Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition

Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic The New Dinosaurs, which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press. Here’s the website, open for pre-orders (link); the book ships on August 11. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this absolute banger.

CHRONONAUT

Dougal Dixon’s books After Man (1981) and The New Dinosaurs (1988) both cast very long shadows over my intellectual development. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when I first saw a thumbnail advertisement for After Man in a bookstore flyer. With nothing more than the cover art and a 2-3 sentence description to go on, my mind fizzed. To say that the mere idea of the book fired my imagination is an understatement so gross as to be a lie; more accurately it detonated an atomic bomb under my imagination, Project-Orion-style, and sent it rocketing into the stratosphere. When I finally found a copy at the local public library a couple of years later, I was not disappointed. The Gigantelopes, Raboons, and Porpins were awesomely strange and wonderful and inspiring. At about the same time in my life that The Dinosaurs by William Stout and William Service was making me a chrononaut in the Mesozoic, After Man was giving me a similarly vertiginous sensation of the distant future.

I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw The New Dinosaurs on the shelf in my local Waldenbooks, a week before my 14th birthday. The book was on a display rack, cover facing out, and the image of the cutlasstooth made my stomach drop. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution, by Dougal Dixon. “OMG it’s the After Man guy he did a dinosaur book OMG OMG OMG!!” crashed through my mind like a railgun projectile. The New Dinosaurs bent my brain no less than After Man, with its flightless pterosaurs, aquatic hypsilophodonts, and tiny, eusocial pachycephalosaurs. I cared for my first edition hardcover like it was a holy relic; even though I reread it countless times as a teenager and have revisited it many times as an adult, it still looks essentially brand new.

Fast forward to the 2020s. When Breakdown Press published the 40th anniversary edition of After Man in 2022, I bought a copy quick-quick. It’s sitting proudly on display across the living room from me as I type this. When the folks at Breakdown asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, I felt like a kid who’d gotten the golden ticket. I’m excited to get to review the book, but even happier to live in a world where the book is in print again, from a publisher who cares about getting it right. I haven’t yet seen the reprinted book in the flesh — this review is based on digital files supplied by Breakdown — but based on the 40th anniversary edition of After Man my confidence is high. The new After Man has a thick, high-gloss cover, pages sewn in signatures, and excellent color reproduction, and I have every reason to expect the same from the 2025 edition of The New Dinosaurs.

CONCEPT

I’m not sure how well-known it is that the conceptual engine of The New Dinosaurs is not merely “Hey whoa weird critters”, but using the idea of imaginary saurians to explain biogeography. In an interview with Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology (link), Dougal Dixon said regarding the success of After Man:

“It made me think… there’s a future in this. That is, in popular-level books that use fictitious examples of factual processes, there’s definitely room for a few more. And that’s why I came up with the idea for The New Dinosaurs. Again, I wanted to do the same sort of thing but, this time, I was aiming to create a popular-level book on zoogeography, using fictitious examples to show what the dinosaurs might perhaps be like if they hadn’t become extinct.”

In the same interview Dixon wonders to what extent the book achieved that aim, rather than being just a gee-whiz spec evo book. It worked for me! When I learned about biogeography in college, the concepts of “Nearctic” North America, “Palearctic” Eurasia, and so on were already familiar to me from The New Dinosaurs. Similarly, I’m pretty sure that I first learned the concept of biomes from After Man.

WHAT ABOUT THOSE NEW DINOSAURS?

I’m not the first to point out that The New Dinosaurs was eerily prescient in many ways — Darren has touched on this at Tetrapod Zoology, and Riley Black wrote a nice piece on the topic of 2022, which seems only be available via Wayback Machine now (link; I heap vile curses on Scientific American for being the digital graveyard of so much good science writing). Some things for which we had little to no evidence for the 80s but which are now either well-established or at least up for discussion include:

• fuzz
• small arboreal dinosaurs, esp. with skin-wings (e.g., the Flurrit)
• semi-aquatic dinosaurs
• arctic dinosaurs
• dwarf island dinosaurs
• insect-eating dinosaurs
• at least the specter of flightless terrestrial pterosaurs

