После человека: Зоология будущего

Book by the Scottish geologist and author Dougal Dixon

After Man: A Zoology of the Future is a 1981 speculative evolution book written by Scottish geologist and palaeontologist Dougal Dixon and illustrated by several illustrators including Diz Wallis, John Butler, Brian McIntyre, Philip Hood, Roy Woodard and Gary Marsh. The book features a foreword by Desmond Morris. After Man explores a hypothetical future set 50 million years after extinction of humanity, a time period Dixon dubs the "Posthomic", which is inhabited by animals that have evolved from survivors of a mass extinction succeeding our own time. After Man used a fictional setting and hypothetical animals to explain the natural processes behind evolution and natural selection. In total, over a hundred different invented animal species are featured in the book, described as part of fleshed out fictional future ecosystems. Reviews for After Man were highly positive and its success spawned two follow up speculative evolution books which used new fictional settings and creatures to explain other natural processes: The New Dinosaurs (1988) and Man After Man (1990). After Man and Dixon's following books inspired the speculative evolution artistic movement which focuses on speculative scenarios in the evolution of life, often possible future scenarios (such as After Man) or alternative paths in the past (such as The New Dinosaurs). Dixon is often considered the founder of the modern speculative evolution movement.

After Man explores an imagined future Earth, set 50 million years from the present, hypothesizing what new animals might evolve in the timespan between its setting and the present day. Ecology and evolutionary theory are applied to create believable creatures, all of which have their own binomial names and text describing their behaviour and interactions with other contemporary animals. In this new period of the Cenozoic, which Dixon calls the "Posthomic", Europe and Africa have fused, closing the Mediterranean Sea; whereas Asia and North America have collided and closed the Bering Strait; South America has split from Central America; Australia has collided with Southern Asia (colliding with the mainland sometime in the last 10 million years), uplifting a mountain range beyond the mountains of the Far East that has become the most extensive and the highest chain in the world, greater even than the Himalayas at their zenith 50 million years ago; and parts of eastern Africa have split off to form a new island called Lemuria. Other volcanic islands have been added, such as the Pacaus archipelago and Batavia. Over a hundred future animal species are described and illustrated in the book. Major groups include the "rabbucks", versatile descendants of rabbits filling the ecological niches of deer, zebras, giraffes and antelope; "gigantelopes", descendants of antelope filling niches held by elephants, giraffes, moose, musk oxen, rhinoceroses, and other large herbivores; "vortexes" and "porpins", descendants of penguins evolved to fill the aquatic niche of cetaceans; and the predatory rats, the major group of terrestrial predators and descendants of rats. There are also more bizarre creatures such as the "raboons", gigantic theropod esque descendants of baboons, the "night stalker", a gigantic predatory leaf nosed bat native to Batavia, the "desert leaper", a giant kangaroo like dipodid and the "chiselhead", a descendant of the eastern gray squirrel that has evolved a wormlike shape and large incisors for chiseling into coniferous trees (hence its name).

As a child, Dixon was inspired by H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, particularly the far future creatures featured in the book, to create his own imaginary future animals descended from creatures of the modern day. These animals often served as background characters in Dixon's own retellings of Wells' work. In the 1960s, Dixon was influenced by the contemporary conservationist movements, especially a campaign to save the tigers. Dixon began to ponder that should the tiger and other endangered animals go extinct, something would inevitably take their place. After seeing a "Save the Whale" badge on a friend in the late 1970s, the idea materialized again. Thinking of what might evolve to take their place if whales did go extinct eventually led to the idea of the giant aquatic penguins in the final book. When designing the various animals of the book, Dixon looked at the different types of biomes on the planet and what adaptations animals living there have, designing new animals descended from modern day ones with the same set of adaptations.

In March 2018, Breakdown Press published a new edition of the book, updated to reflect modern science relating to evolution. The release of the new edition was celebrated with an event hosted at Conway Hall in London on 11 September that same year, which included a joint talk with Dixon and British paleontologist and science writer Darren Naish.

The first review of After Man was one made by Professor Barry Cox of King's College London in a science based radio programme. Cox's review was extremely negative, but subsequent reviews were highly positive. Reviews in New Scientist and BBC Wildlife also praised the book and Dixon went on publicity tours in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Following the success of After Man, Dixon realized that there was a market for popular level books which use fictional examples and settings to explain factual scientific processes. After Man had explained the process of evolution by creating a complex hypothetical future ecosystem, the "sequel" The New Dinosaurs (1988) was instead aimed at creating a book on zoogeography, a subject the general public was quite unfamiliar with, by using a fictional world in which the non avian dinosaurs had not gone extinct to explain the process. The New Dinosaurs was followed by another project in 1990, Man After Man, which focused on climate change over the next few million years through the eyes of future human species genetically engineered to adapt to it. Many of the animals presented in the book remain plausible even in the light of more modern discoveries, with particular examples including the rise of animals that were transported around the world by humans (for instance the rats) to prominent positions within worldwide ecology and that corvids and rodents could evolve into various predatory roles. Other ideas are seen as somewhat less likely, such as the theropod like gait used by predatory descendants of baboons (though predatory baboons as an idea isn't considered as unlikely) and the evolution of penguins into huge, whale like filter feeders. The Future is Wild, a 2002 miniseries, features future animals evolving over the course of several million years. Early in its development, Dixon was brought in as a consultant. Dixon designed many of the creatures featured in the programme, some of which are similar to creatures in After Man (such as the "gannetwhale", a bird similar to the whale like penguins of After Man), and co authored the companion book with the producer of the series, John Adams. The Future is Wild also focused considerably on future environmental changes, something Dixon avoided in After Man so that readers would at the very least recognize the background inhabited by the various future animals. The exhibition also included illustrations Dixon had previously made of a possible future evolutionary path of humanity, previously published under the title Visions of Man Evolved in Omni in 1982. Prior to this, a limited version of the exhibition (featuring 8 models rather than the 19 dioramas featured in the 1987 version) had been at the Newquay Zoo in Cornwall in 1983, in Japan in 1984 and in various locations within the United States from 1985 to 1986. The exhibition was then put up at the Nagasaki City Dinosaur Museum in Nagasaki from 26 March to 7 October 2022.