#man after man

[ramblesandrambling]

Every time this book comes up, it’s like a core memory unlocks in my head

It was a wild book about hominids in DISTANT futures. One of those hominids rediscovered LYING and it was an adaptation that completely changed the course of his species

one of my favorite books as a kid was this one on speculative zoology/evolution that I loved so much I borrowed it to the point my school had to chase me up on returning it several times. it influenced my early creature art and design and pushed me to delve into my own specbio (on dragons. no surprises there). I loved the informatic entries, all their little lore bits and ecological adaptations; the wild color palettes, their weird little shapes. it was called The New Dinosaurs, by Dougal Dixon.

there were two more books in the series that my school didn’t have, which is either a blessing or a curse, because the third book in the set is called Man After Man.

which contains this.

[troythecatfish]

[oddclan-askblog]

I put my own spin on the human spec-evo designs because I don't think a mudokon would evolve in the same way. Also really just wanted to draw a zenomorph for the last one. He can see you with his googly eyes barely, luckily since he's a mud, he's vegetarian so other life forms are safe.

[gilbertgoosey]

gravital takes a selfie with wheatley

posted this on reddit like.. last year 😭

[poetry-written-in-blood]

@jewishpangolin don’t hold out on us please tell us who the artist is and link his shop if he has one

seasons greasons everybody

[jojotier]

I FOUND WHERE THE ORIGINAL SEASONS GREASONS IMAGE IS FROM

[Image ID: part of an illustrated page from Douglas Dixon's Man After Man. The text reads, "2000 years hence: TUNDRA-DWELLER" with "homo glacis fabricatus" underneath in italics.

The paragraph reads, "Mosses, lichens and heathers provide the slow moving tundra-dwellers their diet. A hook-like nail on the foot, developed from the main toe, scrapes up moss and also provides a grip on the snow. Migratory by nature, the dwellers move to open tundra each summer but winter deep in the forests. As with all migrations it is the old, the weak and the young who fall prey to predators."

The italized text directly beside describes the beasts in the image. "The five engineered forms do not perceive each other as the same species. When different types meet, they do so as competitors and enemies; or else ignore one another as irrelevant."

Underneath, a brown, apelike creature attacks the massive form of a white-furred beast with a bare, human-ish face. The white-furred beast, presumed to be the tundra dweller, opens its mouth in pain and shows human teeth. End ID]

[rasuu]

saw a picture cute picture of two creatures in the book 'man after man' and thought they had big tavi and bealie energy, so I did myself an edit!

[thuktunflishithy]

SEASONS GREASONS

[ohfugecannada]

New challenge: draw the species of your favourite non-human character in these cursed Spec-Evo styles:

(Source: u/AlexBot2009 on Reddit)

[octorocks-and-dodongos]

speculative evolution is just alternate history for autistic people

[dragonthunders01]

Spectember D15: Posthumans

5 million years has been since the last human being die on earth, but is a world still ruled by humans, or what descended from them.

All started for the struggle for a civilization that collapsed in a cataclysmic event of interplanetary scale that annihilated the biosphere and a good chunk of the human population, for sure it was not pollution or the man’s hand, or even something like an asteroid, maybe was an extraterrestrial invasion? A supernova? Whatever was this event, it was strong enough it pulled out a civilization that was already on their early steps on traveling to star systems and already was settled across the solar system, it was the endgame for all of them.

The last remaining survivors did the best to stand and find ways to perpetuate the species, but when options at short term turned useless there was a last hope to humanity to survive until the world they live on would recover, they focused the last resources on build a vault designed to last until the habitable conditions of earth returned and repopulate the planet thanks to thousands of human specimens samples that could be born and reclaim the world in the future helped by the synthetic hands of long term lasting artificial intelligences.

Though whatever happened in the planning, something went wrong, something caused to make those restored humans to be shaped into what was sort of similar to them but more ape like, was this deliberated or if it was an inconvenient? if it was ideal for mankind to rise like their ancestors or if this “devolution” was something sketched for the artificial systems as a way to secure their offspring for a systematic failure? Is another question which will likely have no proper answer, but the result of this turned at the end successful for the survival of the biological lineage of humans.

When that humanity arose of the ruins of the again habitable earth, they sort of resembled lanky shorter versions of a chimp, brownish, with a more developed diet thanks to a modification in their digestive system and dentition allowed them to exploit every resource available as generalist omnivores. These creatures which could be called the "woodland dwellers" conquered most of the continent in matter of centuries, they did not need transport or technology to do it, they just traveled, wandered like their ancestors although they no longer were bipedal.

