Understanding The New Dinosaurs An Alternative Evolution
The book is a speculative zoology work by Dougal Dixon, published in 1988. It imagines what animal life would look like 65 million years after the Chicxulub impact if non-avian dinosaurs had survived instead of going extinct. You'll find detailed illustrations of creatures like the sky-skimmers, trench runmers, and various mammal-analog species that evolved into ecological niches usually filled by birds and modern mammals. It's not a scientific textbook, and Dixon himself was clear about that from page one. He's a paleoartist, not a paleontologist, and the book reads like a field guide to an Earth that never existed. I picked it up in the early 2000s and returned to it periodically over the years. What kept pulling me back wasn't the art alone, though that's genuinely top-tier. It was the ecological thinking behind the designs. Dixon doesn't just draw big lizard things. He works through biomechanics, energetics, and trophic cascades. When he designs a creature, he starts with a real animal group and asks what would happen if that lineage had kept evolving under different constraints. That methodology is what separates this from a generic monster art book.
The New Dinosaurs An Alternative Evolution Approach to Speculative Zoology
If you want to actually use this as a reference for your own creative work, here's the practical breakdown. The book organizes its creatures roughly by ecological role and habitat. You've got flying forms, marine forms, terrestrial forms, and burrowing forms. Each chapter opens with an explanation of the evolutionary pressures at play, then presents individual species with distribution maps and behavioral notes. The layout mimics a natural history text, which makes it easy to browse without reading cover to cover. One thing beginners miss when they approach this book is that Dixon frequently references real extinct and living species as starting points. He shows you the lineage he's working from before diverging into speculation. If you're trying to replicate his method, the key is understanding that divergence point. Pick an existing clade, understand its current ecological constraints, then remove the mass extinction event and let the model run. I spent a weekend trying to design a speculative avian ancestor that adapted to a fully aquatic lifestyle, and the first three versions failed because I didn't account for thermoregulation properly. Dixon handles that explicitly in the marine chapters. He notes that large marine reptiles in this timeline would need blubber layers analogous to cetaceans, not just scaled skin. That detail alone saved me from producing a physically inconsistent design.
Where to Find and Acquire the Book
The original UK edition was published by Viking and the US edition by Little, Brown and Company. Both are out of print. The ISBN for the most commonly reprinted paperback edition is 978-0446390484. You can find used copies on AbeBooks, Amazon Marketplace, and eBay. I've seen prices range from about eight dollars for a well-read copy to forty or fifty for near-mint first editions. The Dover Publications reprint from 2020 is the most accessible new copy you can order directly. It's widely available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Book Depository. The Dover edition uses slightly lower quality paper than the original Viking printing, but the illustrations are still crisp and the text is identical. If you're looking for the digital version, Dixon's team has been careful about licensing. There isn't an official ebook release I'm aware of. You'll find scans floating around on torrent sites and forum threads, but those are copyright violations. The Dover print edition is affordable enough that I don't see a reason to pursue the pirated routes. At roughly twenty-five dollars for a new copy, it's cheaper than most art books in this genre.
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What the Book Actually Covers
Dixon opens with an introduction that lays out his premise clearly. The asteroid hit. Non-avian dinosaurs die in the real timeline. In this one, they don't. Mammals remain small and largely nocturnal, occupying restricted niches. The dinosaurs radiate to fill the gaps left by extinct birds and mammals. He then walks through different environments: open grasslands, forests, wetlands, polar regions, and marine ecosystems. The flying forms are probably the most discussed section. Dixon designs descendants of pterosaurs alongside dinosaurian flyers, mostly derived from small feathered theropods. The pterosaur line produces massive gliders with wingspans exceeding six meters, while the theropod derivatives tend toward smaller, more maneuverable fliers. One species he calls the "windrunner" has a wingspan of about three meters and hunts insects in aerial swarms much like modern swifts. The biology is speculative but internally consistent. The marine chapter covers plesiosaur descendants, ichthyosaur analogs that Dixon treats as a surviving lineage rather than a convergent group, and a crocodilian-derived sea troll species. The trench runmer is his name for a long-necked predatory marine reptile that operates in deep water. Again, the biomechanics hold up under basic scrutiny. Dixon accounts for stroke efficiency, hunting strategy, and thermal regulation in each case.
Common Pitfalls When Using This as a Reference
The biggest mistake people make is treating Dixon's creatures as hard science. They're not. He explicitly states this in the introduction and reinforces it in the conclusion. The creatures are plausible within the framework he establishes, but plausibility is not the same as accuracy. Real evolution doesn't have directionality or foresight. It doesn't optimize for elegance or narrative satisfaction. Dixon's designs often reflect an implicit teleology that real phylogenetics doesn't support. A real alternate timeline could easily produce utterly bizarre forms that bear no resemblance to anything in the book. Another issue is that the book reflects the paleontological understanding of the late 1980s. We now know far more about feathered dinosaurs, respiratory systems in archosaurs, and growth rates in non-avian dinosaurs than Dixon had access to. Some of his baseline assumptions are outdated. The theropod-to-bird connection, for instance, was still debated when he wrote this. Modern consensus has shifted significantly, and some of his "dinosaurian flyer" designs might now be reconsidered as primarily avian derivatives rather than non-avian dinosaur derivatives. This doesn't invalidate the book. It just means you're working with a snapshot of knowledge from nearly four decades ago. I ran into a specific problem when I was using the book as a reference for a game design project. I needed a terrestrial predator that could plausibly hunt in packs, and I landed on one of Dixon's hyaenodont-like carnivoran analogs. The problem was that his design assumed a warm-climate ecosystem with high primary productivity. My game level was set in a temperate woodland with seasonal variation. The caloric budget didn't work. I had to reduce the pack size from six individuals to two or three and shift the prey species to something smaller and faster. The original design wasn't wrong for its intended context. It was just being applied outside of it.
How to Use This Effectively in Your Own Work
If you're a speculative zoologist, concept artist, or worldbuilder, the book works best when you treat it as a methodology reference rather than a catalog of finished products. Study how Dixon constructs each creature from the ground up. Note the sequence: ecological niche identification, ancestral stock selection, morphological adaptation, behavioral modeling, and finally illustration. That sequence is repeatable. You don't need Dixon's art training to follow the same logic. For anyone wanting to produce their own alternative evolutionary scenarios, I'd recommend pairing this with Peter Ward's "The End of Evolution" or David Burnie's "Evolution: 500 Million Years of Life" for a more current scientific baseline. Dixon gives you the creative framework. Those other books give you the updated data to make the framework more accurate. Together they cover roughly eighty percent of what a serious speculative zoology project requires. There's also a 1995 follow-up called "The New Dinosaur Spectrum" that expands on some of these ideas with additional species and more detailed ecological interactions. It's less polished than the original but useful if you've already absorbed the first book and want to push further. The same acquisition rules apply. Dover reprinted that one too.
The core value of this book isn't in the creatures themselves. It's in the disciplined approach to imaginative reconstruction. Dixon shows you how to think about an impossible world as if it were real, and that skill transfers directly to any creative or analytical project that requires speculative worldbuilding. I've returned to this book more times than I can count, and each time I pull something different out of it depending on what I'm working on. That's a pretty good indicator that it earned its shelf space.