To that list I’d add morphologically conservative sauropods. The awesome, glyptodont-analogue Turtosaur is an osteoderm-bedecked titanosaur taken to its logical conclusion, and there’s a little sidebar about a short-lived group of sprinting sauropods, but the sauropods in the book are all large-bodied, long-necked, long-tailed, mostly graviportal herbivores. Revisiting The New Dinosaurs for this review after a hiatus of some years, I was pleased to see that among the many radical evolutionary transformations postulated in other clades, the sauropods were all still recognizable sauropods, which nicely fits my ideas about the constraints on their bauplan.

Now, it’s both unrealistic and unreasonable to expect a book written in the mid-1980s to be scientifically up-to-date in 2025, and indeed there are many discoveries and developments in the past four decades that the book did not anticipate. Whole clades of dinosaurs that were known very imperfectly (therizinosaurs, rebbachisaurs) or not at all (alvarezsaurs, scansoriopterygids) when the book was created are now much better known both scientifically and popularly. To this we can add a vast ecological diversity of Mesozoic crocs, birds, squamates, and mammals. The sole mammal featured in the book is the semiaquatic Zwim, a small insectivorous placental, explicitly described as an outlier among the morphologically and ecologically conservative mammals. In the universe of The New Dinosaurs, arboreal, gliding, and digging mammals didn’t evolve in either the Mesozoic or the Cenozoic; in our own timeline, mammals were doing all of those things by the Late Jurassic at least. (Aside: I can’t remember if I’ve said this out loud anywhere, but the ecological diversity of Mesozoic mammals shouldn’t surprise anyone given that our surviving monotremes include an electrosensory swimmer and a spiny digger. The mere existence of platypuses and echidnas implies a whole zoo of ecological experimentation among early mammals.)

Similarly, we know a lot more about the biology of dinosaurs now. One thing that may jar modern dinosaur enthusiasts encountering the book for the first time is so many dinosaurs shown with very mammalian rear ends and skinny tails (depicted in the coelurosaurian arbrosaurs, in multiple hypsilophodonts and hadrosaurs, and even to some extent in the cover-adorning cutlasstooth), as opposed to the thick caudofemoralis-housing tails now known to be present in almost all non-avian dinosaurs. When I first encountered The New Dinosaurs at age 13, the furry dinosaurs blew my mind, and none moreso than the desert-adapted Taranter (see below). I suspect that the only integumentary surprise for readers now opening the book for the first time will be the absence of pennaceous feathers on any of the non-avian dinosaurs.

These observations are not intended as — and, I hope, could not be reasonably interpreted as — criticisms of the book. It is an artifact of the post-Deinonychus but pre-Sinosauropteryx Dinosaur Renaissance, not a forward projection of dinosaurs as we know them today but of dinosaurs as they were known back then. So here in 2025 the book rather mind-bendingly embodies the future (now) of the past (the 1980s) of the future (the Cenozoic) of the past (non-avian dinosaurs).

I can’t do a review without mentioning the art. My opinion there hasn’t changed much since I was 13. Like After Man, the ideas in The New Dinosaurs sometimes outrun their visual execution. Most of the art is serviceable, some of the pieces really shine — the painterly work on the Paraso in particular has always impressed me — and a few are so flat and indifferently rendered that my eyes tend to slide past them. My initial impression, unchanged almost four decades later, was that the artists either only had experience painting mammals and birds, or the publisher game them the brief to render the alternative dinosaurs in the guise of mammals and birds. Weirdly, I find most of the black-and-white pencil sketches much more consistently well-executed than the full-color paintings; it’s hard for me to tell how much of that is real and how much is just my strong bent towards pencil sketches (about which see more here and here). Given that Dougal Dixon is himself a very gifted artist (see examples of Dixon’s work at his personal website and in various TetZoo posts: one, two, three), I’d love to see a version of the book someday that included his original sketches. Perhaps if there’s sufficient interest, such material could be included in a 40th anniversary edition of The New Dinosaurs, as Dixon and Breakdown Press did for After Man. One can hope. For now, let’s just say that the book runs on the strength of its ideas and the art mostly gets the job done.

