Dougal Dixon

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Dougal Dixon
Dougal Dixon with a model of one of his creatures
Dougal Dixon in 2009 with a model of a "Strida", one of the creatures featured in his 2010 book Greenworld
Born (1947-05-09) 9 May 1947 (age 74)
Dumfries, Scotland
NationalityScottish
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom
Known forAfter Man
Foundation of the speculative evolution movement
Palaeontology and geology books
Spouse(s)Jean Dixon (m. 1971)
ChildrenGavin (b. 1975)
Lindsay (b. 1980)
AwardsSee text
Scientific career
FieldsGeology
Palaeontology
Websitewww.dougal-dixon.co.uk

Dougal Dixon (born 9 May 1947) is a Scottish geologist, palaeontologist, educator and author. Dixon has written well over a hundred books on geology and palaeontology, many of them for children, which have been credited with attracting many to the study of the prehistoric animals. Because of his work as a prolific science writer, he has also served as a consultant on dinosaur programmes.

Dixon graduated from the University of St. Andrews with a Master of Science in 1970 and has since then worked in a variety of occupations, including as a geological consultant, tutor and teacher, a practical geologist on geological expeditions and as a civilian instructor for the Air Training Corps, a British volunteer-military youth organisation. At present, he lives in Wareham, Dorset, where he works as a full-time author and book editor and also manages a local movie theatre.

Dixon is most famous for his 1980/90s trilogy of speculative evolution books: After Man (1981), The New Dinosaurs (1988) and Man After Man (1990). These books use imagined future and alternate animals to explain various natural processes, including evolution, natural selection, zoogeography and climate change. Through these books, Dixon is often recognised as the founder of the modern speculative evolution movement, an artistic and scientific movement focused on speculative paths in the evolution of life. Dixon has created further speculative evolution works since the publication of his trilogy, notably the book Greenworld (2010), and has also served as a consultant and contributor to other projects, such as the 2002 miniseries The Future is Wild and the 2020 miniseries Alien Worlds.

Biography[]

The in Wareham, Dorset, which is managed by Dixon

Dixon was born in Dumfries on 9 May 1947 to parents Thomas Bell and Margaret Dixon.[1] He spent most of his younger years in the Scottish borderlands.[2] Dixon credits the beginning of his writing career as being spawned from his love of creating stories, usually in the form of comic strips, as a child.[1] He has had a special interest in evolution and fossils since his youth.[2] In 1970, Dixon graduated from the University of St. Andrews with a Bachelor of Science and in 1972, he graduated with a Master of Science,[2] having studied geology and palaeontology.[3] Dixon's research thesis focused on palaeogeography.[2]

Dixon's first experiences with publishing came when he worked as the in-house geological consultant for the publishing company Mitchell/Beazley Ltd. in London from 1973 to 1978. From 1978 to 1980 he worked as a book editor for Blandford Press in Dorset, England and from 1980 onwards he has worked as a freelance editor and writer.[2] From 1976 to 1978 Dixon also worked as a part-time tutor, teaching geology and palaeontology, at the Open University. He also did teaching work from 1993 to 2005, sponsored by the publishing company Boyds Mills Press as a visiting lecturer at elementary schools in the United States, giving presentations about dinosaurs.[2] Dixon was a member of the board of governors of the in Wareham, Dorset from 1985 to 1987, and also a chairman of the Parent-Teachers Association at the , also located in Wareham, from 1985 to 1989.[2]

Dixon has also done various other types of work. From 1981 to 1990, he worked as a civilian instructor for the Air Training Corps, a British volunteer-military youth organisation.[2] He has also worked as a practical geologist. In 1995, he partook in an Open University/Earthwatch expedition to , Iceland, and in 1987, Dixon was one of the excavators at a Jurassic-aged dinosaur-rich fossil site in Durlston, Dorset. Dixon was also involved in excavations of stegosaurian fossils in Montana from 2004 to 2008.[2] Dixon is a science fiction enthusiast and has attended several conventions, often speaking about the veracity, in terms of evolution and ecology, of alien creatures in science fiction.[2]

On 3 April 1971 he married his wife, Jean Mary Young.[1] They live together in Wareham and have two children: Gavin (born 1975) and Lindsay (born 1980), as well as three grandchildren.[2] In Wareham, Dixon is also the director, operations manager and chief projectionist of the local movie theatre, the , and he has created claymation stop-motion advertisements for local businesses, as well as animated short films, that screen before the feature films.[2][4][5]

Writing career[]

Dougal Dixon at TetZooCon, London, 2019

Dixon works as a full-time author and book editor.[2] Dixon has written well over a hundred books,[1][6][a] many of them are encyclopaedias or children's books concerning palaeontology or geology.[2] He is most known for his more novel concepts, his most famous and notable works being the speculative evolution books After Man (1981), The New Dinosaurs (1988) and Man After Man (1990), as well as the book Time Exposure (1984; also known under the name The Age of Dinosaurs), wherein Dixon collaborated with the wildlife photographer Jane Burton to portray extinct animals in life-like photographs.[2][8]

Through writing books on the subject on several different levels, reviewers have credited him with attracting many to the study of dinosaurs and many of his books have been praised by critics.[1] Recognised as an authority on dinosaurs,[6] Dixon has worked as a consultant and animator on dinosaur programmes,[2][9] and he has hosted a Japanese programme on Evolution, during which he travelled across the world, visiting, among other locations, the Galápagos Islands and the Serengeti.[2]

