Start of direct USA sales of the Furaha book, a new very nice review, and off to DinoCon!

No science this time, just a quick update.

My book ’Wildlife on the planet Furaha’ appeared in the UK on 3 December, 2025. People in the USA could order it from the UK, but they won’t have to any more: The Book will be available directly in the USA as of the 28th of July, or next Tuesday. If you are interested, go pester your local bookshop to get it for you. It’s worth it, I promise!

That opinion is shared by Matt Wedel, one of the authors of the famous blog ‘Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week’. Matt just published a very positive review of my book, right here.

Finally, I will be at DinoCon in the UK with a limited number of copies of the book (books are heavy!). If you want one, or a nice print, visit stand 66. I am sharing that stand with CM Kosemen, known for ‘All tomorrows’ and ‘Snaiad’. If you think that two Speculative Biology planets aren’t enough, come find out about the ‘Syndicate of Planetary Biology Societies’ (also starring Dougal Dixon…).  

The RETURN Of The NIGHTSTALKER!!

The Nightstalker is, as most readers will know, one of Dougal Dixon’s creations presented in his 1981 book 'After Man', a book that proved fundamental for speculative biology. In that book, he presented completely novel themes, such as penguin whales and terrestrial cephalopods or bats; for more on the 1981 setting, see an earlier post here.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

The image of the nightstalker in the 1981 version of After Man was later changed by Dixon, who did not like the original one very much. The new version is shown above and is published in recent editions of 'After Man', such as the '40th anniversary edition' (which has new information too!).  

The nightstalker descended from bats that were among the first animals to arrive on the newly emerged volcanic Batavian Islands in the Pacific. Facing no serious terrestrial competition, the bats lost the ability to fly, became fully terrestrial and diversified. Once other mammals arrived as well, a bat species started to hunt them and evolved into the nightstalker, a formidable bipedal predator of one meter and a half in height, or as tall as an 11-year old child.

Nightstalkers are blind and use echolocation to find their prey in the night, ‘screaching and screaming through the Batavian forest’. This may mean that the nightstalker uses echolocation at sound frequencies we can hear too, although the text does not literally say so. The screeches might also be used for communication within the pack, leaving ultrasonic sound for echolocation. In either case I wondered whether its prey can hear the echolocation sounds too, which would make life more difficult for the nightstalker.  I have compared the relative merits of vision and echolocation in three posts (one, two, and three). It turned out that echolocation is like someone shouting at the top of their voice ‘WHERE ARE YOU!?’. Provided the prey can hear the sounds used in echolocation, echolocation is the opposite of stealth.

The nightstalker is bipedal, with the interesting twist of walking on its front legs. That makes sense in that the wings of bats are much larger and stronger than their hind legs. The animal uses claws on its hind legs to help overcome it prey, to which end the hind legs pass the front legs on the outside. In my 'review with hindsight' of After Man, posted in 2018, I wondered whether it would make more sense if the hind legs moved forwards between the front legs. I asked Dougal at the recent 2022 TetZooCon if he would mind me writing a blog post about this particular revision of the nightstalker. He did not, so here it is. I could not help myself thinking some more about terrestrial bats. I do not doubt that bats could evolve to walk efficiently again, as there are bats alive today that not only walk, but run too. 

Researchers managed to get vampire bats to run on a treadmill, and the animals obliged by using a unique hopping run. That is the video above. That odd gait must be due to the extreme difference in size between front and hind legs, which poses an unusual problem. During walking, legs that are on the ground at the same time must all propel the body over the same distance in the same time, or else the shoulder would walk faster or slower than the hip. From this it follows that the shorter leg will be on the ground for a shorter period than the longer leg, so the shorter leg only supports the body for a short time. That may be impractical, which suggests three different evolutionary solutions.

The first and weirdest solution is to have the hind legs move twice in the time the front legs move once. That is definitely possible, at least in theory. I know that because I was once requested to program such a gait to help visualise a terrestrial shark, posted here. The videos above show the result. This solution does not seem the most likely one though...

Click to enlarge; copyright Marc Boulay / Jean-Sébastien Steyer

 The second adaptation would involve quick enlargement of the hind legs, which appears altogether sensible and straightforward. the result would be very similar to the Steyer/Boulay terrestrial bat shown in ‘Demain. Les animaux du futur’ (and discussed on this blog here and here).
 
The third possibility means the animal no longer uses its hind legs for locomotion, so they can be used for something else, such as being weapons. If front limbs are liberated from their walking role, I would call that ‘centaurism’ (see here for the first mention of the principle). But the nightstalker freed its hind legs, so we probably need another name than centaurism; 'reverse centaurism'?

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Of the three, the second option seemed the most straightforward one, and I considered stopping alternate evolution right there. Then again, the result wouldn’t be a proper nightstalker! I suppose a bipedal animal can still evolve from the enlarged hind limb version, so there you are: a bipedal terrestrial erstwhile bat with reverse centaurism.

What else did I change?

• I made the ears smaller than in the original. When animals species increase in size, organs do not necessarily scale linearly with body size. Eyes, for instance, are relatively small in large animals. Beyond a certain size an organ's function may not improve noticeably, so there is no point in making the organ larger than necessary to do its job. I am not certain this also holds for echolocating ears but assumed this to be the case.
• The skull and face are less bat-like than the original, because I assumed that the larger size would require a sturdier build. Bats have many pointy needle-like teeth, useful to catch insects. But an animal the size of a large dog would need teeth that can handle larger stresses.   
• I kept the leaf-based nose because it is part of the basic package of vampire bats. However, it seems very vulnerable.
• The eyes are still there because eyes seemed much too useful to abolish altogether. They are still small though, but useful for unforeseen circumstances.
• There are no fingers, just thumbs. Bats fold their fingers, that support a large part of the wing membrane, out of the way when roosting and walking. They use their big thumbs to hang from. What will happen to the fingers if the wing atrophies during evolution? I foresee the fingers disappearing completely, and not coming back as toes. The thumb has grown and now extends towards the midline to support the body underneath the centre of gravity. Normally animals place their feet close to the midline for that purpose, but the nightstalker needs room under the body for the hind legs. The thumb could help support the body directly under the centre of gravity by extending towards the midline. The two stubs you see on each hand do not have nails or claws, because they are not fingers! They are pseudo-fingers, supported by former wrist bones.                
  

