Speculative Evolution: Bear Whales and Bipedal Dinosaurs #SciFiSunday
We’re familiar with speculative technology: warp drives, phasers, time machines, hard light hologram projectors. Science fiction also regularly explores speculative architecture, speculative fashion, and speculative culture. What about speculative biology? Or more specifically, what about speculative evolution? Some stories have explored alternate possibilities for evolution. Look no further than the Sleestack from Land of the Lost. Imagine however if we project evolution forward. If humanity survives the next 10,000 or 5,000,000 years, what would it look like? And if humanity doesn’t survive, what will the species who replace us look like a hundred million years after we’re gone? That is the subject of speculative evolution. Here’s more from Earthling Nature:
Its popularity has gradually grown in no small part due to the works of the Scottish geologist, paleontologist and prolific dinosaur book writer Dougal Dixon, with his famous trilogy of speculative evolution consisting of “After Man: A Zoology of the Future” (1981), “The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution” (1988) and “Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future” (1990), later as well working as consulter and creature designer for the later TV series “The Future is Wild” (2002), which was responsible for the resurgence of interest in this area by bringing a relatively more up-to-date take on the subject. With the growing presence of the internet at the time, Speculative Evolution flourished to create a fandom of its own sometime around the mid-2000s.
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