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The New Dinosaurs

Strongly recommend to the readers of this article the "Eden Trilogy" by Harry Harrison (West of Eden, Winter in Eden, and Return to Eden). An alternate history that has stayed with me through the years. Just checked and it is still available in ebook format via Amazon. PS: "The New Dinosaurs" can be found online as a free PDF download.
 
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This was probably my first introduction to alternate "history" of a sorts as a child (I found it randomly at a book sale following a Gifted and Talented summer camp), and I think my mother has a bunch of notebooks of me drawing creatures from this book and plotting out all my own alternate ecosystems.

Typo here, should be feathers if I am reading it right:

Some of the creations here are, by their very nature, bizarre ones. To Dixon's credit, a number of them feature features and something akin to fur, which put him ahead of many in the field of paleontology at the time.
 
JesterBL said:
Typo here, should be feathers if I am reading it right:

Some of the creations here are, by their very nature, bizarre ones. To Dixon's credit, a number of them feature features and something akin to fur, which put him ahead of many in the field of paleontology at the time.
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Good catch! Hopefully @Gary Oswald can update the post to correct it.
 
Here is the site I found and used. Advised to remove link due to possible illegality. Link was a direct download and did NOT involve any torrents or give any "illegal" indications. There were numerous similar pdf download sites similar to this one. I found no obvious issue with it.
 
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Hendryk said:
I remember coming across illustrations of Dixon's After Man as a kid and being quite intrigued by the concept of speculative evolution.
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I liked that one as well. He had a number of reasonable extrapolations, with various animals evolving to fill niches that mankind had emptied (rabbits replacing deer, rats replacing wolves, and penguins replacing whales). He combined it with more speculative ones, such as the parashrew - a shrew with a parachute-like structure of hairs at the end of their tails allowing them to glide through the air.
 
f7f tigercat said:
Here is the site I found and used. Advised to remove link due to possible illegality. Link was a direct download and did NOT involve any torrents or give any "illegal" indications. There were numerous similar pdf download sites similar to this one. I found no obvious issue with it.
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Just as a gentle fyi - googling most published book titles will find multiple sites offering .pdf or even. Mobi downloads of the titles. But they will always, without exception, be pirate sites that are offering illegal copies that lose the author and publisher significant money; not to mention likely containing viruses to screw your computer
 
Skinny87 said:
Just as a gentle fyi - googling most published book titles will find multiple sites offering .pdf or even. Mobi downloads of the titles. But they will always, without exception, be pirate sites that are offering illegal copies that lose the author and publisher significant money; not to mention likely containing viruses to screw your computer
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Well aware of all of that. This site had not obvious issues or viruses. Did not take the time to determine copywrite of the somewhat dated title. Site was removed quickly so no intentional harm done.
 
Ncw8 said:
I liked that one as well. He had a number of reasonable extrapolations, with various animals evolving to fill niches that mankind had emptied (rabbits replacing deer, rats replacing wolves, and penguins replacing whales). He combined it with more speculative ones, such as the parashrew - a shrew with a parachute-like structure of hairs at the end of their tails allowing them to glide through the air.
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The art from Man After Man, though, is the stuff of nightmares.
 
There have presumably been quite a lot of 'superhero' comic alternative societies, whether on Earth or on imaginary other planets, that featured either recognisable surviving dinosaurs or large animals which physically resemble Earth's ancient megafauna and interact with smaller humans/ humanoids. There was one classic 'Roman-type civilization moving forward into the Space Age' plus dinosaurs series in comics which was a favourite of mine - the British children's comic / informative and educational magazine 'Look and Learn' ran a long series of stories on the imaginary 'Trigan Empire' on the planet Elekton from 1965 to 1982.

This began in 'Ranger' comic in 1965, which was then swallowed up by L and L in ?1966, and mixed up a rapidly-evolving civilization with Roman/ Ancient Greek trappings with space age technology and surviving megafauna, but with only a few varieties of the latter eg the Tyrannosaurus-like 'Zargots' that the Roman-style 'Trigans' hunted like more dangerous wild boars plus assorted giant sea monsters and a few huge elephants and lizards lurking in jungles. The series, which I read in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was written by Mike Butterworth and drawn by top 1960s graphic artist Don Lawrence, and the artwork was very imaginative and spectacular and examples of it from DL's studio still fetch good prices. Some of it reappeared in reissues of the stories in books in the 1970s (and a more expensive reissue later) and has recently been reprinted by Rebellion Publishing, who now have the rights to many 1960s-70s comics. My own AltHist ideas were sparked off by this series, so I owe it a lot.
 
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