YMMV / After Man: A Zoology of the Future

• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Night Stalker is no doubt the most famous creature in the book, thanks to its unique and scary design. This is a probable contributing factor to it being one of the only two animals which had a redesign in the 2015 reprint (the other being the one on the original cover, the reedstilt).
• First Installment Wins: Out of Dixon's speculative evolution trilogy, After Man is still the most successful and fondly remembered of the books. It's got the most emblematic creatures, served as the basis of The Future is Wild, enjoys a particularly strong following in Japan and has overall become fairly iconic. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution, while still successful, didn't achieve the same degree of praise as this book, but it did get a Japanese manga. Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future, on the other hand, isn't as liked for its drastic change in narrative and its exceedingly horrifying imagery. It still does have its fans, though and has spawned several internet memes.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Just like The Future is Wild, Japan loves it. A Japanese After Man museum exhibit even gave an exclusive extra creature, a gorilla-like descendant of the Japanese macaque. They also made a documentary using stop-motion and animatronics to bring the various creatures to life.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Some of the hypothetical future animals are no longer plausible because of their modern day ancestors being now endangered, like the clatta (a future descendant of lorises, which are, however, likely to go extinct in a few decades).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The broadbeak is a large predatory bird that evolved from starlings, much like Staraptor twenty years later.
  • The Bardelot shares its name with a brand of champagne.
  • The Truteal also shares its name with a staffing and recruiting company in Phoenix, Arizona.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Night Stalker qualifies, with its Eyeless Face, More Teeth than the Osmond Family, Creepy Long Fingers and bizarre anatomy (walking on its wings while using its hind legs as hands).
  • The predator primates, the Horranes and the Raboons. First off their primate facial features gives them an oddly human-like appearance, secondly the way they're shown in the Japanese Adaptation, with the Horranes behavior being straight up like that of a stereotypical Dromaeosaurus and the Raboon being an ominous mix of Gorilla,T-Rex and Lion. Special mention goes to the creepy music that plays when the Raboon first appears.
  • How about that puppet show they made in Japan?
• Older Than They Think: While this book helped to impulse Speculative Biology as a whole, the very first work of Speculative Evolution on animals is likely The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, a 1957 book written by German zoologist Gerolf Steiner dealing with the Rhinogradentia, a fictitious order of mammals created by Steiner himself.
• Once Original, Now Common: This was the book that practically pioneered the Speculative Biology genre. Thanks to a mixture of many projects on the internet with a similar premise and Science Marches On, the book doesn't stand out as much.

---