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Customer Reviews of The Future is Wild

And Life Goes On...
Following After Man and The New Dinosaurs, Dougal Dixon and several biologists take a look at how the course of evolution might go over the next 200 million years if man left the earth. Made to follow a television mini-series, this lavishly illustrated book features commentaries from leading biologists and a wonderful introduction to evolution and continental drift. All the animals featured are smoothly done in CG art, but there are pictures of modern animals that are similar or even related to these hypothetical beasties. Incidentally, each chapter features certain clips that were not featured on the show the first time it aired, so if you saw the tv special you may have missed certain parts of the book.

The book opens up in the next Ice Age 5 million years into the future (a very real possibility btw), and actually matches up closely with Dixon's book "After Man". In this period, northern Europe is covered in ice sheets, where giant rodents and semi-aquatic birds are hunted by gigantic wolverines. The Mediterranean has dried up into a salt desert inhabited by lizards and wild boars (which was not featured on the show). In the Americas, the Midwest has become a sweeping desert/plain where gigantic predatory bats swoop across the sky and quails tunnel underground. And the Amazon has become an endless savannah where giant ground dwelling birds of prey hunt down the last few primates.

Jump to 100 million years from now, when the Ice Age ends. A great sea covers much of the earth, and it is warmer and more humid. Giant jellfish and sea slugs lurk in the warm shallow oceans, while India/South Asia has become a large swamp where elephant sized turles, land octopi and giant angler fish live. Antarctica is a tropical forest, inhabited by colorful birds and monsterous insects (this part wasn't in the tv series originally). Meanwhile Australia crashed into Asia forming huge mountains, in which giant spiders harvest rodents while dodging high altitude birds (which BTW feature anatomical adaptations recently discovered in prehistoric birds; victory for Dixon's views!)

Then 200 million years in the future a mass extinction eliminated most of the life on earth and the continents have reformed into Pangea II. A colossal inland desert occupies much of Pangea II and in it highly specialized termites co-exist with a variety of worms (not in the original airing). In the oceans the ultimate predators, sharks, have become even more adapted for hunting and prey upon colossal squid while flying fish have adapted to take the niche of birds. A rainshow desert exists beyond coastal mountains, and in it can be found hopping snails and scavenging insects. And in the humid northern forests, fish-birds and predatory fungi can be found, along with terrestrial squid which may one day evolve into intelligent life.

All in all, I found this to be a wonderful book. If you enjoyed Dougal Dixon's previous works or saw the television special, you know what to expect. If you have an interest in natural history, evolution or even just sci-fi, then I really suggest checking this book out (along with Dixon's other books like "The New Dinosuars" and "After Man"). Its really a great read and it gets your thoughts going too. So check it out.

Very informative book.
Any fan of "The Future is Wild" and other speculative future evolutionary theories would be pleased by this great coffee table book. Not only does it have large, splendid full-color pictures of all the animals from the documentary's episodes, but it explains in-depth the evolution of each creature: what it looks like, what its lifestyle is, and why. Dougal Dixon is quite good at predicting based on science what life will be like millions of years in the future. After all, billions of years ago, who would have guessed that humans would have evolved, or any of the other amazing creatures of today? When you consider some of the weird animals the crawl the earth right now as we speak, this book seems much more credible than you might originally think. There are definite scientific reasons behind these predictions; they're not the work of crazy science fiction authors who are just trying to be as "far out" as possible.