British science writer Dougal Dixon traffics in imaginary animals, not a lucrative trade one might guess, yet he has made a cottage industry of it.
The good-natured Scot lives in a small town in Dorset and thinks hard about genetics and evolution, conjuring creatures that never were but might have been and those that might well be, someday, if we don`t take care to postpone our own extinction.
Many of Dixon`s animals turn out so beautiful or so intriguing that they deserve to live. He gathers them into books that garner rhapsodic reviews and sell briskly, whereupon zoologists and evolutionary biologists harumph and grump and debate Dixon on picky points.
”The most amazing thing to me,” he said recently during a Chicago interview, ”is that they accept what I`m trying to do and quibble with the details.
”I was terribly afraid, when I started this eight years ago, that I would merely be ignored.”
Dixon, 41, has spent most his career trying to combine two worlds. When he finished college, at the University of St. Andrews, he found himself with degrees in geology and paleontology yet no burning desire to become a scientist.
”My background interests were artistic,” he said. ”I went directly into a job as house geologist for an encyclopedia company. Since then I`ve written straight books about dinosaurs, handbooks on fossil collecting and a lot of articles. I still follow paleontology and do a little fieldwork, latching on to digs and such. But I`ve never been an academic.”
Since boyhood, however, he has been fascinated by the vast diversity of life and how species change over time and circumstances. By 1981 he had filled in enough pieces of his imaginary evolutionary puzzle to publish the critically acclaimed ”After Man: A Zoology of the Future,” in which he used sophisticated scientific theories to project what the world might be like in 50 million years, absent all hominids, including us.
This time, Dixon has looked backward. His premise requires a gulp of faith, because if you accept it, there`s no way you could be reading this article.
”Suppose the dinosaurs had never died,” Dixon ventured.
”Suppose that giant meteorite had missed the Earth 65 million years ago,” he said, noting one popular theory for the dinosaurs` untimely demise. ”The climate wasn`t dramatically changed. The sun wasn`t blotted out and the vegetation destroyed. The dinosaurs did not disappear at the end of the Cretaceous period but continued to evolve normally. What would they be like today?
”In a nutshell,” Dixon said, ”they would have changed out of all recognition, because of the changes in environment and geography of our globe over that period.”
If this were the case, the Chicago area quite likely would be populated by hordes of nasty meat-eating, tree-dwelling dinosaurs Dixon calls
”footles.”
Why footles? ”Why not,” he said.
”A whole range of tree-living dinosaurs (the abrosaurs) would have established themselves in the branches and boughs of the world`s woodlands after the Cretaceous,” Dixon explained.
”They evolved from the small, lightly built, running, flesh-eating dinosaurs called `coelosaurs,` which in real life developed wings and feathers and gave rise to the birds.
”Today there would be many birdlike dinosaurs-the equivalents of the woodpecker, hornbill, flamingo and pelican, for example. They look basically like birds, except they have teeth.
”Birds evolved past this,” he pointed out, ”because jaws with teeth are heavy. A flying animal needs to reduce as much weight as possible. That`s why beaks developed. My offshoot abrosaurs also would have evolved from the rootstock to hunt the social insects-the bees, wasps and ants-which began to develop at this time.”
Footles, like birds, have retained their collar and breastbones to anchor powerful arm muscles and allow the animals to swing through the branches. In deciduous woodlands, Dixon said, the trees would be alive with these little insect-eating abrosaurs, each differing from the next by the colors of its furry pelt and by the shape and size of its jaws.
Some footles, Dixon reported, have short, thick jaws to crunch up beetles; others have long, thin jaws to dig for larvae and worms. All species utilize their stiff, rodlike tails for balance and their long claws to rip up bark for insects.
These dinosaurs, Dixon decided, must be warmblooded (endothermic), because they need to store their own heat as they dash about after prey. Their skulls also show this adaptation: a big brain box, eyes placed forward for stereoscopic vision and jaws lined with sharp little teeth. No, you wouldn`t want to leave your cave if there were gangs of marauding footles outside.
