Speculative evolution

Speculative evolution, also called speculative biology and speculative zoology, is a genre of speculative fiction and an artistic movement, focused on hypothetical scenarios in the evolution of life. Works incorporating speculative evolution may have entirely conceptual species that evolve on a planet other than Earth, or they may be an alternate history focused on an alternate evolution of terrestrial life. With a strong connection to and basis in science, particularly biology, speculative evolution is often considered hard science fiction. Speculative biology and creature concepts are also a prevalent subject in concept art.

With the main topic of speculative evolution being evolutionary biology, it shares with many science fiction subgenres a focus on scientific plausibility.

Although vertebrate paleontologist Darren Naish concedes that speculative evolution is full of "possibilities, crazy ideas, speculations, and things you wish you knew but never will", he suggests that "some of our speculations about animal evolution involve possibly useful and informative guesses and hypotheses... and some of these speculations are designed with real-world adaptations, processes and diversity in mind."

Speculative evolution, with its relation to hard science fiction, builds on our knowledge of the real world and uses evolutionary principles to possibly develop a genuine hypothesis about the future. In some cases, speculative evolution artists have conceived of the existence of a creature before it was discovered by paleontologists. An imaginary filter-feeding 'Ceticaris', conceived by artist John Meszaros, was published in All Yesterdays before the discovery of the first filter-feeding anomalocarid, Tamisiocaris—which was subsequently included in the clade Cetiocaridae. In addition, some of Dougal Dixon's speculative dinosaurs have predicted the paleobiologies of actual dinosaurs.

The books All Yesterdays (2012) and All Your Yesterdays (2013) presented hypothetical forms of existing prehistoric creatures, applying speculative principles to paleoart in a manner similar to speculative zoologist Dougal Dixon.

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