I’ll close on a couple of high notes. First, I love the layout of the book, which is unchanged in the new edition. I find it interesting, drawing my eyes omnivorously around each spread, but uncluttered, with just the right amount of negative space to let each image and text block breathe. Also, and very fittingly for a book about zoogeography, the maps at the beginning of each section are fantastic, and would sit comfortably in a top-of-the-line science book today.

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

The reprinted book does have some nods to the passage of human time and the accumulation of scientific knowledge since 1988. There’s a new Author’s Introduction credited to Dougal Dixon, 2024, and on the following page this note:

This is a facsimile reproduction of the 1988 first edition
of The New Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon.
Some of the text has been changed at the request
of the author to reflect scientific discoveries
made in the intervening years.
The changes have been made in a slightly
different typeface to make their presence clear.

I really like having the updates in a different typeface; it’s the publishing equivalent of making sure that the cast and sculpted bits can be distinguished from real bone in a mounted dinosaur skeleton. Along the same lines, a minor but pleasing thing for anyone comparing both versions of the book is that the pagination hasn’t changed; the ever-contentious Lank is still on page 34, and so on.

So what’s updated? Mostly the front matter, with a few tweaks elsewhere in the book. The section on “The Great Extinction” (pp. 6-9) has been heavily revised to present the evidence for the impact hypothesis. In the “What is a Dinosaur” section (pp. 10-11), the left-hand page has been overhauled and now features a phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs and their outgroups rather than the hub-and-spokes “bubblegram” of the original book, in which saurischians, ornithischians, pterosaurs, and crocs all arose independently from thecodonts. The following right-hand page hasn’t been edited at all as far as I can tell. This creates a minor disjunct; the passage, “It is possible that warm-blooded dinosaurs may have had fur or down” appears unchanged on page 11, but on the revised page 10 the evolution of feathers in theropods has already been established as observed fact.

The following section, “The New Tree of Life” (pp. 12-15), is really, really new. Not only does it follow the fate of various vertebrate groups into a hypothetical mass-extinction-free Cenozoic, as in the original book, but the underlying relationship diagram has been substantially overhauled to somewhat better reflect current thinking on dinosaur evolution. I say “somewhat” because there are some peculiarities: tyrannosaurs and ornithomimids are on a common branch, separated from all other theropods; oviraptorosaurs are allied with a big swath of coelurosaurs that are in turn separate from therizinosaurs, maniraptorans, alvarezsaurs, and birds.

Not only is the phylogenetic arrangement a little odd, the fates of several clades and their surviving representatives (in the alternative Cenozoic) have changed from the original book. The Gourmand was originally a specialized scavenging tyrannosaur, but predatory tyrannosaurs apparently survived as well (according to the bubblegram; none were featured in the original book). In the new edition, all tyrannosaurs died out in the mid-Cenozoic and were replaced by abelisaurs that spread north from Gondwana. The Gourmand art is unchanged, but it is now described as an abelisaur, which is fine. With its long, low body, short hind limbs, and absent forelimbs, the Gourmand arguably reads better as an abelisaur than a tyrannosaur anyway, even if its scavenge-then-snooze biology is pulled from Lawrence Lambe’s sleepy post-prandial Gorgosaurus of the early 20th century.

There are a few other such phylogenetic reassignments, and they don’t all completely cohere. In the original book, Madagascar is a dinosaurian Australia, home to a relictual fauna of titanosaurian sauropods and Megalosaurus (not some generalized megalosaurid or megalosauroid, but good old William-Buckland-approved Megalosaurus, albeit as the new species M. modernus). This is now Megalodontosaurus, a carcharodontosaur; according to the revised text, abelisaurs and carcharodontosaurs both made it to Madagascar, but only the carcharodontosaurs survived. To fictionally wipe out the theropod clade that actually diversified in Madagascar (abelisaurs) and replace it with a clade with zero known Malagasy representatives (carcharodontosaurs) is, to say the least, an odd choice for a book founded in zoogeography.

