The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution is a 1988 speculative evolution book written by Scottish geologist and palaeontologist Dougal Dixon and illustrated by several illustrators including Amanda Barlow, Peter Barrett, John Butler, Jeane Colville, Anthony Duke, Andy Farmer, Lee Gibbons, Steve Holden, Philip Hood, Martin Knowelden, Sean Milne, Denys Ovenden and Joyce Tuhill.

Like After Man, The New Dinosaurs uses its own fictional setting and hypothetical wildlife to explain natural processes with fictitious examples, in this case the concept of zoogeography and biogeographic realms.

As in Dixon's previous work, After Man, ecology and evolutionary theory are applied to create believable creatures, all of which have their own binomial names and text describing their behaviour and interactions with other contemporary animals.

In total, about sixty animals are described in the book, about half of the amount featured in After Man, with examples including a widespread group of tree-climbing coelurosaurian theropods called "arbrosaurs", huge striding and terrestrial pterosaurs such as the giraffe-like "lank", colonial pachycephalosaurs, descendants of the Mesozoic hadrosaurs called "sprintosaurs" adapted to a new lifestyle on the grass-covered plains of North America, amphibious hypsilophodonts, flamingo-like coelurosaurs and iguanodonts capable of jumping like kangaroos.

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.

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.

[4] 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.

[6] According to Dixon's own website, "Dinosaur science has moved on since first publication in 1988, and the original introduction of the book has aged considerably."

In this capacity, the "lank", a four-legged, terrestrial and grazing pterosaur derived from the Cretaceous family Azhdarchidae, has been seen by some writers as perhaps the worst offender.

[2] Many of the hypothetical animals created for The New Dinosaurs ended up resembling actual Mesozoic creatures that have since been discovered, both in appearance and in behaviour.