Speculative evolution[]

Dixon is by far best known for his illlustrated works of speculative fiction, which contain elaborate visions of plausible future, alternate and extraterrestrial ecosystems.[3] As a child, Dixon was inspired by H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, particularly the far future creatures featured in the book, to create his own imaginary future animals descended from creatures of the modern day. In the 1960s, Dixon was influenced by the contemporary conservationist movements, especially a campaign to save the tigers. Dixon began to ponder that should the tiger and other endangered animals go extinct, something would inevitably take their place. After seeing a "Save the Whale" badge on a friend in the late 1970s, the idea materialised again.[3] The result was After Man, published in 1981, which explored an imagined Earth 50 million years in the future, featuring complete ecosystems populated by future descendants of modern day animals. The book used these imagined animals to explain various natural processes, most prominently evolution and natural selection.[3]

Reviews for After Man were highly positive, which allowed Dixon to go on publicity tours throughout Britain and the United States.[3] The success of the book inspired Dixon to work on further books that used fictional examples to explain real natural processes. His second such work, The New Dinosaurs (1988), explained the concept of zoogeography using a fictional world in which the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event never happened and his third, Man After Man (1990), explained climate change through the eyes of future human descendants that had been genetically engineered to cope with it.[3]

Through these three books, sometimes dubbed the 'After trilogy',[3] Dixon is generally considered to be the founder of the modern speculative evolution movement, an artistic and scientific movement focused on speculative paths in the evolution of life. The fact that Dixon created entire fictional worlds, which were then made easily accessible through books with color illustrations printed by mainstream publishing companies had a large impact and his ideas have increasingly been repurposed or used as inspirations for numerous similar projects, both in print and on the internet.[10] The popular trilogy of books spawned several adaptations; After Man was adapted as both a stop-motion documentary and an animated film in Japan,[11] as well as an exhibition with "life-size" models of the animals in the book which toured England, Japan and the United States from 1983 to 1987.[1][12] The New Dinosaurs was adapted into a Japanese manga series in 2008.[1]

Since the publication of Man After Man in 1990, Dixon has been involved in numerous other projects relating to speculative evolution.[3] In 1996, Dixon served as the designer for the creatures of the IMAX film Krakken: Adventure of Future Ocean, a Japanese film featuring imagined future ocean creatures.[13] In 1998, Dixon was one of the scientists featured on the Discovery Channel/BBC programme Natural History of an Alien, where several hypothesised alien ecosystems were explored. Dixon's imagined world, "Greenworld", was later utilised in another book project. His fourth personal speculative evolution book project, Greenworld, featured a complete alien world which is later pillaged and polluted by humanity. So far, Greenworld has only been published in Japan, where it was published in two volumes in 2010.[3] In 2002, Dixon was brought in as a consultant and creature designer for the series The Future is Wild, which explored various imagined future time periods on Earth and what animals might evolve, directly inspired by After Man. Dixon also co-authored the companion book of the series together with its producer, .[3] Dixon also contributed to the 2020 Netflix series Alien Worlds, which conceptualised possible extraterrestrial ecosystems.[14]

Awards and nominations[]

  • 1982 – Hugo Award nomination, for After Man.[1]
  • 1991 – Rhone Poulenc Science Book Prize nomination, for The Big Book of Prehistoric Life.[1]
  • 1993 – Helen Roney Sattler Award, for Dougal Dixon's Dinosaurs.[1][2]
  • 1993 – Distinguished Achievement Award for Excellence in Educational Journalism, for Dougal Dixon's Dinosaurs.[1][2] Granted by the Educational Press Association of America.[2][9]
  • 1994 – Outstanding Science Trade Book Award, for Dougal Dixon's Dinosaurs.[1][2] Granted by the Children's Book Council.[2][9]
  • 1996 – Times Euducational Supplement Primary Schoolbook Award, for Discovery Dinosaurs.[1][2][9]
  • 2019 – Children's Choice Award, for When the Whales Walked.[2] Granted by the School Library Association.[2]

Notes[]

  1. ^ As of 2021, Dixon's own website lists 180 published titles.[7]

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Dixon, Dougal 1947– | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 16 August 2019.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y "Biography". Dougal Dixon. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j Naish, Darren. "Of After Man, The New Dinosaurs and Greenworld: an interview with Dougal Dixon". Retrieved 16 June 2015.
  4. ^ "The Rex Cinema - Rex History". www.therex.co.uk. Retrieved 14 November 2019.
  5. ^ "The Rex Cinema | Wareham, Dorset". England's Coast. Retrieved 22 October 2019.
  6. ^ Jump up to: a b "Dougal Dixon Books". www.hachette.com.au. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  7. ^ "List of publications". Dougal Dixon. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  8. ^ "Dougal Dixon". Simon & Schuster. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  9. ^ Jump up to: a b c d "Dougal Dixon". US Macmillan. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  10. ^ Naish, Darren (2018). "Speculative Zoology, a Discussion". Scientific American Blog Network. Retrieved 16 August 2019.
  11. ^ "The Dougal Dixon After Man Event of September 2018". Tetrapod Zoology Podcast. Retrieved 23 September 2018.
  12. ^ Accola, John (1987). "Animal Life of the Future - After Homo Sapiens". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved 15 August 2019.
  13. ^ "Krakken". Dougal Dixon. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  14. ^ "Dougal Dixon". Center for Book Arts. Retrieved 13 July 2021.

External links[]

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