So here we are: an alternate nightstalker with its hind legs between the front legs. When I look at the result, it looks much less like a bat then the original, which may not be good from a didactic point of view. The image serves to illustrate an evolved bat, so people who see it should immediately associate it with bats. My revised version probably does that less well than the original. Mind you, my first version had smaller ears, no leaf nose, a longer snout and sturdier teeth, so it looked even less like a bat than the one you see now. The version shown above was 'batified' on purpose, but it still doesn't shout 'bat'. That raises the interesting question of balance between  presumed biological underpinning and what the image is supposed to evoke. It is fun to play with both aspects, and adds another layer of speculation to speculative biology.

Epilogue

The above was all seen by Dougal. His response to reading the text was this:

"I claim it is an example of speciation in the Batavian archipelago! A new species on one of the newer volcanic islands in the "hot-spot" conveyor belt island chain. Shared ancestor with Manambulus perhorridus rafted across from the Big Island at a time of its early appearance along with its potential prey species."

And so it shall be; the new species deserves a new name though, and I think the differences are too large to use the same genus.  I therefore present Condylovador terriloquus! (from condylus: knuckle; vadere; to go or to walk;  terriloquus: uttering frightening words)

Zoom interview with Dougal Dixon tomorrow

 I received, courtesy of Dougal Dixon, an invitation from Oscar Salguero, a book curator from New York, to view a Zoom presentation given tomorrow by Dougal. Mr Salguero assured me anyone can register for free. Because time is short I will just pass on the information.

 

 "Mr. Dixon will give a live presentation highlighting some of his most important works on speculative zoology from the last 40 years. This will be presented via zoom and it's sponsored by the Center for Book Arts in NY."

 Friday, April 30, from 1 - 2:30pm EST

That should make 19:00 -21:30 hrs CET, and 18:00-20:30 hrs for people in the UK  

 Here is the event (click on "Register" button to receive the zoom link):

https://centerforbookarts.org/calendar/talk/speculative-zoology-fictitious-examples-of-factual-processes

Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/events/300204934901648

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 After the event

 This is just a short update for those who are curious about Dougal’s work.

In the talk, Dougal mentioned that there would be a 40-year anniversary edition of ‘After Man’, that should be published before the end of 2021. I understood that it will have more material than the books published so far, including sketches.

Another interesting bit of information was that there were Japanese model kits of some of the creatures featuring in ‘After Man’. Dougal showed a box with content of an unassembled kit of the Night Stalker. I was curious and wondered if I could find out more about those kits (secretly hoping I might still order one from some forgotten Japanese warehouse).

 

Well, I found two entries on a site of a company where you can indeed order such things, but the items were sold out. There were a few images, and I chose the one above, because it showed the contents of the box.

 

The two images above are were posted by a collector on a site called ‘dinotoyblog’. Interesting, aren't they? Alas, I found no hidden stores of such models...

 

'After Man', by Dougal Dixon; a review with hindsight

The book 'After Man' is arguably the best-known book in Speculative Biology. It first appeared in 1981, so you may well wonder why I should choose to discuss a book everyone knows already, 37 years after its publication.

Well, a shiny new edition came out. It is a facsimile edition of the 1981 version, but with some changes. I still own the copy I bought in 1981 and could easily compare the two. The new version faithfully copies the monochrome sections at the beginning and end of the book that explain basic concepts such as the nature of evolution. These, printed on a somewhat coarse type of paper, enclose the heart of the book like slices of bread in a sandwich. That heart consists of 90 pages filled with illustrations in full colour, printed in much better quality on glossy paper. Even the page numbers match up perfectly.

The few changes are interesting. The introductory text has been updated in a few places, and these are indicated with a slightly different font, a nice touch for the bibliophiles among us. For instance, the old version states that early amphibians already had 5 toes on each foot, whereas the new version says that that pattern only emerged as the standard pattern after earlier experiments with other numbers.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon, with permission

The middle part of the book describes animals using ecological zones as a guiding principle, but Dougal Dixon has made two changes to the illustrations. These were originally done by professional artists and were based on sketches by Dougal. That process was not always easy, as Dougal explained in an interview with Darren Naish. I own some photocopies of early sketches for Greenworld that Dougal was kind enough to send me a long time ago, so I can say with confidence that he knows what he is doing when he sketches animals. I discussed Greenword, still only available in Japanese, here, here and here. Dougal gave me permission to use the drawing above to illustrate his own skills. These are of course predatory descendants of rats (falanxes) attacking a rabbit descendant, the rabbuck. Dougal was generally happy with the illustrators' work, except for two interpretations. In the new book he replaced the drawings of the reed stilt and the night stalker with his own drawings, and they indeed look better, in particular the reed stilt, that now is a lightweight and slender creature. I will not show them here; but leave them as an incentive to buy the book.         

I could stop here and consider the job done, but I have seen some critical discussions of Dixon's works, including 'After Man'. I sometimes think these criticisms are overly harsh and would like to add a bit of background to 'After Man', meaning the time in which it appeared.

