An unknown speculative biology project by Dougal Dixon: Microplatia I

I recently exchanged emails with various people involved in speculative biology, including Dougal Dixon, about a possible common project. This bit of knowledge might just make you a little bit curious, but I will not say more about it until we know that it will go through. That should be in a month or two, and if it does I will definitely write about it here. 

Anyway, Dougal mentioned that he had drawings and illustrations from a project on exobiology with the Science Museum in London. Unfortunately the project was abandoned when the sponsor decided to withdraw. Apparently there were models as well, but those got left with the animation house and are no longer available. Somehow I forgot to ask whether any actual animations were ever done.

Dougal Dixon does not need an introduction in a blog on speculative biology; you could say that he introduced speculative biology. He put two of the three major fields of speculative biology on the map: the first was future evolution in the book 'After Man (1981)', and the second was alternative evolution in the book 'The New Dinosaurs' (1988). I have seen some of the themes in those books referred to as clichés, and perhaps they are now, having been copied and paraphrased many times. But nothing is a cliché when done for the first time, and these books were full of novel ideas. Scientific American recognised that not long ago and published a slide show on his work: Dougal's 'alternative dinosaurs' were less alternative than anyone could have guessed in 1988. Subsequent dinosaur discoveries showed that actual dinosaurs had features very similar to Dougal's earlier fictional ones. Moreover, if it had not been for recalcitrant publishers, his book on the third field of speculative biology, 'fictional exobiology', would also have appeared long ago. As it is, you need to speak Japanese to read 'Greenworld', about which I wrote earlier here and here.   

Back to the aborted project; I was curious and asked whether he would mind sharing some of that material. He did not, and was kind enough to send me several images and an accompanying text. So here is his text on 'Microplatia' and three images. I shall be cruel and post the remaining five images later. 

MICROPLATIA

Geology

As with the Earth, Microplatia’s structure consists of a core, mantle and crust. The core is very large and consequently the mantle is shallow. Tectonic plate movements take place on the surface as they do on Earth - expanding and shrinking oceans and moving the continents about in continental drift - but as the mantle is shallow, the convection currents are very small. This results in a large number of very small tectonic plates (Microplatia - geddit?) that move around quite quickly.

With small continents - mostly no more than island chains - and rapid tectonic movements, the surface conditions are dominated by what we would term “natural disasters”. Not a day goes by without earthquakes, volcanic eruptions of all sorts, geyser and hot pool activity, tsunamis and so on. The energy of these movements is what supplies the energy that is exploited by the life forms (like the life forms around the hot smokers in the depths of modern earth oceans).

Life forms

No magnetic field, and so nothing to block out dangerous solar radiation. Most animals protect themselves by wading in the shallow seas. Those permanently on land have developed sun-proof shells, or transparent body coverings making them look like jellyfish.

Plant life is protected by layers of translucent resin that solidifies and persists as glassy cities and towers even when the plants that produced them inside have died off. They act as greenhouses protecting a whole range of animal life beneath them. Frequent earthquakes bring them shattering down, and the shards are used as raw materials for the next generation.

Amongst the animals the walking limbs are not like ours - rigid bone with muscles on each side pulling one way and then the other. Instead the bone is springy and the muscles are only on one side - muscles pulling one way and the spring pulling the other. (There is precedent in our own zoology.)

Attached are the plans of two of the animal types developed for the project.

The first is the Walkingmouth. A big animal of coastal shallows. Spends most of its time with its body just under the water. Several mouths on the ends of long springy rods that are cast out like an angler’s fishing rod. Each mouth has a set of legs that allow it to go looking for food on the shoreline. The youngsters grow on the back, and are broken off and carried inland on tsunamis, surfing on the giant waves.

The second are Bubblesonstilts. These are land-living animals that forage on the slopes of the volcanoes."

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

Here is the planet. It looks like Dougal painted over an existing sphere to produce the map. I did exactly the same thing to produce an actual globe of Furaha, but never finished it: it became fairly boring to paint yet another mountain range.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

This shows the ancestry of  Walkingmouths and Bubblesonstilts. I wonder whether these names are temporary placeholders or were meant as the final names of these groups. I rather like the idea of starting with an ancestral pattern and developing your life forms from there. Personally I did it the other way round, and am paying for that: having given my beasties' evolution more thought, the poor creatures on my paintings find that their transformation into digital form is accompanied by a ruthless rearrangement of their anatomy.

Have a look at the animal's arms or branches: these consist of the elements Dougal described above:  a springy bone, labelled 'gristle' with muscles attached to it to pull it against the direction the gristle pulls in, which must be upwards. When I read the text I imagined that the two structures would be placed alongside one another, but there is a lot of space between them along most of their length.  That is best visible in the Walkingmouth sketch at the bottom.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

And this is a more detailed sketch of the Walkingmouth. The top view shows a rotund body with 'up to 5 mouths', and the side view shows just one of those mouths, or perhaps 'mouth limbs'. The gristle is now at the top, and forms a bow-like shape. What would be the string on a bow is defined as a 'trunk like gullet', with a 'mouth unit' at the end. These have there own 'legs', the details of which will be shown in another post.

That is a pretty radical departure of 'life as we know it', but there is more:  the youngsters on the back are described as the 'haploid phase'; there is another phase as well?