Scottish geologist, illustrator, and speculative zoologist Dougal Dixon has made his career dreaming up dozens of fictional creatures shaped by evolution gone bonkers. Here are 10 of his creations who seemingly escaped from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual.
We've mentioned our love of Dixon's never-was dinosaur menagerie before, but he's worked on several projects about speculative biology. His most notable speculative endeavors include:
— After Man: A Zoology of the Future (1981), which details the rise of rodents and other critters 50 million years from now.
— The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution (1988), which is about a world where the K-T extinction event never happened.
— Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future (1990), a book about man's genetically engineered descendants.
— The Future Is Wild (2003), a documentary similar to After Man, but about monkey-like tree squids.
Most of Dixon's chimeras resemble modern-day creatures, as they occupy evolutionary niches familiar to modern-day humans. But some of his speculative beasts are unadulterated nightmare fuel (Man After Man is by far the worst, what with its sabertooth yetis and other horrors). The following 10 creations will make you pray for a robot uprising and a supervolcano...at the same time.
10.) The Tic from Man After Man
In Man After Man, genetically superior humans abandon a polluted Earth to colonize space. The remaining Homo sapiens tinker with their gene codes for a thousand years to achieve immortality. One such species is the Tic, who graft back-up organs and limbs onto their bodies like Mr. Potato-Head made flesh.
