This was followed by The New Dinosaurs (Dixon 1988), a book that told the story of a parallel Earth where the end-Cretaceous extinction event never occurred, and Man After Man (Dixon 1990), a fantastic and slightly disturbing look at a possible future for humankind.

Dougal has been the go-to person for speculative zoology ever since the 1981 publication of his famous, beautifully illustrated book After Man (Dixon 1981). I refer of course to writer, artist, editor, consultant and visionary Dougal Dixon, author of a huge number of books and winner of an intimidating number of awards relating to educational journalism and authorship. One person above all others can be regarded as the ‘parent’ of the Speculative Zoology Movement, his several books and innumerable ideas inspiring virtually everything that’s appeared since. The latter group was named specifically with reference to Mezsaros’s invention. (2014) and included within the newly recognised clade Cetiocaridae. As some of you will know, this imaginary creature presaged the discovery of the genuine Early Cambrian anomalocarid Tamisiocaris, described in Nature in March 2014 by Vinther et al. Memo Kosemen’s 2013 book All Your Yesterdays features John Mezsaros’s hypothetical suspension-feeding anomalocarid Ceticaris. Even better, there are sometimes weird crossovers between speculative creatures and reality. Speculative zoology now has such a large presence in the online community that we can talk of a Speculative Zoology Movement that sometimes spills out into the mainstream and gets onto the TV or cinema screen. It turns out that everybody loves speculative zoology, the topic being such a perennial favourite that I’ve since covered it repeatedly on Tet Zoo (a list of links is provided below). It was on the biology of Godzilla, and I published it with trepidation, my concern being that people would balk at the fact that I was covering an imaginary creature, not a real one.

Some considerable years ago – February 2007, actually – I made the decision to write a short Tet Zoo article on speculative zoology.

Dougal dixon after man