Customer Reviews

The Future is Wild

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Following After Man and The New Dinosaurs, Dougal Dixon and several biologists take a look at how the course of evolution might go over the next 200 million years if man left the earth. Made to follow a television mini-series, this lavishly illustrated book features commentaries from leading biologists and a wonderful introduction to evolution and continental drift. All the animals featured are smoothly done in CG art, but there are pictures of modern animals that are similar or even related to these hypothetical beasties. Incidentally, each chapter features certain clips that were not featured on the show the first time it aired, so if you saw the tv special you may have missed certain parts of the book.

The book opens up in the next Ice Age 5 million years into the future (a very real possibility btw), and actually matches up closely with Dixon's book "After Man". In this period, northern Europe is covered in ice sheets, where giant rodents and semi-aquatic birds are hunted by gigantic wolverines. The Mediterranean has dried up into a salt desert inhabited by lizards and wild boars (which was not featured on the show). In the Americas, the Midwest has become a sweeping desert/plain where gigantic predatory bats swoop across the sky and quails tunnel underground. And the Amazon has become an endless savannah where giant ground dwelling birds of prey hunt down the last few primates.

Jump to 100 million years from now, when the Ice Age ends. A great sea covers much of the earth, and it is warmer and more humid. Giant jellfish and sea slugs lurk in the warm shallow oceans, while India/South Asia has become a large swamp where elephant sized turles, land octopi and giant angler fish live. Antarctica is a tropical forest, inhabited by colorful birds and monsterous insects (this part wasn't in the tv series originally). Meanwhile Australia crashed into Asia forming huge mountains, in which giant spiders harvest rodents while dodging high altitude birds (which BTW feature anatomical adaptations recently discovered in prehistoric birds; victory for Dixon's views!)

Then 200 million years in the future a mass extinction eliminated most of the life on earth and the continents have reformed into Pangea II. A colossal inland desert occupies much of Pangea II and in it highly specialized termites co-exist with a variety of worms (not in the original airing). In the oceans the ultimate predators, sharks, have become even more adapted for hunting and prey upon colossal squid while flying fish have adapted to take the niche of birds. A rainshow desert exists beyond coastal mountains, and in it can be found hopping snails and scavenging insects. And in the humid northern forests, fish-birds and predatory fungi can be found, along with terrestrial squid which may one day evolve into intelligent life.

All in all, I found this to be a wonderful book. If you enjoyed Dougal Dixon's previous works or saw the television special, you know what to expect. If you have an interest in natural history, evolution or even just sci-fi, then I really suggest checking this book out (along with Dixon's other books like "The New Dinosuars" and "After Man"). Its really a great read and it gets your thoughts going too. So check it out.

Triceratops and rhinos, fish and dolphins, flying bugs, birds and bats: examples of convergent evolution, whereby animals of different phyla and genera take on similar forms. Our Earth's ecosystems have changed, yet many remain similar to their ancient formations. As animals evolve, they take on the properties that allow survival in these ecosystems; with enough similar properties, similar forms arise, each marked by the phylum's unique characteristics (e.g. dolphins breathe air, fish extract oxygen from water).
The Future is Wild casts the process of `convergent evolution' into the future. Its playful, yet scientifically informed, speculation on future species is delightful. Familiar faces, such as squid and snails, take on the forms of the jungle and ocean.
While many of the illustrations are beautifully done, others suffer from a poorer, cut-and-paste quality. Nonetheless, this makes a conversation-provoking coffee table book.
The real strength of this book is its illustration of the naturalist vision, and how this differs from a creationist view, whence humanity is the pinnacle of creation. This book shows that evolution is a continual, i.e. past, present, and future, phenomenon. Life is not a pyramid with humanity at its peak, but a tree with many branches. If humans disappear from the Earth's, life will move on.