Click to enlarge; Granada Publishing 1981

Everyone is obviously free to form his or her opinion on the matter, and let me stress that I have my doubts here and there too. As an example, let me discuss the night stalker in some detail. It is a fierce predator, descended from a bat that has given up flight and is a nocturnal terrestrial hunter, using sonar to find its prey. It walks on its front legs and uses its hind legs to catch prey, for which they arch over and outside of the front legs. The image above was copied from the dust cover of the 1981 edition, showing Dougal with a model of the night stalker. Dougal is very good at making such models by the way: I saw several of them for myself on the occasion of the Loncon3 science fiction convention (discussed here by Darren Naish and here by me).

Let's follow the scenario of evolving a land-living bat with specialised grasping legs. I would not expect all those features to evolve at once, but that one would set the stage for the next. (Whales did not evolve baleens the minute they entered the water, but had to become proficient swimmers first.) I expect the first step in that process to be that the bat gives up flight and becomes an animal walking on all fours. That will force quick changes to both the front and hind legs. I would expect that freeing one pair of limbs to catch prey and using the other legs to walk on to evolve only after that. (That, by the way, would be an example of 'centaurism'; see earlier posts here and here). Which pair of legs would become grasping limbs? My guess would be the front legs, because they are closer to the prey. But if the hind legs would be used for some reason, would they reach forward on the outside of the front legs, or in between, where the entire hind part of the body might also be swung forward to extend the reach?

My second doubt concerning the night stalker is that I do not think that sonar works well for a ground-based predator, as I explained in a series of earlier posts (here, here and here). Basically, using sonar is the opposite of stealth. I would therefore expect the animal to redevelop its eyes, keeping its extraordinary hearing as a passive sense. So my personal variant of a bipedal terrestrial predatory bat descendent would walk on its hind legs and not use sonar. I think it would be fairly likely, but it would also be much more conservative and also more boring than Dougal's night stalker...  

By now you may feel that all this criticism of what is probably the most famous creation of 'After Man' is a very odd way to defend Dougal's work. But there is a point here: it is very unlikely that anyone would have been able to raise such specific and detailed considerations in 1981. Such a person would at the time have to have been a professional biologist, not a member of the general public. I am not a biologist, and I can only raise such criticisms now because of several reasons. The first is having ideas; even though I thought hard about the use of sonar for a land-living predator, someone had to have to come with that idea first, and that certainly wasn't me; it was Dougal. The second reason is that you need knowledge to think matters through; to learn, there must be something to learn from.

Suppose you find yourself in 1981 wanting to know more about some biological subject, say sonar, the evolution of whales, or any specific animal group such as 'mudskippers'. You go to a book store or ask your local librarian, who will probably come up with the same one or two books every time, leaving you both frustrated and ill-informed. Anything specific would require access to something like a university library, and even there you would on some subjects find less information than you find on Wikipedia now. There was hardly anything to fill the gap between a general interest and professional levels. The information that is readily available now with a few clicks was either non-existent or almost completely inaccessible in 1981. So what could someone interested in biology, palaeontology and science fiction find in 1981? Well, disappointingly little:

• On the dinosaur front, you would not be happy. There were stirrings of the coming 'Dinosaur Renaissance' (Bakker's paper from Scientific American from 1975 can be found here). But Robert Bakker's book 'The Dinosaur Heresies', that spread the message that dinosaurs were lively, athletic and interesting was still five years into the future in 1981. The most spectacular book on past life that you could own at the time was probably 'Life before Man', illustrated by Zdenek Burian. It had been around at least since 1973.
• Speculative biology did not really exist as such. An early work such as Stümpke's 'Snouters' (1957) would remain unknown to you, unless someone book dealer would decide to distribute a new printing, so you could find out about it, by chance, by browsing a book store. I found one in 1983 (under its original German title of 'Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia'). I later wrote about them here, here and here.            

That's about it. There was no information at your fingertips. If you wished to learn something from an author, you wrote them a polite letter and hoped for the best. No internet, no Google, no computers (well, except for the Sinclair ZX-81 with a 1Kb memory). The lack of information back then would now feel like a near vacuum, and as a result even the most interested people could not possibly become as well-read as many people on the forums now are. It was in this vacuum that Dougal Dixon used his knowledge of evolution and zoology to come up with not just one odd animal, but a whole book full of them. He in fact largely defined speculative biology with 'After Man'. It was an extraordinarily creative production at the time of its first appearance, and that is the only time to judge originality and creativity. 

Future evolution from France: 'Demain, les animaux du futur' Review I

Click to enlarge; copyright Éditions Belin 2015  The bird at the top is a Necropteryx, a vulture descendant. The 'helmet' is found on males only, depends on hormones and signifies rank.

 

Books on speculative biology are rare, so the publication of a new one is an Event. The long-awaited 'Demain. Les animaux du futur' deserves a place of honour in that small library, right next to Dougal Dixon's 'Life after man'. It's very good!

Click to enlarge. Copyright Éditions Belin 2015. I like the clever use of a fake infrared night image. What you are looking at is a confrontation between a predator and a carrion eater, both large birds. 

The book was written and illustrated in a very close collaboration between Marc Boulay, a sculptor who became a ZBrush expert, and Sébastien Steyer, a palaeontologist. As they themselves describe in the book, the artist and the scientist bounced ideas back and forth to shape their creations. The book is published by Belin and is available from Amazon (for 23 Euros, so it's not expensive). Before you all rush off to order it right now, be aware that it is in French.

The book has its own website and there is lots of other information on Marc's site too. It counts over 150 pages and contains more illustrations than text, which is how it should be. Almost all illustrations were done with ZBrush; that is a 3D sculpting programme that has very quickly become a world leader when it comes to sculpting organic forms. Marc is an expert and former beta tester of ZBrush. I knew how good he was with ZBrush, and drew attention to his ability to produce photorealistic illustrations back in 2009. Still, I was a bit hesitant, as I think photorealistic computer generated images run a risk of becoming somewhat lifeless.

