The New Dinosaurs

The New Dinosaurs utilizes the imagined present-day descendants of Cretaceous animals to explain biogeographic realms.

The New Dinosaurs explores an imagined alternate version of the present-day Earth as Dixon imagines it would have been if the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event had never occurred. As in Dixon's previous work, After Man, 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. Most of these animals represent surviving dinosaurs, pterosaurs and plesiosaurs, which Dixon discusses through biogeographic realms, divisions of the Earth's land surface based on distributional patterns of animals and other lifeforms.

In total, about sixty animals are described in the book, about half of the amount featured in After Man, with examples including a widespread group of tree-climbing coelurosaurian theropods called "abrosaurs", huge striding and terrestrial pterosaurs such as the giraffe-like "lank", colonial pachycephalosaurs, descendants of the Mesozoic hadrosaurs called "sprintosaurs" adapted to a new lifestyle on the grass-covered plains of North America, amphibious hypsilophodonts, flamingo-like coelurosaurs and iguanodonts capable of jumping like kangaroos. In the far north, large migratory birds such as the "tromble" with legs almost like tree trunks, roam the land.

In terms of predators, the coelurosaurs dominate in terms of number and diversity, often having unique adaptations. For instance, the apex predator of the South American pampas, the coelurosaurian "cutlasstooth", has evolved huge, cutting teeth to allow it to prey upon large sauropods. The pampas is also home to the last of the tyrannosaurids, the large scavenging "gourmand". There are also various dromaeosaurids, including the "jinx", adapted to mimic larger herbivorous dinosaurs through scent and appearance.

The world's oceans are home to various pterosaurs, such as seagull-like and penguin-like forms. There is also the "whulk", a massive whale-like pliosaur that feeds exclusively on plankton. The "kraken", an enormous ammonite, uses specialized tentacles to entangle and sting anything that comes near it.

Following the success of his previous speculative evolution book After Man in 1981, Dixon realized that there was a market for popular-level books which use fictional examples and settings to explain actual factual scientific processes. After Man had explained the process of evolution by creating a complex hypothetical future ecosystem, The New Dinosaurs 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.[2]

The dinosaurs and other animals in The New Dinosaurs were heavily influenced by the paleontology of its time. The ideas of the Dinosaur Renaissance – replacing the older ideas of dinosaurs as dumb and slow creatures with active, agile and bird-like animals – are heavily used in the book.[3] Dixon extrapolated on the ideas of paleontologists such as Robert Bakker and Gregory S. Paul when creating his creatures and also used patterns seen in the actual evolutionary history of the dinosaurs and pushing them to an extreme, such as with the creation of the "gourmand", an armless and massive scavenger descended from the tyrannosaurids.[2]

Like its predecessor After Man, The New Dinosaurs garnered positive reviews from critics. William F. Allman, writing for the U.S. News and World Report, praised the fact that Dixon had extrapolated his designs from real dinosaur ancestors and concluded that although whimsical at times, most dinosaur researchers would agree with the book insofar that had the asteroid that brought their extinction not hit the planet, dinosaurs would probably dominate the planet to this day. Reviews in Smithsonian, School Library Journal and Booklist were also positive, with reviewers calling the book an "alternative history of the world" and a "quintessential 'what if' book for dinosaur enthusiasts".[4]

Many of the animals featured in the book were criticized by paleontologists and science writers, particularly in that so many of the animals are entirely convergent with actual modern day animals. In this capacity, the "lank", a four-legged, terrestrial and grazing pterosaur derived from the Cretaceous family Azhdarchidae, has been seen by some writers as perhaps the worst offender. In a 1990 review of the book, researcher Gregory S. Paul called the creature "perhaps the worst beast in the book" and "unbelievable", pointing out that he thought it was infeasible that pterosaurs would evolve into giraffe-like animals before the more dominant and already terrestrial dinosaurs. In 1992, researcher David Unwin echoed the same sentiment, viewing four-legged and grass-eating pterosaurs as highly unlikely. In 2008, British paleontologist and science writer Darren Naish offered a more redeeming look at the animal, pointing out that if pterosaurs were to become terrestrial, azhdarchids were the most likely group to do so and that azhdarchids would have used a gait similar to that of giraffes when walking. Paul, Unwin and Naish all pointed out that the sheer diversity seen in pterosaurs within the book is somewhat unlikely as the group was low in diversity at the point of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, the azhdarchids being the only living group. Paul even went on to state that he considered pterosaurs surviving into the Cenozoic "doubtful" even if the extinction event had not happened.[5]

Many of the hypothetical animals created for The New Dinosaurs ended up resembling actual Mesozoic creatures that have since been discovered.[3] Many of the hypothetical dinosaurs featured in the book are covered in fuzzy integument, which in modern times have been discovered in dinosaurs of most groups. The tree-climbing arbrosaurs are similar to actual tree-climbing small theropods such as Microraptor (described in 2000) and the large terrestrial pterosaurs, such as the aforementioned "lank", resemble some animals in the actual pterosaur group Azhdarchidae.[2]

Peter Jackson's 2005 film King Kong featured a complete ecosystem populated with descendants of Mesozoic animals. The designers of these animals (Weta Workshop) were inspired by Dixon's works, in particular The New Dinosaurs.[6]

In 2008, The New Dinosaurs was adapted into a Japanese manga series by Tokyo-based company Diamond.[4]