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from now. Life has recovered from its encounter with humans, and
gone on to evolve an impressive array of new species. There is, for
instance, the woolly gigantelope (
Megalodorcas borealis
) roaming the
tundra, with its shaggy mane, fatty hump (to help survive the bitter
winters), and single long forward-pointing horn. Roaming the grass-
lands of his new world are herds of rabbuck—more or less deer-like in
shape, although without the horn and with noticeably long ears. That
is the giveaway: since deer had become extinct, these creatures evolved
from the rabbits that humans had scattered so extravagantly around
the world. So, there is the common rabbuck (
Ungulagus silvicultrix
) in
temperate forests, the mountain rabbuck (
Ungulagus scandens
) as the
smallest and most agile of the group, the arctic rabbuck (
Ungulagus hir-
sutus
), covered with thick fur—and so on. All these creatures—the
falanx with its vicious teeth, the chirrit cutely nestling among branches,
the chiselhead excavating burrow systems in tree-trunks with its mas-
sively developed incisors, and many more—were drawn to be func-
tionally and ecologically
reasonable
descendants of whatever surviving
species are left after humans.
Dixon only set a couple of scenes in the sea. In the polar oceans, the
largest creature on the new earth is the vortex (
Balenornis vivipara
)—a
whale-like and plankton-eating pseudo-baleen descended from the
penguins, given the demise of whales. Almost as impressive is the
4-metre-long distarterops (
Scinderedens solungulus
), with paddle-like
feet and long, forward-pointing incisor teeth used to pick shells off
the sea floor; it is descended from rats.
It is a lovely, imaginative piece of work, with a serious subtext. After
all, some kind of ecosystem has to arise from the ashes of the old
world. Its component species would have to function under the same
constraints as all life forms, since life began. But life—as biology and
palaeontology tells us—can come up with an extraordinarily wide
array of mechanisms and structures to allow organisms to make their
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