Dinos Survive in The Lost World

The Lost World, a 1912 novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, contains a multitude of plot points, characters and themes, but is really a book about dinosaurs. After a long and successful career as the author of the adventures and memoirs of British analytic detective Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle desired change. He killed off Holmes in 1893, to turn a page in his writing career (although he later revived the character as a result of public outcry). Conan Doyle was a man of science, an ophthalmologist, and a leader in the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State, but he is mostly remembered as a writer of huge imagination.

The Lost World tells the tale of a group of British men on an expedition to South America where it is reported a high plateau deep in the jungle has managed to be left behind by evolution and still harbor prehistoric creatures – most notably dinosaurs. Without getting too much into the details of the frame story, I will say that it involves an act of bravery meant to impress a woman, and a crazy scientist who physically assaults journalists who demonstrate disbelief in his outrageous claims.

           The idea of a land left behind by evolution was not begun or ended by Conan Doyle. His novel is one in the long history of re-imagining dinosaurs walking on our earth, whether conjured by science, time-travel or dangerous exploration. In the 19th and earliest 20th century, the possibility of extinct creatures existing in the darkest or most unexplored parts of our world was not only enthralling, but also very realistic seeming. When Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World in 1912 scientists were just beginning to get a taste of paleontology and some parts of the world were still largely unexplored - included vast parts of South America, a good reason for the location Conan Doyle chose for this adventure. Jules Vern had already written about living dinosaurs in the depths of the earth, wasn’t it possible that there was something surprising and undiscovered deep in the Amazon?

           For Conan Doyle, the existence of dinosaurs was the most exciting of these possibilities, and it is those creatures he placed on the plateau - unable to escape the treacherously high cliffs, stranded for all time in this remote location. Side by side with primitive ancestors of humans, a variety of dinosaurs appear in the novel. Our understanding of dinosaurs in 1912 was minimal, and most of the depictions found in the novel would not ring true today – such as Iguanadons being of such a low intellectual ability that they could be led around like cattle and butchered for meat by one of the man-like races on the plateau. Can he be blamed? Who would have thought that such large creatures with tiny heads could be smart?

"For a moment I wondered where I could have seen that ungainly shape, that arched back with triangular fringes along it, that strange bird-like head held close to the ground.  Then it came back, to me.  It was the stegosaurus...The ground shook beneath his tremendous weight, and his gulpings of water resounded through the still night.  For five minutes he was so close to my rock that by stretching out my hand I could have touched the hideous waving hackles upon his back.  Then he lumbered away and was lost among the boulders." - From The Lost World

           Whatever the level of realism, this exciting and descriptive tale is a great journey for those who enjoy Conan Doyle’s literary style, as well as for those who find joy in imagining what could be left out in there in our unexplored universe.