than anything, that in the year 50,001,981 man would very much not be still alive.

He was working on a book, After Man:A Zoology of the Future, in which he presents a hypothesis of what the animals of Earth may look like following a mass extinction event. He'd decided that humans just got in the way of the story (the way they domesticate animals, hunt animals, treat diseases, etc;) and that for evolution to really go somewhere different man would have to be written out of the story.

The Night-Stalker

Thirty-seven years later I was with my friend Simon at Conway Hall, an event hosted by New Lands in association with the London Fortean Society, to witness Dougal in conversation with fellow palaeontologist and author of Hunting Monsters:Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths, Darren Naish.

For my shame, and not for the first time in the last five days, I'd never heard of either the host or the clearly incredibly popular speaker before. It seemed I was in a minority. This was one of the best attended Conway Hall events I'd ever been to. Up there with the one about witches and the occasion when both Penny Rimbaud from Crass and Ghostwatch creator Stephen Volk spoke. Simon, like many others, had even brought his Dougal Dixon books along to be signed. These people are fans.

Wakka

Reedstilt

Why would they not be? After Man looks to be just the sort of fantastic book that would catch a curious child's imagination at an early age and refuse to loosen its grip. The Night Stalker and the Desert Sharks alone are about as bizarre as anything in all science-fiction (and, on closer inspection, most of the other creatures are pretty bonkers too).

Although this does belong, strictly speaking, in the realm of sci-fi (both science and fiction are involved in the creation of these creatures) the term that gets bandied about the most is 'speculative biology'. An imagining, informed by what we know of the evolutionary process and the adaptations that drive and necessitate it, of what may develop many millions of years in the future - when man is no more.

Woolly Gigantelope

Desert Shark

Dougal Dixon spoke lengthily, enthusiastically, articulately and with both humour and a strong Dumfries accent. He was a joy to behold, each digression not so much a deviation from the point he was trying to make but a gateway into a whole new field of enquiry and wonder.

Darren Naish simply had to begin a question and Dougal was off. Starting with a little personal history he explained how, in his youth, like many children, he was something of a 'dinosaur freak' but it being the fifties the sheer amount of dinosaur merchandise available today wasn't available so he started drawing his own comic strips, first ripping off HG Wells' Time Machine before developing his own fantastic beasts.

He started to wonder about extinction and conservation. His father suggested to him that saving the tiger wasn't worth it! Species sometimes die out and new ones come along to replace them. Let nature be. When Dougal saw some 'Save the Whale' paraphernalia he remembered his father's words and wondered what may replace whales should they die out. He thought, quite logically, penguins may evolve to become gigantic and, essentially, take Moby Dick's place and that was it, he was off.

Rootsucker

Raboons

Imagination fired he was soon 'designing' giant flightless bats like the night stalker, ultra-aggressive baboon/raptor hybirds called raboons, huge sand living 'sharks', underwater monkeys, and all manner of long necked oddities. Some clearly had their genesis in prehistoric creatures (check out the woolly gigantelope) while others don't stray too far from the recognisable, but peculiar, fauna of the present day. The rootsucker appears to be a distant ancestor of the duck-billed platypus. 

Dougal, and this a real treat for those fans present, had brought with him draft copies of the initial book, forty year old photocopies of his illustrations, and resin models, the queue for the signing snaked all the way out of the door into the corridor and back into the hall again.

Khiffah

But it was the talk (there was a Q&A but these things rarely add much to the experience, perhaps explaining why half the attendees either shot off home or to the pub instead of hanging around for it) that was the real pleasure of the evening. Dougal talked about how he considered breeding stock, ecosystems, as well as already in place adaptations when 'inventing' his animals, his 'babies'.

He looked at what animals he thought would thrive in a post-human society and considered that rats, rabbits, seagulls, and crows wouldn't have a problem whereas dogs, cats, horses etc; have became too reliant on humanity for their existence to last long post-humanity.

The book became an instant success, was translated into about sixteen different languages, and soon Dougal Dixon found himself travelling around the world promoting and talking about it. In the US he cagily started referring to evolution as 'animal development' so as not to upset creationists and there, also, he found people more interested in what had caused the mass extinction of humanity than the animals that would live after man. Almost as if they couldn't conceive of a world devoid of homo sapiens. Dougal was pretty adamant that he didn't care what caused the death of man, only that man had to die for this book to make sense.

In Japan, the land of Godzilla so not a place unaccustomed to imaginary beasts, animators intended to bring Dougal's creations to life using Ray Harryhausen style stop-motion animation and when Dougal asked to film in the Serengeti, in Costa Rica, or on the Galapagos Islands he was granted his wish. He was a rock star of the speculative biology scene and now, despite (or perhaps because of) being a grey heared septuagenarian, he's a rock star of the Fortean scene.

There's even an anime available that features a lament sung by a child who's travelled into the future on a flying saucer only to despair at the end of humanity.

Swimming Monkey

Flooer

If that sounds bizarre it's as nothing compared to Dougal Dixon's wonderful and frightening world of flooers, rabbucks, predator rats, khiffahs, wakkas, and night stalkers. A fun evening that despite its oddity factor still proved to be as educational as it was entertaining.

Thanks to Simon for suggesting this, accompanying me to this, and debriefing over pizza and Coca-Cola afterwards! Dinosaurs, pizza, and fizzy drinks! Like two schoolboys allowed to stay up late and have their favourite treats.