And they are merely one of hundreds of species of fanciful offspring catalogued in Dixon`s ”The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution” (Salem House, $19.95).
When Dixon creates a species, he said, he looks mainly at the ecological niche the species must fill. Then he carefully sketches the animals most likely to fill it, eventually turning his creatures over to a talented stable of artists who execute the finished illustrations.
”It`s incredible how we have come to think alike,” he noted. ”The paintings in the dinosaur book were done by 13 artists, yet all could have come from one hand. In this book, the problem wasn`t what to put in but what to leave out.
”Thousands of dinosaur species would be alive today,” Dixon said, ”as many species as there are mammals. Of course, there can`t be mammals in my scenario. We wouldn`t be here. It was only the Great Extinction that allowed our furtive, shrewlike ancestors to dare to emerge and grab a foothold on an evolutionary niche.”
The dinosaurs, as any youngster knows, represent the most successful and magnificent animals that ever lived. They evolved in the late Triassic period, about 220 million years ago, and from humble crocodilelike origins developed with such variety and abundance that they were able to rule the planet for about 180 million years.
Dinosaurs came in all shapes and kinds: more than 800 known species, some smaller than chickens, others so gigantic that the upper limit has yet to be unearthed. As Dixon writes: ”Nimble, darting, brightly colored meat-eaters chased lizards through the ferny undergrowth. Big meat-eaters strode dragonlike through the forests hunting slow-moving prey.
”Huge, long-necked plant-eaters, veritable mountains of flesh, roamed open plains and woodlands in family groups, browsing from the tops of trees and keeping wary eyes for the predacious hunters. Small, fleet-footed plant-eaters sprinted on their long hind legs from one patch of vegetation to another, snatching at leaves and shoots and quickly darting away when danger threatened.
”Lumbering armored plant-eaters, safe behind their flamboyant and colorful plates and horns, chomped and chewed the prolific vegetation in the warm and equable climates of the long, tranquil Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.”
Then, about 65 million years ago, they all vanished. Rocks tell the story: Strata from before this time contain fossils of animals that had been present for 150 million years. But there is a break in the strata. The rocks immediately above show no evidence of dinosaurs. Something happened that changed things completely.
”The cause may have been sudden, like a meteorite,” Dixon said, ”or it may have been very gradual. A million years in the geological record is a mere eye-blink and may be represented by a bed of rock only a few centimeters thick.
”Personally, I lean toward the gradual theory of extinction-the shifting of continents by plate tectonics, new environments, habitats.
”But for my scenario that theory doesn`t work. No, I need some catastrophe that wiped them out quickly. Then I can deny that it occurred.”
Mammals never amounted to much during the 150-million-year Age of Reptiles: ”just little mouselike, possumlike things,” Dixon noted. But with the dinosaurs gone, the mammals were free to come out into the sun and make something of themselves. Pigs and elephants replaced the plant-eating dinosaurs. Strange wolflike creodonts evolved to hunt them. Bats supplanted pterosaurs. In the seas, whales and seals developed in place of plesiosaurs and mosasaurs.
”But in my scenario, 65 million years have passed and the primitive mammals have had no opportunity to develop into anything else,” Dixon said.
”The dinosaurs never gave them a chance.”
Ranging from such diverse creatures as the fearsome ”megalosaur” of Ethiopia, the bone-headed ”numbskull of the rain forests,” the elusive black woolly ”balaclav” of the Himalayas to the gigantic oceanic ”whulk,”
dinosaurs would inhabit all geographic regions, Dixon said, and their modern- day appearance would depend on what they ate.
Nature, and Dixon`s artists, have provided no end of clever adaptations.
The furry desert ”wyrm,” for example, has evolved from a speedy, slightly built dinosaur into a streamlined, limbless animal with a scaly trowellike head for burrowing through sand. It moves by undulations of the long body and by thrusting with swimming motions of the broad hind feet. A heavy shield of scales covers the rump to protect the wyrm from members of its own species that may pursue it down the tunnels of its prey: small hopping mammals that have been stuck in a rut for eons.