They started somewhere in Eurasia, eventually crossing to new regions and in a thousand years the majority of the world that was easy to access through routes was filled with these, all of them started to establish wherever food was easy to find, then came those that started to venture in new environments, new climates, migrated across continents.

In 50 thousand years, there were new populations that isolated themselves and became adapted to their respective environments: Tundra, Grasslands, canopies, the deserts, the coasts and seas, rivers, etc., all product of constant migration and colonization of new terrains.

100 thousand years, few ice ages went and came, they have turned the balance of diversity further towards speciation at a rhythm that only will benefit those species that can be flexible to change, they manage to colonize America, as well expand towards Africa and many of the island regions across the pacific ocean somehow reaching up to Australia, and so conquered most of the planet with exception of Antarctica.

1 million years, many of those ecologically adapted or regionally isolated populations have turned into different species, they still resemble the woodland dweller to a degree but they have changed considerable depending of their environment, with new behaviors, sizes and faces.

3 million years, the world was starting to see the new men shapes, some robust, some more slendy than their ancestors, some agile, some slow walkers, bipedal, facultative bipedal, quadrupeds, a lot of them took advantage of being the only dominant megafauna to reign as only a handful of small surviving mammals, resilient birds and many reptiles and amphibians represent competition, some have started to take over but it will be a long time until the posthumanity is dethroned from their state, meanwhile the oceans and rivers are dominated by shark and fishes, though there were already the start of a branch of the human dwelling species that became semiaquatic, their evolutionary path is increasingly fast.

And now 5 million years hence, a lot of these new posthuman species have specialized and turned even more different of their ancestral form, many look like an amalgamation between different animals with features of many of their gone monkeys and ape relatives. For things of natural selection and that speciation the new species that evolved of the isolation for the last 2 million years have migrated and now claimed another place on other continents, especially in America which in these million years saw a wave of posthuman species that replaced many of the endemic species, and some of those moved towards Asia. These ecosystems have one of everything, browsing or grazing herbivores, specialized prey eaters (insectivores, mollusk eaters, scavengers), varied lineages of omnivores, and full carnivores.

Specifically one of the carnivore lineage that evolved of the original "Woodland dweller" came from a specialized form reduced in size, adapted on hunting small animals and after millions of years these started to increasingly expand their prey range, growing in size as they replaced previous predatory forms that became stagnated. With the new diversity of the posthuman formed ecosystem growing in complexity, the new predatory forms could rise to hunt these down. Some are fast small prey hunters, some became more arboreal, some are more prominent on the grassland or mountains, all of them came in a considerable range of sizes from the extinct domestic cat to a panthers, but upon the appearance of large herbivores, a new more formidable and heavier predator evolved, this was the Spiketooth.

Spiketooths are among the largest terrestrial carnivores of earth, with a height of 2.3 meters tall and weight some 300 kg, their range extend across Eurasia, coming on the most temperate regions, they are heavy predators adapted for ambush and wrestling their prey into submission rather than fast hunt and kill. They hunt down large posthumans like the Eurasian slothmen, heavy descendants an arboreal heavy species from Africa that resemble a ground sloth, though formidable fighters with their long hand claws, or the armored species like the Temperate Lockskin, fatty and hairless posthumans that are semi bipedal, descendants of the tundra species that moved to the tropics and lost their fur due to the climate they live on, turning their skin very robust made against medium size predators, they often hold a handful of small sized gibbon like posthumans that feast on parasites and live in sort of symbiosis with their host Lockskin, often even being able to warn these of the incoming attack of a spiketooth.

This large carnivore evolved specifically to deal with the thought skin of these animals, with hypertrophied conical incisive that often pressure and cut through the hardest epidermis and are capable to pierce any defense of the large forms, with their carnassial teeth they are capable of tear down and cut with quite efficacy the meat of their prey, often taking also chunks of bones if they are capable off.

[morthern]

Dougal Dixon's art is a blessing.

Season's greasons everyone!

[liliumaa]

Happy holidays!

[troythecatfish]

[draptorronin]

In the wake of Season's Greetings, here's a related Man After Man holiday greetings card.

It may not be as meme-able, but it still has that weird-ass charm.

[gilbertgoosey]

okay yeah, SURE, over the top speculative worlds are awesome and all. the giant hyper-evolved insects are cool.. but i also kinda wanna see a speculative world with super small and pathetic animals/aliens. yk?

pettition 2 bring back pathetic speculative worlds!!!