Click to enlarge. Copyright Éditions Belin 2015. The image of the head of a male parrot descendent, Tyrannornis rex, shows the level of detail in feathers, skin etc. 

I should not have worried, because Marc pulls it off. In fact, I now think that at this level of artistry photorealism really comes into its own. Paintings have the unique advantages of easily provoking the viewer into imagining a world, often through not showing every detail. Here, every tiny scale, feather, hairs, wrinkle or glint in an eye is visible, and that has an effect in a way opposite to what a painting can do, but just as good. Marc manages to make all those details add life to his creatures: they are actually there.

The book has four chapters: the oceans of the future, the endless mangrove, a new continent and a 'user guide of the future', which in part describes how they designed their creatures, what the design limitations were, etc. Each of the first three chapters has a main text in which unnamed human observers relate what they see in the world around them, so we read about interactions between animals, hunts and other behavioural aspects. The text at times jumps to another perspective providing insights of the reasoning behind a shape or form. I have not read every letter yet, but the authors provide information here and there of the underlying story. This is a world 10 million years in the future. The main players we are used to have disappeared, so there are no large mammals on land, and not even bony fish seemed to have made it through the extinction event. The chapter on the oceans coolly describes that acidification of the oceans might result in the extinction of many animals that make up plankton: this could start to happen in parts of the oceans as soon as 2030. The book does not make a big thing out of this, and the reader is left to fill in the gaps: in a way the book is about  the results of our own actions shaping future life on this planet, for ever altered. The authors chose a period of 10 million years to allow the ecosystems to swing back to stable states again, and also, pragmatically, because other authors had left this particular slot open.

So which animal groups quickly evolved to fill the gaps? There are some lovely and unexpected creations here, but the main players are squid, birds and bats. I expect that this is where people may become critical, either because it is not made clear why these groups survived, or perhaps because of a feeling that 'this has been done before'. As for the latter matter, well, yes, there is truth in that, but it would not be easy to come up with totally novel 'survivor' groups. Dougal Dixon had that luxury with 'After Man', but that was in 1981, because he was the first. Work on the present book started in 2000 as far as I can tell, and in those 15 years many people became interested in speculative biology. I think that that particular term was probably not even in use at the time. Marc and Sébastien do not seem to be worried about this.

Click to enlarge. Copyright Éditions Belin 2015. A big nocturnal terrestrial bat

In fact, when presenting a blood-sucking terrestrial bat (Nosferapoda kinskii), they directly compare it to Dixon's night stalker and the 'future predator' of the television series 'primeval'. By the way, both featured in one of my earlier posts on echolocation. Marc and Sébastien write that creating a terrestrial bat can be considered a classic of speculative biology, and add detail and reasoning to their version: they explain why their 'night vampire' bears most of its weight on its hind legs, so its gait resembles that of knuckle-walking apes. I like this approach of not ignoring earlier works of speculative biology but of accepting that theirs is not the only one. Dixon's work is mentioned more than once in the book, and I am proud to say that my work is acknowledged too: there is a quadrupedal 'giraffe bird' with the species name 'Giraffornis vandijki'. I am honoured!

Click to enlarge. Copyright Éditions Belin 2015. Giraffornis vandijki... I apologise for cutting off the image at the right, but that is where the book pages meet, and I will not ruin the book merely to get a better scan. The male is on top, and a female interacts with a young at the bottom. They are preyed on by Tyrannornis, I am sorry to say.     

I expect that most readers of this blog would want me to post as many as yet unpublished images of the animals in the book as I can cram in this post. I have included very few such images and will show a few more in a second post on this book, one or two weeks from now. But I will restrain myself, as that would spoil the joy of getting your own book. I had seen images on various websites before, but seeing the large number of fresh images formed a large part of the pleasure of reading the book. I hope that others will also restrain themselves, and that Belin finds an English language publisher quickly, so you can all find out for yourselves.

Back from Loncon3

'Loncon3', in case any readers missed my earlier post on the subject, is the name of the World Science Fiction convention that ended yesterday. Over 10,000 people bought tickets for one or more days, with over 6000 people attending at one day (Saturday, no doubt). I had only visited one 'WorldCon' before, in 1995 in Glasgow, but the atmosphere was as friendly as I remembered. I met Australian SF writers, painters, mathematicians, experts on mediaeval textiles and IT consultants making their own Star Trek episodes (Hi Anna!), just to give you an idea. My estimate is that the three sessions drew some 450 people, not bad for a convention with some 15 parallel sessions going on, apart from a well-equipped bar and many stalls with books and other items. The response was good, but it was also obvious that the science fiction crowd as a whole had hardly come into contact with speculative biology as a field: several people remarked that it was the first time that had heard the phrase. There is work to be done!    

There were three sessions devoted to speculative biology with five speakers. Darren Naish has already posted about the sessions on his Tetrapod Zoology blog, so I will be short here; for an account of the sessions and images of the speakers, visit his blog. It was very good to finally meet them in person; my contacts with Dougal Dixon go back to 1982, believe it or not, and with Memo to the early nineties, and still I had never seen one of them in person. We had to juggle a bit to make all five speakers fit in the first session, in part because we only learnt there and then that we had 15 minutes less than we thought, to clear the room for the next panel.

Click to enlarge; copyright Lewis Dartnell

Lewis Dartnell provided an enthusiastic introduction about astrobiology. He stressed the importance of plant life, something often glossed over in speculative biology: people go for animals only, forgetting the basis of the ecology. After a question from the audience he made a strong argument for the absence of other intelligent life in the universe. This idea is based on the 'Fermi paradox'. In short, this holds that there has been easily enough time for alien intelligences to seed the universe with civilisations, and we see and hear no sign of them: where are they? (here is a good website explaining the Fermi paradox). Perhaps there are 'filters' weeding out the evolution of technically capable lifeforms such as ourselves. It is possible that humanity has already passed the 'great filter' without realising it, which would mean the universe is now wide open to us. But if it is still ahead of us, somewhere in the future things will go very wrong indeed.

