by Luna Maru -

Life in a Distant Galaxy

We’ve talked about life that will come after us, and what life before us looked like. But what about life on other planets? How do we imagine alien life? And where does the reality differ from the image we created in media?

Small Green Men

Aliens are used as a classic embodiment of the other in media. From small green men to furry monsters and incomprehensible shapes – aliens are an unknown kind of people who appear grotesque and strange, who might be exactly like us, even become or friends or allies. Or might just be our doom, the total destruction of or race. Or who might be so incomprehensible to us that we can’t even begin to understand them.

“Aftonsparv” plush from IKEA, Alf from the TV show Alf (1986) – Jean Jacket from Nope (2022)

Where Is Everyone Else?

Of course, for us to meet aliens, there would need to be aliens. But where are they? The universe is infinite, it’s preposterous to say we’re all alone.

We can make an educated guess about what environments support life, using our own planet as a basis. Habitability requires certain conditions like the availability of water, energy and carbon. Thus, allowing life to be established, but also allow to sustain it and make it flourish. It sounds simple enough, but Earth is in fact a rarity out in the universe. We have yet to discover a world that would be suitable or even remotely habitable for a human being without extensive artificial help. Even planets that count technically as habitable have such extreme environmental conditions that earth-like life could never exist there. Additionally, environments are not static. They change over time and the conditions present during the appearance of life might not be those needed to maintain life or are even capable of supporting it long-term. This also assumes that any planet that has or had the ability to support life will definitely have contained it.

Life is surprisingly fickle and habitable environments are rare. When imagining alien life, we not only need to consider what environment might sustain life, but what type of life would even be able to life there. Here the defining factors are temperature, acidity and salinity. We can study these conditions on Earth, though they will never be able to accurately copy environments on different planets given factors like gravity and atmosphere.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile to explore. Intelligent life elsewhere might not look like anything we’re even capable of imagining, but it’s still up to us to try. To wonder what else is out there and if we ourselves could one day settle on a planet far away.

“Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world.” – Arthur C. Clarke, Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Sources

  • Wolfschlag, Claus M.: Traumstadt und Armageddon. Zukunftsvision und Weltuntergang im Science-Fiction-Film. Graz: Ares 2007
  • Preston, Louisa: Goldilocks and the Water Bears. The Search for Life in the Universe. London, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing 2016 [E-Book]
  • Kershenbaum, Arik: The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy. What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens – and Ourselves. UK u.a.: Penguin Books 2020 [E-Book]
by Luna Maru -

How Do Artists of Today Depict Dinosaurs? – A Look at “The Palaeoartist’s Handbook”

About the Book

The book was written by the British vertebrate palaeontologist, author and palaeoartist Dr. Mark P. Witton and is meant to be an introduction to paleoart, as well as its history and the processes accompanying it.

Leaping Laelaps by Charles R. Knight, 1897

Reconstructing Extinct Animals

After briefly introducing the subject, the book goes into the history of palaeoart. It started back in the late 1700s, originating along with palaeontological science. Though it might have begun long before, influencing the depictions of many different mythical animals (e.g. the head of a cyclops was inspired by a fossil elephant skull). A lot of early paleoart has been lost over the years, however, since many depictions weren’t preserved after they became scientifically obsolete.

The next chapter discusses the process of researching, resource gathering and planning that goes into creating a piece of palaeoart. It’s not just anatomy that matters, but also the time and place of the fossil find. For this the latest information on the subject species is gathered, along with its contemporary fauna and flora and its habitat to create the closet possible depiction.

Fossils

The fossils are crucial glimpses into the proportion, size and appearance of an extinct animal. Not just skeletons, but also exoskeletons, shells and preserved tissue of corals and plants. These findings can be used to make predictions about the skeletal form, proportions and articulation. A lot of species were only partially preserved – here its necessary to know what goes into the reconstruction of a skeleton.

Techniques like phylogenetic bracketing are used here, where the position in the evolutionary tree is used to infer things about the extinct animal. Cross-scaling is also a useful tool, hereby bone elements common to two species are scaled to the same size – assuming that non-common elements can be scaled to the same degree, too. Here the most reliable bones to use for would be those of the upper limb.

