Archipelago: Speculative Futures (Spanish and English) is an augmented reality illustrated book imagining what the evolution of animals and the environment will be in the future resulting from climate change. What are the dramatic changes we are doing to our climate, and how will it affect the evolutionary changes of the planet? This project is inspired by the ground breaking speculative evolution book, “After Man” by Dougal Dixon. Like Dixon’s work, we are using real biological principles and are exploring real life processes, such as evolution and climate change, through the use of fictional results. By extrapolating past trends into the future, we can predict the most likely scenarios of how certain organisms and lineages could respond to ecological changes. The team spent time on the Galapagos Island and Iceland researching and designing the book. ISBN: 978-1-892494-81-8
In 1859, a brilliant scientist put into words, The Origin of Species, a concept that took decades, even centuries, to gestate in human science: the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin, adventurer and naturalist, had embarked years prior into the open seas, following in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt, to explore the natural world firsthand and try to explain it. As a crew member of the British Royal Naval ship, HMS Beagle, he arrived at the most wonderful islands in the world, the Galápagos archipelago. Through his observations, he would later synthesize the different ideas conceived by earlier naturalists into one miraculous conclusion — a force called evolution dictated the course of a species over time, where the fittest and most adaptable would survive and the unfit would be selected against.
What did the Galápagos show Darwin that was so transcendental? There is something very special about the Galápagos, and in general — all islands, which are harder to observe in continents or larger land masses. When you have an isolated piece of land where there are not many other animals to compete for resources — a species can thrive, diversify, and evolve in very unusual ways. For example, Darwin’s finches, which derived from a common ancestor, evolved new beak forms responding to different food sources from island to island. The finches eventually diversified into many new species. Another great example is the birds of paradise in Oceania, whose ancestor was a corvid, which flew from the north to the islands. The original corvid bird settled, and evolved into many colorful and cheerful species — each with its own behavior, plumage, and mating rituals.
Inspired by Charles Darwin’s voyage, our team visited two different volcanic islands located on opposite sides of the world to observe and study the indigenous animals and the landscapes that shaped them. In the summer of 2023, we flew to Ecuador and then took a boat to the Galápagos Archipelago, and settled on San Cristobal Island, and later tiny La Española. We visited most of the islands by land, boat and underwater snorkeling. During our travels, we saw Darwin’s infamous finches, the beautiful albatrosses at the beginning of their mating season, some very ornate moths yet to be classified, and the Española mockingbird that flew onto my head in search of water.
Many of the animals adapted to human tourism and activity, a sign of behavioral evolution. While snorkeling, the sea lions were very comfortable swimming with us, and lounging in the sun near the port. Besides human interaction, there were many other factors pushing these Galápagos species towards their evolutionary paths. The acidification of the ocean, the rise in global temperatures, and the loss of sea currents are having detrimental effects on sea animals’ populations and interrupting their migration cycles. Dependence on human contact has made the Española mockingbirds reliant on people for drinkable water. While other animals are losing their evolutionary advantages resulting from cruise engine’s pollution, light and sound contamination, and other human by-products. Evolution is multidimensional; it is never just one thing that brings a species into existence or leads to their extinction. Multiple factors in their environment and their interactions with them determine success or failure. I imagine that is why it is such a hard concept to grasp, and difficult to observe. Using the Española mockingbirds again; the aid that humans provided to them by giving them water might help them in the short term, but what happens to the birds when humans go away for whatever reason? Would Española mockingbirds be so reliant on human care that they could not fetch water on their own and face endangerment? That is the reason human-made climate change is shaping the world so definitively.
Just in the Galápagos, research and scientific centers track how the huge cruise ships are polluting the ocean with thousands of gallons of chlorine daily. The amount of water that unethical tourism in the Galápagos wastes every day is leaving the local population and ecosystems in shortage. The use of plastics, animal trafficking, and rising temperatures are pushing many species to the limits of their capacities, and similar results are happening worldwide.
In spring 2024, we flew to Iceland — a very strange place for two Colombians. The country’s glaciers, cryptic mountains, and animals (mostly birds) revealed to us the missing part of our story. We witnessed with our own eyes the extent of the melting and receding glaciers once reaching the horizon, but now only a fraction of their true self. In Iceland, there is not as much biodiversity as on other islands. In fact, Iceland is less biodiverse than mainlands since the country is at the tip of the Arctic Circle. Framed by a volcanic landscape, we saw a few alpine conifers and shorter trees that cannot grow well at this latitude. Seldom did we see many animals except the domesticated Icelandic horses, sprinkling of bumblebees that pollinate a small range of flowers, Arctic birds like rock ptarmigans, Arctic seals, and the lovely puffins that charmed our hearts. These fabulous plants and animals are suitably adapted to life at the extreme, surviving through some of the coldest winters on Earth with no sun for up to three months and heavy snowfall. Most of the land animals display their beautiful white coats to match the eternal winter. What would they do if the snow disappears due to rising temperatures?