Slide by Darren to show part if the 'SpecBio' timeline; click to enlarge

Darren Naish then give a thorough review of the history of Speculative Biology (Zoology really) with many examples. He made an interesting comparison between, on the one hand, projects such as Furaha, Greenworld and Snaiad, and on the other hand speculation about 'missing links'. The first type might follow scientific rules but is essentially a fantasy, while the second concerns animals that must have existed in some form on Earth but whose details we do not know. Examples are protobirds, prototurtles etc. Darren argued that the two types of speculation are distinct and I agree: we are certain that animals of the second type once existed and are equally certain that those of the first type do not. I am not saying that there can be no complex life out there, but it won't be Furaha or Snaiad specifically.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Memo Kösemen showed, for the first time in public, images of how Snaiad came about (and no, I am not about to show any of these, so what you do get is a known image). He first sketched something and later retro-engineered the biology to explain the sketch. That is very familiar to me: many Furahan clades started in the same way: you find yourself doodling, and somehow a shape emerges on paper almost of its own accord. Only then does the logical part of the mind kick in and starts wondering 'what if...'. This is for instance how tetropters came about.

Anyway, Memo argued that the success of Snaiad was to a large extent due to his project being open to the public: as long as people followed the rules for a given clade, they could suggest animals of their own, and if Memo liked them enough those animals became part of the official Snaiadi canon. In that his procedure contrasts with the Furaha one; I never opened Furaha to such outside influences because I have so little time available for the project as it is, and would never have the time even to consider all suggestions with the attention they deserved. Of course, Memo now has an enormous number of species waiting to be drawn or painted...

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

As for Furaha, I showed some new animations as well as paintings never shown in public before. The ones above are landscapes in Vue, made to illustrate the point that planets are large and will have many biotopes: I never liked the idea of a 'desert planet' or a 'jungle planet'.  The animations, of cloakfish and tetropters in particular, will be shown here in due course.

Dougal showing a -rare!- manuscript of Greenworld and the Japanese published version; click to enlarge

Dougal Dixon discussed Greenworld, a project that is still waiting to be published in English (for a review of the Japanese version, see here and here). Both Furaha and Snaiad have humans on them, but the story is not primarily about them. In the Furaha they were introduced to provide human interest, in that the citizen-scientists of The Institute work together and quite often against one another to study life of on Furaha. The trick is to keep their number low though. The Greenworld story is to a much larger extent about the influence of humanity on a pristine world. Having lost much technical know-how, humans on Greenworld first live more or less together with the wildlife, but then their impact changes gradually, to resemble the one we are all familiar with, right here on Earth. No world seems big enough to house humanity as well as wildlife, neither the fictional Greenworld nor the real Earth. We do not now how these particular stories will end. Perhaps there is a link here with the 'great filter' of the Fermi paradox, that might be waiting for us in the future. Let's hope not.     

Speculative Biology at Loncon3; you know, Greenworld, Snaiad, Furaha, that kind of thing...

Well, I may not be back from being away in the sense that I will immediately take up churning out posts every two weeks again, but there is something I definitely would like to share with you.

Over half a year ago I thought that it was time to introduce Speculative Biology at this year's World Science Fiction Conference: 'Loncon3', held in London: Thursday to Monday August 2014. The original plan had to be modified quickly as the costs of flying people in from long distances was prohibitive. And then there were some other changes that meant that the program remained uncertain until a sort time ago; last night, to be precise!

But I can now officially tell you that Speculative Biology will definitely be there, in two sessions of 90 minutes each, On Thursday and Friday afternoon. The following five people will take part. The illustrations were largely taken from the folder I had sent to Loncon3.

Copyright Lewis Dartnell

Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiology research fellow at the University of Leicester where he studies the effects of cosmic radiation on the survival of Martian micro-organisms and persistence of biosignatures of their past existence. He is very active in science outreach and has published a popular science book on astrobiology; 'Life in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide'.
  Lewis has appeared on the Furaha blog in the past on several occasions: he wrote an article called 'Alien Safari' and even appeared in a video in another post on exoplanets.

Copyright Darren Naish ; that's him on the left...

Darren Naish is a paleontologist working on dinosaurs, but with a very wide range of interests. He is famous as the author of 'Tet Zoo', or 'Tetrapod Zoology', a Scientific American blog discussing animals, mostly, but with an occasional fictional one thrown in for good measure. Actually, he recently did discuss Speculative biology there. He and I both discussed the Brussels' 'future animal' exposition in our respective blogs (mine is here, with a link to his in the post).
   He is also one of the authors of 'All Yesterdays', a delightful book full of creative ideas on reconstructing animal; not just dinosaurs, but also today's animals, reconstructed by no doubt puzzled palaeontologists millions of years from now.

Copyright Dougal Dixon

Dougal Dixon needs no introduction here I think! His books basically created Speculative Biology. He will talk about Greenworld at Loncon3, an unknown project of his I introduced in my blog, first here, later here.
 

Copyright CM Kösemen

C.M. Kösemen is a name you might be less familiar with his alter ego Nemo Ramjet. Nemo's Snaiad is still one of the best known projects on 'exolife', even though his website has long sice disappeared into that void into which deleted websites go. Mind you, he did part of the illustrations of 'All Yesterdays' discussed above.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

 Gert van Dijk; well, that would be me, and I will bring lots of images and videos of Furaha with me to London.

I hope you like the programme; if you can, come and say hello! 







  

Dougal Dixon's Microplatia; part II

The previous post dealt with an unknown project by Dougal Dixon meant for the Science Museum, and today's post will deal with the rest of the project.