Tissue

Musculature is one of the most critical aspects in reconstruction, as it provides major contours of the animal’s bodies. It’s essential to have a good understanding of the muscle distribution and bulk to create a realistic depiction of an extinct animal. Fatty tissue overlying the musculature is much more difficult to predict, but nonetheless important and thus should be considered. There are trends we can observe when it comes to the distribution of fat, however. Reptiles for examples often have fat behind their heads, around their torsos and around their tails, while mammals and birds tend to mostly deposit their fat around their torso, as well as neck and face. Aquatic species have fat tissue around their whole body – here it is used to minimize heat loss.

Only leaning on the skeletons as reference can lead to making the reconstructed animals seem underweight, or forgoing their internal organs completely. As a rule, the curvature of the stomach should be a gentle arc between the sternal and the pelvic region.

Skin

Skin type and colouration are among the most debated, controversial and seemingly unknowable components of palaeoart, given how rarely skin gets preserved. Data about this has made many leaps forward however, updating how we view certain extinct animals frequently. Skin can vary in toughness and texture, while fur and feathers rarely get preserved.

mummy of a nodosaur found in Alberta, US – one of the best preserved dinosaur skin and armor ever found

Dermal tissue can be as tough as resistant as cartilage, while not being reliant on bones like other armoured skin. Instead it can be inferred from evenly-distributed projections growing out of the bone. Many horns and crests have no bony components, instead being formed from stiffened, toughened skin. They are rarely preserved, because of which they are reconstructed based on the bony structures that once supported them. The same goes for fins, flukes and flippers if they aren’t supported by limb bones.

What can we take away from this?

A lot of the knowledge in this book can not only be used for palaeoart, but creature design overall. Its important to understand what we’re depicting when trying to create a believable animal. Nothing happens in a vacuum, evolution goes hand-in-hand with its environment. Knowing not only the basics of anatomy, but also why certain physical attributes developed and for what purpose can aid us in creating immersive (fictional) worlds.

Sources

  • Wikipedia. Die freie Enzyklopädie (07.12.2025), s.v. Mark P. Witton, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_P._Witton (zuletzt aufgerufen am 30.12.2025)
  • Witton, Mark P.: The Palaeoartist’s Handbook. Recreating prehistoric animals in art. Ramsbury, Marlborough: The Crowood Press 2018 [E-Book]
by Luna Maru -

Life in a time before ours

We’ve taken a look at life on earth in the future, but what did the past look like? And more importantly, how were we able to piece it all together?

How Do We Know How Extinct Animals Looked and Lived?

Rough patches and flanges on bone can be used as a guideline for where muscles, cartilage and ligaments used to lie. Scratches and wear patterns on teeth can tell about the diet and possible feeding habits of the animal. Cutting thin sections through bones and putting them under the microscope, helps to determine the age of these animals and how fast they would grow up. Skeletons are only the starting point of our understanding, however.

There are a lot of things that can be inferred from preserved gut contents, eggs, nests, footprints, skin impressions and as well as fossilised feces. These can tell us about the diet, size, life cycle, habitat and etc. of these animals. Comparisons with living species is also key. Parallels can be drawn between living and extinct lifeforms with similar features and be studied in real time.

Reconstruction

Although the accumulation of discoveries has given palaeologists a pretty clear image on some extinct animals, many are still reconstructed with a rule-of-the thumb methodology. Things like soft tissue as well as integument, colour and behavioural elements are not often taken into account. This approach would look bizarre when applied to modern animals, but would need a certain degree of speculation when being applied. Which is why these shortcomings haven’t been addressed until recent years.

The Magdeburger Unicorn – a famously bad reconstruction

Filling in the Blanks

One problem with older reconstructions would be “Shrink-Wrapping”. Hereby prehistoric animals are stripped of any kind of soft tissue, showing every muscle and bone ridge and thus turning them into strange, skin-and-bone creatures.

How future historians might imagine a horse when lacking any kind of context about the animal and just going off its skeleton.

