The Once and Future Zoo

By Peter Stoler

Rabbucks, pamthrets and other forms of life after man

Should man follow the dodo and the passenger pigeon into extinction, who will inherit the earth? Faced with that gloomy question, most futurists and even some zoologists tend toward the whimsical: late-late-show killer ants, say, or playful monsters that put one in mind of Lewis Carroll's frumious Bandersnatch.

Not so British Science Writer Dougal Dixon. A student of both geology and paleontology, Dixon has taken a careful look at the question and come up with more serious predictions, based on genetics and the course of evolution to date. The creatures that populate Dixon's futurist world in After Man: A Zoology of the Future (St. Martin's Press; $14.95) are variously amusing or appalling. But they are perfectly logical.

Dixon assumes the continents will continue to drift, eventually creating a world that will be far different from today's. Africa, Eurasia, Australia and North America will come together to form a giant continent with new climates and ecosystems; South America will become a huge island. Once man has succeeded in overpopulating the planet and exhausting its resources, as he now seems bent on doing, he will have assured not only his own extinction but that of the species that depend upon him for existence: domestic cattle, for example. Man's departure, concludes Dixon, will allow "evolution to get back to work filling in the gaps."

As each new ecological niche is opened by the fall of an old species or the rise of a new environment, creatures will fill it by trial and error. Some will survive by preying on others. Some will protect themselves by mimicking other species (like today's Viceroy butterfly, which birds avoid because it looks just like the foul-tasting Monarch). Some will simply reproduce faster than their competitors.

Take the creature that Dixon calls the rabbuck, for instance. Dixon figures that man, before disappearing, will destroy most of the world's woodlands in his search for fuel and farm land and will drive into extinction the deer and other browsing ungulates that now inhabit forests. But the superprolific rabbit will exploit this newly opened niche by evolving into a deer-size species that combines the lagomorph's gnawing teeth with the long, hoofed legs of the ungulates to form a new genus, Ungulagus. These super-rabbits will not have to worry about the wolves, foxes and feline carnivores that attack deer today; such predators will vanish with their present prey. But they may have to keep a watchful eye out for falanx, Amphimorphodus cynomorphus: dog-size predators likely to evolve as today's rats sense a new opportunity and literally grow into it.

As always in the past, so in the future: each ecosystem will produce its own specialized creatures. Relocated deserts will give rise to new animals capable of enduring for months without water, like the cameloid yet kangaroo-like desert leaper, able to store fat and other nutrients in its tail. Dixon proposes new islands settled by bats, which will evolve into forms specially adapted to exploit each of the islands' food sources. One group could well develop into an aquatic species capable of using its winged forelimbs for swimming. Another could, in the absence of competition, turn into the carnivorous night stalker, a flightless sightless bat, with ears as sensitive as a NORAD radar antenna, that carries its clawlike hind legs over its shoulders as it roams around on its forelegs screeching, in search of prey.

Ranging from the carefree chirit, a long-bodied squirrel that moves by hunching its body inchworm-style, to the flooer, whose large pinkish ears mimic a flower to attract edible bees, Dixon's future zoo may suggest an imagination gone wild. But he is talking about a period 50 million years from now. And nature, the great experimenter, has already created creatures just as outrageous. --By Peter Stoler

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