The New Dinosaurs is Dixon's second work on speculative evolution, following After Man (1981), which explored the animals of a hypothetical world 50 million years in the future where humanity had gone extinct. After Man used a fictional setting and hypothetical animals to explain the natural processes behind evolution whilst The New Dinosaurs uses its own fictional setting and hypothetical wildlife to explain the concept of zoogeography and biogeographic realms. It was followed by another speculative evolution work by Dixon in 1990, Man After Man, which focused on climate change over the next few million years through the eyes of future human species genetically engineered to adapt to it.[2]