If soft tissue can’t get preserved, neither can skin, feathers or fur. This often makes reconstructions, especially of dinosaurs, lacking in any kind of plumage.

Cartilage is another point of discussion; it won’t get preserved, but can tell us about how an animal held themselves. Do they hold their necks up horizontally? Like a giraffe would? Or closer to the ground? Like a rabbit? And what can we conclude about their feeding habits through this? 

Though even here lies uncertainty. Given that many fossils are incomplete, we tend to fill the missing parts with whatever closest relative we can find. These won’t always be correct and maybe even give us false ideas about an animal. Anatomy based on what seems familiar and therefor logical to us can shape our image of these long dead animals and settle in as fact. And we could never know what’s the actual truth.

Developments

The recognition that birds are dinosaurs has played a major role in the reconstruction of dinosaurs in the last 20 years. Not only in physical aspects and behaviour, they carry a direct genetic legacy of their dinosaurian ancestry. They possess genes that can transform bird beaks back into more dinosaur-like snouts, or stimulate chickens to form teeth.

These efforts in genetics have already produced some impressive findings and I imagine they will continue to do so in the future. While a lot of questions about prehistoric life will probably never be answered, we are closer than ever to understanding more about it.

Sources

by Luna Maru -

What Will the Future of the Human Species Look Like?

Last time we took a glance at the beginning of the speculative evolution artistic movement almost 50 years ago. Set in motion by the book After Man. But what do the scientists of today say? Let’s take a look at mankind’s future and what the world will look like after us.

Human Evolution

Evolution is a fickle thing, it doesn’t happen linear, rather it occurs in fits and starts. Life gets simpler, more complex, smaller, bigger, adapts to its environment or perishes completely; it’s hard to predict in which direction the human species will be taken. We might not change at all, or even branch off in a new species in the family Hominidae. The later could only truly occur in geographic isolation of a population of humans, which given globalisation seems very unlikely.

Thus, the predictions of Man After Man, interesting as they may be, have little possibility of ever occurring.

The End of the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene describes our current epoch, defined by human interference in our ecosystem. And this epoch might come to an end sooner than we like, given the rapid progress of climate change. Should we burn through all our fossil reserves, the climate will rise up to 18 degrees Celsius and raise the sea levels by hundreds of feet. It’s likely this warming spike will be more devasting than the one that caused the End-Permian mass extinction. This event, also known as the Great Dying, killed 90% of marine and terrestrial lifeforms. It would be a return to the climate of the Eocene, where none of the poles had ice, being instead home to swamps and tropical forests. A lot of mammals will die out or be forced to migrate pole-wards, though reptiles and birds will be fine for the most part. Life in the oceans will be devasted and won’t properly recover for a few thousand years.

The temperatures would rise for a long time in this green house and stay consistently hot for at least a hundred-thousand years. Afterwards we will plummet into a new ice age. If humanity has survived until then, this is where the sixth mass extinction will take place. Although its more likely civilisation will collapse long before.

Next in Line

Who will come after us then? That seems to be the big question, but the answer isn’t clear. We have no way of knowing who would survive the sixth mass extinction and who wouldn’t. Whoever is left would fill in the niches of those species, who didn’t make it.

The docu-miniseries The Future is Wild, based on Dougal Dixon’s work is an exploration of this. Released in 2002, the show explores life on Earth millions of years in the future.

The first part, taking place 5 million years after our extinction, takes a look at how life changed in the second ice age. Ice sheets range all the way to central Europe, rain forests have dried up and turned into grasslands while the North American plains have become a cold desert. The shifting continents have closed off the Mediterranean Sea, turning it into near uninhabitable salt flats. The climate is cold, dry, megafauna have once more taken control of the Earth.

A 100 million years later, we return to a global hothouse. The climate is warm, humid. The land is flooded by shallow seas, turning everything into swamps. Rain forests sprawl across the globe, even Antarctica. The shifting continents created a kilometre-high mountain plateau, dwarfing the Himalayas. The Sahara Desert has become a rich grassland.

