Book Review : If the Dinosaurs Had Survived . . .

The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution by Dougal Dixon (Salem House: $19.95; 120 pages; illustrated)

Recent years have seen much discussion in scholarly and popular circles about what happened to the dinosaurs. After ruling the Earth for 150 million years, those spectacular reptiles suddenly became extinct 65 million years ago. Current speculation centers on some cataclysmic event, such as the Earth being hit by a comet, to explain their disappearance.

Dougal Dixon, a British paleontologist and science writer, wonders about a different question altogether. What if the comet had missed? he muses. What if the dinosaurs had not become extinct but had continued to flourish, evolve and dominate the planet? What would today’s dinosaurs be like?

The result of this speculation is an engaging, thoroughly enjoyable, almost-believable book, “The New Dinosaurs,” which strictly applies the principles of evolution to the creation of an imaginary zoo. Starting with the idea that climate and environment are the deciding factors in how living things evolve, Dixon charts the changes on the Earth’s surface since the dinosaurs died out and then invents critters to fill all environmental niches.

It is a wonderful idea wonderfully carried out, and the pictures of these would-have-been creatures are as good as the text.

Here we meet the balaclav (whose name is almost an anagram of a Greek pastry), a ferocious-looking beast that inhabits mountain snowfields and ekes out a living on alpine plants. To protect itself from the cold, the balaclav contains layers of fat and is covered by hair.

The megalosaur, on the other hand, lives in tropical rain forests and offshore islands. “Its sharp teeth and the powerful claws on the forelimbs are used for holding prey and tearing it up,” Dixon writes. “The actual killing is done with great talons on the hind feet. As it walks the heavy head is held out at the front, balanced by the long heavy tail behind.”

The dingum, meanwhile, is a meat-eating desert creature with a remarkable anatomical trait. When a predator appears, “A fin of skin supported by struts of bone springs up from its curved back and presents a gaudily colored sail to the attacker, a sudden burst of garish color against the drab grasses. The crest on the back of the head pops up a frill of spines, each one poisonous enough to kill a large attacker.”

Beast of the Steppes

And don’t overlook the taranter, a grass-eating beast of the steppes whose back is covered with horny bone plates. This armor originally evolved for defense, but in the taranter, it serves the more important purpose of helping the animal conserve moisture.

One of Dixon’s assumptions is that because the dinosaurs didn’t die out, there was no evolution of mammals from the small, rat-like creatures they were during the Age of the Reptiles.

All science-fiction movies to the contrary, cavemen did not exist at the time of the dinosaurs. They came much, much later, after the dinosaurs had relinquished the planet. In Dixon’s imagined evolution, neither cavemen nor anything close to them ever got started. The highest mammal in Dixon’s world is a zwim, which is about a foot long, looks like a cross between a shrew and a beaver, lives in streams and rivers and dines on insects. There are no primates in Dixon’s hypothetical world, and certainly no humans.

Nor is there any sign of intelligence, at least in our understanding of that term. The animals that Dixon envisions all live by instinct and evolutionary design. Might intelligence not have evolved in creatures other than humans? Just a thought.

‘Alternative Zoology’

“The New Dinosaurs” is Dixon’s second book of “alternative zoology.” The first was “After Man,” which imagined how evolution was going to proceed in the future. “The New Dinosaurs” wonders how evolution would have occurred up to now with one large change along the way.

What makes the books so compelling is that they are not mere flights of fancy cooked up in a dream. Starting with what is known about the dinosaurs that did exist and hewing to the rules of evolution, Dixon comes up with plausible creatures that might actually be roaming around today in place of you and me. It’s a pleasant and provocative way to learn about dinosaurs and about evolution.

Fortunately for us, the comet (or whatever it was) didn’t miss, the great reptiles did die out, the mammals did evolve, and here we are thinking about all these things. But it could have been otherwise.