As we flew back south to the United Kingdom, we visited the father of speculative evolution, Dougal Dixon, in Wareham, England. His groundbreaking illustrated book, After Man: A Zoology of the Future, which was published in 1981 — remains relevant today and kicked off the genre of speculative evolution. At his house we discussed how he came up with the idea of his book and made scientific divulgation all across the world. We also strolled on the beaches known as the Jurassic Coast where fossils decorate the ground — reminding us of all those animals whose evolution came to an end and are no more. His encouragement inspired us to create our own version of future animals. Looking out on the beautiful English seascape, we wondered about the fate of all animals affected by climate change and the Anthropocene mass extinction caused by excessive human activity.
As in the Galápagos and in Iceland, some animals are adapting while others are disappearing. The Arctic bumblebee, which is unique to that region, is declining and being pushed away by the European bumblebee, which is taking over its habitat. Situations like these are happening worldwide, and it all points to the conclusion that we are currently experiencing the sixth major mass extinction on Earth. An enormous quantity of life is unable to adapt creating an evolutionary bottleneck, where only a few species manage to cross to the threshold. Previous extinction events have lost 90% of biodiversity caused by geological factors, such as the meteor colliding with the Earth and wiping out most of the large dinosaurs and many other species.
What we are experiencing today is a threat to life on our planet caused by human activities. Pollution of every habitat possible, destruction of ecosystems, acidification of the oceans, and the rise in temperature caused by our emissions are having a catastrophic impact on species everywhere. We are currently pushing the limits of life and therefore evolution to an unfortunate consequence.
If we are going through the Anthropocene mass extinction, then we imagined the future without humans. A planet that has healed from our destruction; thriving with life forms that are strange to us, and animals and plants we have never seen in our time. We might ask ourselves why do we have the animals that exist today? Why have so many other incredible animals of the past disappeared?
These kinds of questions are very important for scientific thinking and analysis. By pondering complicated topics and learning from them, scientists like Darwin imagined brilliant explanations and solutions for the mysteries of the world. Another important tool for Darwin was critical thinking, which challenges previous and incomplete scientific ideas and hypotheses. A good scientist rigorously tests beliefs and if they are wrong replaces them with their own theories or verifiable facts.
This was the work that our team undertook to present the wonderful animals you can appreciate throughout the book. Our future animals are based on animals that exist now, but imagined what they would evolve to as a result of climate change. Ironically, the animals that adapt most successfully to humanity’s destruction are usually considered an inconvenience by humans. We accuse cockroaches, pigeons, and rats of ‘infesting’ our urban environments, but the simple purpose of their lives is precisely the same as ours — to survive. When these pests find an environment to thrive in, they simply do so, regardless of whether it is shared with us. Which raises a question: how does our urban environments actually infest the natural world?
We speculated how the world will change according to what we know now. The continental drift is a powerful force, and it will change our current map in as little as fifty-million years into the future. We investigated the past to take a look into the future. The history of the world is full of ice ages, global warmings, and tropical periods in which millions of species have already existed.
In fact, if we add up all the species that exist today, we would have less than 1% of the total species that have existed on the planet. Most of them have come and gone without any fossil records, so we would have never known if they existed. That is where our imagination comes into play allowing us to envision future animals that, while remaining realistic, are fabulous and wonderful. Dougal Dixon told us when he created his animals for his book, After Man, he made “fictitious examples of factual processes.”
An example in our book is the Cultrodente andino or the Andean knifetooth, which evolved from the common city rat. If you live in a busy city, you have probably encountered rats squeaking and carrying scraps of pizza away into the darkness of an alley. Rats have adapted incredibly well to human civilization and are thriving in our concrete hideouts. When humans are gone, all of our trash will be left behind — buildings, organic matter, infrastructure — that animals like rats can use for shelter and continue to thrive until they need to evolve to something else. The Andean knifetooth descends from a rat ancestor that lived in a city in South America. Over 170 million years from now, the climate of the world stabilized to pre-human levels, and then it was jolted with an ice age. The ancestral rats underwent changes; developing thicker snowy fur, front teeth shaped like a V, and hunting behavior transforming them into predators of the tundra. Like the Cultrodente, many other fantastic animals presented here have evolved beyond the human era into glorious new beasts.
We exist in a time of uncertainty, in which we will need a lot of critical thinking to preserve the planet. Even though humans may make the Earth inhospitable for most of the species including us — life will continue and evolve. In this book, we have been dreaming about those possible beings that might one day come true in the distant future. We hope to inspire you to wonder about the world and imagine how the future might look.
— Melanconnie and Faebian Ceruleo, 2025