200 million years after our time the world is once again recovering from a mass extinction event. 95% of the species on the planet have been wiped out, with marine life and insects taking over. The last mammal has long since died out. The continents have collided in a second Pangea, a supercontinent plagued by extreme weather conditions.

While still only a prediction, this show considers how the climate changes, the continents shift and what that means for the environment. Which species will most likely thrive and which will perish. While our species will almost certainly meet its end one day, that doesn’t mean life won’t go on, with new species adapting and evolving.

Sources

by Luna Maru -

Life on Earth after Our Extinction – How “After Man” imagined the Future

To understand the depiction of future life in media, let’s start with the book that would set everything in motion.

Published in 1981, After Man: A Zoology of the Future by Dougal Dixon along with his following books, are considered the roots of the modern speculative evolution artistic movement. A movement which would go on to discuss both possible futures and alternative routes history could have taken, thus shaping the face of media, especially sci-fi over the last few decades.

About the Book

After Man depicts a world set 50 million years in the future, after the extinction of mankind. Showing how animals that we are familiar with today could evolve in this world set after our time. In 2018 a second edition was published, aimed to update the book to our current understanding on speculative evolution.

Content

While scientific in nature, the book doesn’t aim to be a firm prediction, but rather an exploration of possibilities. How evolution and natural selection can be used to flesh out a fictional future ecosystem. Showing how animals would adapt to changing environments through behaviour, physical form and their place in the food chain.

It goes over multiple different possible branches of evolution, asking questions like: What if rabbits eventually evolved to take over the niche of ungulates? How would baboons behave if they became hunter-predators? Could penguins evolve to the size of whales?

Structure

The book is built up like a scientific almanac, with full-page illustrations by Diz Wallis, John Butler, Brian McIntyre, Philip Hood, Roy Woodard and Gary Marsh. Showing both animals and their environment.

The introduction goes over the different processes responsible for evolution, as well as a short break-down of the development of life on Earth. The chapters explore life from environment to environment, ranging from Temperate Woodlands and Grasslands to Tundra and the Polar Region. It establishes the common animals of the region, which niche they occupy in the food chain.

The book makes use of binomial nomenclature, meaning it uses both generic and Latin names. Alongside are facts about the animals’ physical appearance and behaviour (hunting, social interaction, adaption to weather, …). These are often accompanied by smaller illustrations to visualize the information.

Further Works

The success of After Man showed, that there was a market for books that make use fictional examples and settings in order to explain scientific processes. In 1988 Dixon followed his work up with The New Dinosaurs, which aimed to explain zoogeography, by showing an alternate world where dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct. This was followed in 1990 by Man After Man, which focused on climate change; showing the future of a human species which was genetically engineered to adapt to it.

“Anyway, After Man, I feel, established the idea of world building as goes Speculative Zoology. Things being what they were prior to the age of the internet, I don’t think anybody during the 1980s or early 90s really tried to do what Dougal did […]” – Darren Naish

In 2002 Dixon would also be a consultant on the docu-miniseries The Future is Wild. The 13-episode series goes over speculative evolution of the next 5 million, 100 million, and 200 million years. Many of the designs reflect creatures from After Man, while also taking future environmental changes into account.

Sources

by Luna Maru -

Yesterday, Tomorrow, Elsewhere

How do we depict prehistoric life, or imagine the development of future lifeforms? How would life look on a planet completely different from us?

Illustration by Dougal Dixon – Man After Man : An Anthropology of the Future (1990)


We can paint a picture using science, keep to the facts as far as we can. Though eventually we’ll reach a point where that’s not enough anymore. Where we feel the need to rely on our imagination to depict these worlds that are so different from what we understand.
How should we go about that though? Where lies the point where fact and fiction meet? And how do we portray them in media? Not only considering depictions of past and future life on Earth, or life on other planets. But also how we use this knowledge as a foundation in genres such as fantasy, sci-fi, dystopia, and the like. Creating fictional worlds that feel believable and have a real impact on the viewers.

Approach

  • Research of scientific depictions of the past, future and life on other planets
  • Research of fictional depictions of the past, future and life on other planets
  • Media Analysis
  • Comparison