as the "tromble" with legs almost like tree trunks, roam the land. In terms of predators, the coelurosaurs dominate in terms of number and diversity, often having unique adaptations. For instance, the apex predator of the South American pampas, the coelurosaurian "cutlasstooth", has evolved huge, cutting teeth to allow it to prey upon large sauropods. The pampas is also home to the last of the tyrannosaurids, the large scavenging "gourmand". There are also various dromaeosaurids, including the "jinx", adapted to mimic larger herbivorous dinosaurs through scent and appearance. The world's oceans are home to various pterosaurs, such as seagull-like and penguin-like forms. There is also the "whulk", a massive whale-like pliosaur that feeds exclusively on plankton. The "kraken", an enormous ammonite, uses specialized tentacles to entangle and sting anything that comes near it. Development Following the success of his previous speculative evolution book After Man in 1981, Dixon realized that there was a market for popular-level books which use fictional examples and settings to explain actual factual scientific processes. After Man had explained the process of evolution by creating a complex hypothetical future ecosystem, The New Dinosaurs was instead aimed at creating a book on zoogeography, a subject the general public was quite unfamiliar with, by using a fictional world in which the non-avian dinosaurs had not gone extinct to explain the process. Dixon envisioned dinosaurs as undergoing more change during the last 65 million years than they had during their previous 130 million years of existence due both more dramatic changes in climate and the continents being further separated during the Cenozoic than they were in the Mesozoic. The dinosaurs and other animals in The New Dinosaurs were heavily influenced by the paleontology of its time. The ideas of the Dinosaur Renaissance – replacing the older ideas of dinosaurs as dumb and slow creatures with active, agile and bird-like animals – are heavily used in the book. Dixon extrapolated on the ideas of paleontologists such as Robert Bakker and Gregory S. Paul when creating his creatures and also used patterns seen in the actual evolutionary history of the dinosaurs and pushing them to an extreme, such as with the creation of the "gourmand", an armless and massive scavenger descended from the tyrannosaurids. The animals in The New Dinosaurs can be more or less divided into animals that have convergently evolved to resemble real modern animals (for instance animals reminiscent