First, I must rectify something I wrote previously. The 'bones' of animals on Microplatia are very springy and tend to curve in one direction; they are curved the other way by muscles. On Earth, vertebrate and arthropod limbs with a joint with one direction of movement need muscles pulling the bone or segment one way and other muscles pulling the other way. On Microplatia here are just two elements: a bone curving one way and a muscle pulling it the other. The fact that such bones can bend poses interesting problems regarding their capacity to withstand compression, as you would not want to load a bent bone too much. Then again, quite

Anyway, I assumed that the tube slung under the fishing rods of the Walkingmouth would represent the muscle, but I was wrong. Dougal remarked:

"The 'muscle and spring' arrangement is not visible. The trunk-like organ below the 'fishing rod' is merely the gastric tract. All the musculature involved in casting out the 'fishing rod' is contained within the body of the beast. So the action involved is just like that of an angler casting his line. The 'muscle and spring' arrangement is better seen on the bubbles-on-stilts; I attach a sketch and the photo of the model (now alas lost to me)." 

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

Before we go on to 'bubbles-on-stilts' I will post the remaining sketches of the Walkingmouth. The one above shows some surface structures. I rather like the idea of a 'mother of pearl' type iridescence.  I have considered painting an animal with such a surface myself, but will need to study the visual appearance of mother of pearl in more detail before I can paint that in any believable manner. I wonder how the model makers charged with building model Walkingmouth for the Science Museum exhibition would have solved that problem. As far as I know there is no paint that gives that effect.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

Here is the next picture. It shows that the animal is equipped with three slug-like feet. This image is also the first to show the animal's eyes, placed on the front below the 'fishing rod/gastric tract' ensembles.  I will just call it a 'tackle' to save words.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

Moving on... literally, in a way, as this sketch shows how the tackle can move: it is interesting that the text says the bow is being 'cast'. I would expect it to be deployed slowly and deliberately, but the image of these five tackles flying out and being reeled in slowly is appealing and quite alien.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

Here is a mouth unit, of which the animal as a whole will have five. I think that the structures that look a bit like scimitars in their overall shape are examples of the 'bone/muscle assembly', with the bow forming one curved edge of the structure while the muscles fill the concave side. There seems to be a scraper on the underside of the mouth. I see four small 'limbs' near the mouth, two vertically and two horizontally, while further along there are two much larger limbs on each side. My guess is that four smaller ones are there to manipulate food into the mouth, and that the four large ones are the ones that actually walk the mouth over the ground. I wonder what types of food the Walkingmouth eats. If I am right in thinking that the lower 'jaw' is a scraper, its food might consist of animals secured to the substrate such as clams. Then again, plants need to be freed from the ground too. That's all I can show you of Walkingmouths.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

Another body plan resembles a Walkingmouth turned upside down: the bubbles-on-stilts. The sketch above shows a few; they remind me of Wells' Martian tripod walking engines because of their overall shape.   There are four here, which certainly helps to make their gait a lot easier to imagine than if there would have been three only. Then again, the order in which their legs move is probably the easiest thing to visualise as far as their legs are concerned. The nature of the 'curving bone plus muscle' arrangement is well visible here. Each walking legs apparently consists of a large proximal segment and a smaller distal segment curving the other way; we might as well call it a foot. The front view shows that the animals are quite narrow. That is not surprising at all; if you look closely at many large mammals, including elephants, you will find them to be quite narrow in relation to their other dimensions as well. The build of the legs must say something about the internal structure of the curving bones: their direction of bend depends on their own curvature and the muscles pulling on them, but they must be ery resistant to bending in other directions as I see no muscles controlling their curvatures in other directions than the front and aft one.

Click to enlarge; copyright Dougal Dixon

Finally, here is a photograph of a bubble-on-stilt model. It shows the translucent carapace covering the body quite well, as well as the structure of the legs. The reddish parts of the legs have considerable size in the fore-and aft dimension, no doubt to provide leverage for the muscles.         

It is a pity the model was lost, and a greater pity that the exhibition, perhaps with an accompanying book, was not realised. There are not many projects on Speculative Biology that actually make it to the stage of a book of a television programme, so each one counts. I would have liked to see more of Microplatia, and am visualising a mother-of-pearl Walkingmouth in crystal-clear sea water, gobbling up pearly clams. I wonder which kind of animal in turns feeds on Walkingmouths...
a few vertebrate bones are not held vertically when loaded, and I see no reason that such bones could not be bent. As always it will depend on the mass to be carried relative to gravity.

Echolocation: a sound choice?

In January I wrote a post on whether detecting heat could supplant vision, and concluded that it was, in fact, just a form of sight. I wished to tackle echolocation next, but wondered where to start: with echolocating animals in fictional biology? Other possible questions would be which atmosphere would be best, which frequencies to use, how it can be compared with vision, etc. In the end I decided to start -there's more!- with a post on the nature of echolocation; so here we go...

The basic principle is simple: you send out a sound and if an echo returns, there is something out there. As everyone knows, dolphins and bats are expert echolocators., but it is less well known that some blind people are quite good at it, and that they in fact use their occipital cortex to process echoes, a brain region normally busy with analysing visual signals. That direct link between vision and echolocation is perhaps not that surprising, as both senses help build a spatial representation of the world outside: what is where?