”As climates have changed, animals have evolved with the change,” Dixon said. ”Today along the equator are tropical forests. To the north and south are grasslands-the savannas of Africa, the pampas of South America. Then come desert belts, temperate woodlands, coniferous forests, tundra and ice caps at the North and South Poles.”
This vast range of habitats would have been quite unfamiliar to the dinosaurs.
”They never knew grasslands, for example,” Dixon said. ”Grass didn`t evolve until about 50 million years ago.
”An animal that lives on grass must have particular adaptations. Grass is remarkably tough stuff, akin to eating sand. Your teeth have to be strong or easily replaced as they wear out, and you must be able to digest cellulose. Grasslands are wide-open plains, and it`s helpful for you to have a long face, so when you`re eating, you`d still be able to spot danger coming from a long way off.”
Enter Dixon`s ”sprintosaurs.”
They evolved, he postulated, from the duckbilled dinosaurs and look like an amalgamation of an antelope, zebra and kangaroo. Some species have bony crests on their heads in the shapes of hooks, rows of knobs or broad blades. They graze in groups, bellowing to each other like trombones, their hollow crests serving as sounding tubes.
Smaller, noncrested sprintosaurs prance in tight herds, often visible only as a bunch of stiff flagpole tails waving pertly above the tall grasses. All sprintosaur species keep an eye out for the evil ”northclaw,” a furry-coated, cougarlike dinosaur with a large beaked head and reptilian eyes balanced by a stiff tail and named for the massive killing claw on its right forelimb.
When a northclaw spots the tell-tail signs of a band of noncrested sprintosaurs and attacks, the herd instantly scatters in a flurry of flags and poles intended to bewilder the predator, Dixon said.
Some dinosaurs would have remained basically unchanged over time, he said, so long as their isolated habitats had remained stable. He presents the unusual case of a large island off Ethiopia (that he cooked up). The island is a lost world of bizarre dinosaurs.
The frightening megalosaur, for example, is so stupid that its brain tells it only that it`s hungry again. These behemoths, about 30 feet long, hunt the island`s largest inhabitants, ”titanosaurs,” that look exactly like the giant long-necked, plant-eating sauropods of yore, such as Brontosaurus. Titanosaurs, said Dixon, reach a length of 60 feet and can rise to 20 feet and browse on the tops of trees. Both megalosaurs and titanosaurs have their dwarf varieties, because nature abhors an evolutionary vacuum.
But, according to Dixon, life did not stand still for the once-mighty king of the dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus Rex, among the most highly evolved of all theropods and the fabled monster of a thousand bad movies.
By a cruel twist of fate these ”tyrant lizards”-18 feet tall, 40 feet long, with forelimbs so ludicrously small they were almost useless, have evolved into the lowly ”body-gulper,” a slinking scavenger that swallows carcasses whole.
”Species tend not to last more than 5 million years,” Dixon said.
”Extinction is a very important part of evolution. If nothing becomes extinct, nothing new will evolve to replace it.
”Many of the meat-eating dinosaurs that were unique to tropical climates would probably have been destroyed during the invasion of more versatile creatures from the north. Over time the huge heads of the tyrannosaurs grew increasingly larger, while their pitiful forelimbs grew even punier.
”Eventually this great line resulted in an ugly fellow I call
`gourmand`-a giant head but no forelimbs at all. It`s a massive creature-about 60 feet long and weighing 15 tons-but is much too heavy to hunt on its own. Only its back armor of bony plates protects it from other carnivores. ”Gourmand is condemned to move slowly across the treeless plains of Argentina and other South American regions, gorging on any dead dinosaur it finds,” Dixon said.
”After eating, this behemoth rests for several days, burping occasionally, as it digests the meal. Gourmand lies motionless in the grass. Its armor protects it from other predators during this period.”
A sad end for Tyrannosaurus Rex, this loathsome creature that nowadays cowers in the dirt like a mountainous slug, hoping that no more reputable dinosaur will happen along and notice.
”True,” Dixon said, grinning. ”But then, one thing we`ve learned in biology is that nature plays its own favorites.”