In the original book, the Northclaw and the Mountain Leaper were generalized coelurosaurs, but now they are a therizinosaur and an alvarezsaur, respectively. According to the revised text, some therizinosaurs reverted to carnivory and those are the only ones that have survived. The Mountain Leaper is now described as an alvarezsaur, and its art is changed — the original art showed multi-fingered hands, which wouldn’t do for an alvarezsaurid, so the hands (and I think at least one raised foot) are painted over in the color art and simply erased from the accompanying pencil diagram. As far as I could tell, this is the only animal in the book to have its art revised. The fish-eating Dip, a small theropod (p. 76), is now described as being descended from ornithomimids rather than the Mountain Leaper, its first-edition forebear. But in the Dip’s description the parenthetical reference to page 61 is still to the Mountain Leaper, which is now an alvarezsaur and not an ornithomimosaur (some phylogenies find alvarezsaurs allied with ornithomimosaurs, but in the revised book the two clades are quite separate).

Am I picking nits? Most assuredly, and not because I don’t like the book but precisely because I do. For me the updates to the text fall between two stools; the new edition of the book is not a perfect time capsule reproduction of the first edition, but neither have the minor edits been integrated thoroughly enough to make a cohesive whole. Given that the book was never going to be completely up-to-date without a clean-sheet redesign, I think it would have been more elegant to leave it untouched, in all of its mid-80s glory. But I’m an old, pedantic curmudgeon, and in all honesty the edits are few and minor and unlikely to corrode anyone’s enjoyment of the book. In the interest of doing my due diligence as a reviewer, I may have already given them more attention than anyone else ever will.

In any case, Dougal Dixon himself is quite well-acquainted with the problem of always-advancing science inevitably outrunning any fixed publication. In the Afterword, subtitled “The Survival of Dinosaurs in Literature”, a paragraph has been added about Jurassic Park. It concludes with these lines (p. 111):

“Unfortunately for both the book and the films, dinosaur science moves on so quickly that many of the details have become very dated. The book has hypsilophodonts climbing trees (no longer believed) and the film has Velociraptor without the feathers we now know it to have possessed. Unfortunately, that is the fate faced by all writers who stray into the genre.”

VERDICT

So should you get the book? Of course! Certainly if you were curious enough to slog through this whole post. The New Dinosaurs is a stone classic, one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution, and almost four decades on it still has the power to delight, astonish, and provoke. I look at some of the new dinosaurs and think, “That’s too conservative” or “That’s too far out”, but then I remember that elephants’ closest living relatives are sirenians and they share their zoogeographic province with big flightless sprint-birds and bone-crushing feliforms and barely-endothermic eusocial rodents and flat tortoises that can inflate their shells to wedge themselves into cracks in the rocks, and I decide that my handle on “too conservative” or “too far out” is extremely poorly calibrated. As Ursula K. Le Guin observed, science fiction is not about the future, it is about the present, viewed “at certain odd times of day in certain weathers”.

Ultimately, The New Dinosaurs has given me things to think about for 36 years. I was born in the 1970s but grew up during what now seems like a golden age of semi-technical dinosaur books in the 1980s. I still have all of those books, and on occasion I dip into one or another for nostalgia. The New Dinosaurs is one of the very few I’ve revisited as a working scientist, to hold up against our ever-evolving understanding of the past and see how well my dinosaurometer is calibrated. The new edition costs £29.99 (about $40 as of this writing), but having this particular time machine on my bookshelf is nearly priceless. Here’s that link again — go do the right thing.

CODA: OTHER TIMES AND PLACES

It seems to be speculative evolution season. C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows is being published in an expanded English-language print edition on August 25 (link), and Gert van Dijk’s Wildlife on the Planet Furaha will likely be available later this year (author’s announcement, publisher’s page). If I missed any other developments in this area, sing out in the comments.

Parting shot: you do have a 40th anniversary edition of After Man, right? If not, kindly sort yourself out (link).

Source: https://svpow.com/2025/07/29/review-dougal-dixons-the-new-dinosaurs-2025-edition/