A major difference between vision and echolocation is how distances are judged. In vision, judging distances depends on complex image analysis, but in echolocation the time between emitting a sound and the arrival of the echo directly tells you how far an object is away. The big problem here is that echoes are much fainter than the emitted sound. The reason for that is the 'inverse square law', something that works for light as well as for sound.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The image above explains the principle. Sound waves emanate from a source near the man in the middle and spread as widening spheres (A, B and C). As the spheres get bigger, the intensity of the sound diminishes per 'unit area'. A 'unit area' can be a square meter, but can also be the size of your ear. When you are close to the source your ear corresponds to some specific part of the sphere, and when you move away your ear will correspond to a smaller part of the sphere: the sound will be less loud. Now, the area of the sphere increases with the square of the distance. If you double the distance from the source, the area of the sphere increases fourfold, and the part your ear catches will decrease fourfold. To continue; increase the distance threefold and the volume decreases ninefold. Move away ten times the original distance from the source, and the sound volume becomes 100 times smaller!
In the image above, only a tiny fraction of the original sound will hit the 'object', a man, at the left. Not all of that will bounce back, and the part that is reflected forms a new sound: the echo. The echo in tun decreases immensely before arriving at the sender, and that is the essence of echolocation: to hear a whisper you have to shout.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

As if the 'inverse square law' is not bad enough, there is another nasty characteristic of echolocation. At the left (A) you see a random predator using echolocation. Oh, all right, it's not random, but Dougal Dixon's 'nightstalker' (brilliant at the time!). It sends out sound waves (black circles) of which a tiny part will hit a suitable prey; there's that man again. As said, the echoes travel back while decreasing in strength (red circles).
There will be some distance at which a prey of this size can just be detected. Any further away and the returning echoes will be too faint to detect. Suppose that this is the case here, meaning 10m is the limit at which a nightstalker can detect a man (as mankind is extinct in the nightstalker's universe no-one will be hurt).
Here's the catch: most of the sound emitted by the nightstalker travels on beyond the prey. These sound waves can be picked up easily by other animals further away than 10 meters (I assume you recognise the creature listening there; it's pretty frightening). For animals out there the sound only has to travel in one direction and none of it gets lost in bouncing back from the prey. The unfortunate consequence of all this 'shouting to hear a whisper' is that the nightstalker is announcing its presence loudly to animals that it cannot detect itself!
This suggests that echolocation could be a dangerous luxury. One way to use it safely would be if other predators cannot get to you anyway. Is that why bats, up there in the air, can afford echolocation? Another solution would be to be big and bad, so you can afford to be noisy? If so, echolocation is not a suitable tool to find a yummy carrot if you are an inoffensive rabbit-analogue. The carrot does not care, but the wolf-analogue will.

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Getting back on topic, we now know that echolocation tells you how far away an object is. To make sense of the world you will also need to know where the object spatially: left and right and up and down. With hearing this is more difficult than with vision, but it can be done. The spatial resolution of bats is one or two degrees (see here for that), which is impressive but still 60 to 120 times less good than human vision. For now, let's take it for granted that an echolocating animal can locate echo sources. Next, let's try to visualise what it may be like.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is a scene with a variety of objects on a featureless plain. The objects have transparency, colours, shadows, etc. At one glance we see them all, as well as the horizon, the clouds, etc., without restrictions regarding distance, all in high resolution. The glory of vision, for all to see.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Colour is purely visual, so to mimic echolocation it has to go. All the objects are now just white. They are also all featureless, but that is for simplicity's sake only: vision and echolocation can both carry information about things like wrinkles and bumps, so I left texture out.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

In sight the main source of light is the sun shining from above, but in echolocation you have to provide your own energy. To mimic that, the only light source left is at the camera. The resulting image looks like that of a flash photograph, for good reasons: the light follows the inverse square law, as does sound. Nearby objects reflect a lot of light (sound!) for two reasons: they are close by, and part of their surfaces face the camera squarely, turning light directly back at the camera. This is an 'intensity image'.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

However, you can see nearby and far objects at the same time, but that is not true for sound. Sound travels in air at about 333 m/s, so sound takes about 3 ms to travel one meter. An object one meter away will produce an echo in 6 ms: 3 ms going to the object and 3 ms travelling back. The image above shows the same scene, but now the grey levels indicate the distance from the camera. Light areas in the image are close by, dark areas are further away. This is a 'depth image', formed courtesy of the ray tracing algorithms in Vue Infinite.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

Now the scene is set to mimic echolocation. Let's send out an imaginary 'ping'; each interval in time determines how far away an echo-producing object is. For instance, the interval from 6 to 12 ms after the 'ping' corresponds to objects 1 to 2 meters away. While the depth image tells us how far away objects are, the intensity image tells us how much of an echo is produced there. To make things easier for the human eye a visual clue was added: echoes returning early are shown in red, while those returning later are blue. Above is a video showing three successive 'pings'. As the echoes bounce back, areas close by will light up in red, and objects furet away will produce an echo in blue, later on. I blurred the images a bit to mimic the relatively poor spatial resolution of echolocation.
I personally found it difficult to reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the world using such images, but my visual system is not used to getting its cues in such fashion.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

One easy processing trick to improve the image is to remember the location of early echoes. The video above does that, by adding new echoes without erasing the old ones. The image is wiped as a new ping starts. More advanced neuronal analyses could take care of additional clues such as the Doppler effect, to read your own or an object's movement. By the way, the above is in slow-motion. In real life echoes from an object 10 m away would only take 60 msec to get back. Even without any overlap you could afford 16 pings a second for that range. That is not bad: after all, 20-25 frames a second is enough to trick our visual system into thinking that there is continuous movement.

So there we are. Is this simple metaphor a valid indication of what echolocation is like? Probably not, but it does point out a few basic characteristics of echolocation. Echolocation must be a claustrophobic: no clouds, no horizon, just your immediate surroundings. It would seem the meek cannot afford it, as it may be the most abrasive and abusive of senses.
Is it therefore completely inferior to vision? Well, yes and no...

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a... flying squid!?

