Speculative evolution thread

[Infinity Blade]

The genre of speculative evolution is a really interesting one, thus I decided to dedicate a thread to it. Share and discuss works (books, documentaries, artwork, etc.) regarding speculative evolution here.

Dougal Dixon's After Man: A Zoology of the Future (about life on Earth 50 million years in the future), The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution (if the K/Pg event never happened), and Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future (future human evolution) are all online, which is pretty cool. All three books are old and surely some of the content in them is dated. Nevertheless, they remain compelling (although to be candid, I liked Man After Man less than the previous two). Here are the hyperlinks to them.

- After Man
- The New Dinosaurs
- Man After Man

Fun fact: Man After Man was originally supposed to be about humans traveling to the time period of Earth seen in After Man and ravaging the planet like they do in the present day. Personally, I find that to be a cooler premise than what the book actually turned out to be. I think Dixon transfers this premise to his book Greenworld (which thus far has only been published in Japan), though. Only there, humans are on an extraterrestrial planet, not on their own in the future.

[creature386]

As for artworks, these aliens:
nemo-ramjet.deviantart.com/art/Snaiad-Relaunched-466994619
And a complete fictional phylogenetic tree:
www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/53bd869491097
This future creature is beautiful as well:
www.artstation.com/artwork/bmXdd

[Infinity Blade]

There's room for discussion for A LOT of animals in Dixon's books, but I want to express my confusion regarding one animal in After Man.

The clatta, Testudicaudatus tardus, a lemur-like prosimian with a heavily armoured tail protected by a series of overlapping horny plates, demonstrates this principle. Before the arrival of the tree-living predators, such a tail would have been a disadvantage, interfering with the efficiency of food gathering. Any tendency for such a cumbersome structure to evolve would have been quashed rapidly by natural selection. But faced with constant danger the efficiency of food gathering would have taken on an importance secondary to defence and would have therefore created the correct conditions for it to evolve.

The animal itself is a leaf-eater and moves slowly, upside down, along the boughs. When a striger attacks, it drops down and hangs from a branch by its tail. The clatta is now safe - the only part within reach of the predator is too heavily armoured to be vulnerable.

When attacked, the clatta drops down, presenting the predator with an impenetrable horny-plated tail.

What's stopping the striger from descending down the branches and ravaging the rest of the clatta's unarmored body?

[creature386]

I dunno, maybe it is too dangerous to do it if there is no branch below the branch the clatta is hanging on and it couldn't carry it's corpse on the branch to eat it after killing it.