It is very interesting the presentation of a possible future of our planet. According to the DVD, a group of scientists from different universities gathered to describe a possible vision of out future. We could say, of course, that scientists are better qualified than the rest of us to present this type of scenario. They have studied about this.
But we should remember that scientists are also human beings, and as such, they can be fallible.
As one of them says: "Will this really happen ?"
No one knows. We will not be there to see what really happens.
Some people wrote saying that what they say is NOT POSSIBLE. They are very emphatic. But that attitude is very risky, because whenever new things have been reported, people refuse to believe them.
The giraffe, well known nowadays, a century ago some people said that such an animal could not exist. The celacanth, a fish that lived together with the dinosaurs, was supposed to be extinct until it was caught last century, alive.
In the XVIII century people in England refused to believe that some central African tribes ate raw meat.
The okapi, a strange kind of antelope, was said to be a fantasy.
According to some ancient Phoenician documents, when some mariners described the ice in the northern seas, the listeners laughed and told them that they were insane.
Arthur Conan Doyle said once, by means of his very famous character, Sherlock Holmes:"Life is much stranger than anything that human imagination can conceive."
I would say that some things are unlikely, but impossible is a very strong word.
That is my own experience as well.
Thank you very much for your attention
The English

I love speculative evolution, so this was a must-have for me. Sadly, the book wasn't nearly as good as the Animal Planet documentary on which it was based. The illustrations are low-budget cg that pales in comparison to the illustrations Dixon's original speculative evolution book, After Man.

The writing centers on dull accounts of fictional happenings between fictional animals. I get the impression that alot of science went into the speculations made in the book, but next to none of that science was actually discussed therein. And the science would have been a giant part of the draw for readers. Oh well.

This is a fun look at what some scientists and artists imagine the world's flora, fauna and natural environment might be like 5 million, 100 million and 200 million years from now, under the assumption that human beings have become extinct.

At first glance, the creatures seem to be mere fanciful products of a vivid imagination, some well-suited for a good science fiction tale. However, the authors explain how each is actually based on reasonable evolutionary changes according to what we currently know about the history and evolution of today's living species. There is also a companion DVD series available for this book.

"The Future Is Wild" is an interesting look at what life on Earth in the far, far future will be like. The book takes the reader to five million years, one hundred million years and two hundred million years to show how life on Earth may evolve through climatic changes and vast time changes.
Although other reviewers may not agree with some of the proposed evolutionary suggestions, one must remember that all of the proposed evolutionary changes are based on speculation. There is no way to know what life will look like in five million years time; science bases those evolutionary theories on what we currently know about evolution and how life has evolved to its current day forms.
Will squids eventually be the 'new intelligence' of the future? Will there be pack hunting sharks? Will fish develop bird-like traits? We have no way of knowing but "The Future Is Wild" provides both an entertaining as well as scientific look at what might be...

Even those who think science is boring would have their interest peaked by this book which describes both the future of the earth and the possible future of life on earth.

Going five million, one hundred million and two hundred million years into the future this book forcasts an earth where human life has made a permanent sojourn elsewhere to see what happens to the life left behind. In so doing, we get to evolution transmogrify pigeons into flightless beach dwellers, fish into "flish" that fly out of the water for dinner and land dwelling octupi that are in the process of evolving intelligence.

A lot of fun!

I love how they made all of the animal based on science to make them all propable, most of the reason people criticize the show is because of the Mammal extintions and the squid, but I believe it is propable, seeing that the dinosaurs died out, because the dinosaurs shared most of the niches that mammals did and were too warm blooded, but they died out anyways, and seeing that the squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are extremely intelligent animals (a little known fact), I wouldn't be suprised if they could spawn a new civilization. Octopuses already have some adaptions to make them amphibious, because they have been known to escape from aquariums and crawl across land to steal food when they're human companions aren't around, so they could also evolve to take on land. I wish they explained some of that stuff in the show and book, but it's still awesome!

Any fan of "The Future is Wild" and other speculative future evolutionary theories would be pleased by this great coffee table book. Not only does it have large, splendid full-color pictures of all the animals from the documentary's episodes, but it explains in-depth the evolution of each creature: what it looks like, what its lifestyle is, and why. Dougal Dixon is quite good at predicting based on science what life will be like millions of years in the future. After all, billions of years ago, who would have guessed that humans would have evolved, or any of the other amazing creatures of today? When you consider some of the weird animals the crawl the earth right now as we speak, this book seems much more credible than you might originally think. There are definite scientific reasons behind these predictions; they're not the work of crazy science fiction authors who are just trying to be as "far out" as possible.

An impressive companion to After Man, another book by Dougal Dixon written on the same genre. However, After Man is less far fetched in its animals than in this book, which are computer generated rather than illustrated. Extremely detailed verbal sketches are accomplice to beautiful graphics of astounding animals of the future. My only complaint is that occasionally there is a bad computer generated image that probably would have done better as an illustration. After Man, Dixon's most masterful book, is best read either immediately before or after reading this one.