A year ago images of flying squid were in the news, including two short papers in Scientific American (here and here). Somehow I missed them at the time. Perhaps they are old news to readers of this blog, but I thought they were still very interesting. After all, cephalopods (octopus, squid and the like) attract attention from just about everyone with an interest in speculative evolution. I think Dougal Dixon was the first to have them venture out on land, a concept followed so often that it has become a cliché (but which does not mean that it was not a great idea at the time). I criticised the concept of 'walking with tentacles' in a series of blog entries later, reasoning that tentacles are so poorly designed to withstand compressive forces that evolution would turn them into limbs (here are the first, second, third and fourth posts on the subject). By the way, cephalopods with jointed legs would, for me, be much more interesting than ones painfully plodding about on tentacles. Unfortunately, their renal system is probably a much larger hindrance from them leaving the water than having tentacles; but I digress.

Cephalopods have jet propulsion, also a rather interesting feature to have aboard, and one that also crops up regularly in discussions on alien animal design. Some went so far as to equip animals with fuel-burning jets, something belonging in the needs-a-lot-of-faith category.

So now it turns out that some squids can leave the water, much as flying fish do, and probably for the same reason: to escape predators. And they use jet propulsion to do so. I wonder how people would react if squid did not exist and I would invent an animal with a double set of propulsion organs, fins as well as a jet: "What, two means of propulsion? That is improbable and inefficient!" Have that followed by the remark that they can also use their fins as wings and fold up their grasping organs to have a second pair of wings: "He's lost it this time!". Facts are often stranger than fiction, and flying squid are a prime example.

Internet searches revealed more pages and photographs of flying squid,including the following two ones. I checked two books on cephalopods I already had, and one book mentioned that the family Ommastrephidae is in fact known as 'flying squids'. The other book specifically mentioned that the fins are 'not especially well modified for gliding'. It seemed I had missed all of that.


This is a large image found here; The blogger program would not let me import all of it, so I had to cut off portions not showing squid. Even so, you may have to zoom in to see them properly. Some squid trail a stream of water behind them, that appears to be breaking up into drops in some cases. The text mentions that these images were taken as a series of rapidly taken images, and that this time series allows calculation of how fast the squid moved. That is obviously true, but unfortunately the results of those calculations were not stated, which is frustrating.

Click to enlarge; from: Bartol et al, Integr. Comp. Biol. (2008) 48 (6): 720-733

Squid squeeze a jet of water out of a tube, the 'siphon'. The image above nicely shows that the siphon can be turned around allowing the squid to move in either direction. The fins at the end of the body are a normal part of squid anatomy. Squid use both their fins and their jets to move around. The principle of jet propulsion has to do with actions and opposite reactions: pushing away a mass with a certain force results in you undergoing an equal force in the opposite reaction. The force gets bigger the more mass is pushed away and the faster it is propelled. In jet engines air streams in to the engine and out of it continuously, but in squid the propulsion is 'pulsatile'. The water is held in the mantle cavity, surrounded by muscles; when these contract water is forced out. Afterwards the muscles relax, the cavity expands and sucks in water for the next cycle. On the whole squid jet propulsion is nowhere near as efficient as swimming with a tail is, as fish do. Recent calculations suggest it is not as inefficient as formerly thought, but squid still do well do use their fins as well as their jet propulsion system. In fact, they may be better off for having two propulsion systems. I found some interesting material on that subject in a free scientific paper on the subject (from which I took the diagram above as well).

Click to enlarge

This image, found here, shows one flying squid in close up. The animal is flying towards the left. The image suggests that the fins are held in a V-shape, with the tips directed upwards. Holding wings like that is a design trick to prevent rolling about the body axis: when the animal rolls to one side, the wing on that side becomes more horizontal, so it will generates more lift. The other wing becomes more vertical and generates less left. The two effects counteracts the roll and help stabilise the body. At the other end of the animal the tentacles are held in a symmetrical way in a horizontal plane, and there appears to be a membrane between at least some tentacles. This position can only mean that the tentacles act as another wing. I cannot see on the large image whether the tentacle-wings are held in a V-position as well. The close-up seems to suggest they are not. So the 'flight plan' of the flying squid consist of two pairs of wings positioned far apart, with a long body between them. Now where have I seen that before?

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Actually, only here, as far as I know. The Furahan Seasoar can be found on my website. I developed it consciously in an effort to see what could be done with a four-winged body plan. I reasoned that placing the wings far apart would place relatively much mass at the ends of the animal, making it more difficult to rotate to the left and right. The design would be stable, though, good for long and energy-efficient flights. In fact, I made a paper version once that flew quite well (which gives me an interesting idea for a future post...). The front pair of wings are held in a V-shape, but the hind pair are not. In truth, I did that only because it looked good, and I never stopped to think why one pair should be held in a V-shape and the other not. That arrangement looks a lot like that of the flying squid. Perhaps it does serve a purpose besides looking good.

The large image shows trails of water behind the squid. Does that mean that the squid are actually using jet propulsion to power their flight? Yes and no. Maybe. On the one hand it is certain that the jet allowed them to accelerate enough to leave the water, where resistance against movement is very large. That same force should have a stronger propulsive effect in air, which offers much less resistance to movement than water. On the other hand, weight is not a big problem in water, but it is in the air. Any water carried into the air to serve as 'ejection mass' for jet propulsion increases the mass of the animal and will therefore impair the squid's flying ability considerably. The good part of that is that the water is squeezed out, so the mass of the squid plus its store of water decreases quickly. As the store of water is depleted the squid gets an extra boost, which helps to propel it. There must be a complex optimum in there somewhere, in which the mass of stored water, the force of propulsion and the moment the squid leaves the water are all factors that, when balanced subtly, result in the best soaring ability. But such thoughts count in the long run of evolution. For an individual squid with a predator on its heels (so to speak), getting out of the water NOW regardless of any optimisation might be the wiser choice.