The Lost World

“He held it up to the light, examined it with a magnifying glass, then set it down again. looked at the green skin, the pebbled texture. Maybe, he thought…maybe.”

That “maybe” says it all. Malcolm understands that Levine’s proposal about dinosaurs alive on that island is far from preposterous. But he resists—until he receives the skin sample from Levine. He now knows it is time to reap what InGen has sown.

“As she went down the stairs from the second floor, the sing-song chant began again. ‘Kelly is a brainer. Kelly is a brainer.’”

At the heart of this technothriller is an old-school exploration of what it means to be female in what is perceived to be a man’s world. Sarah will teach Kelly to be proud of what she is. But here Kelly, a promising science and math student in middle school, recalls bearing the brunt of her male classmates’ taunts.

“Somebody’s raising these things.”

The animal researcher at the San Francisco Zoo who helps Malcolm examine the skin sample from Costa Rica reveals to Malcolm what he does not want to hear. The doctor’s discovery of the tag tells her InGen wanted to monitor the dinosaurs they were building. This is no lost world—this is a laboratory gone rogue.

“Thorne’s dislike of theory was legendary. In his view, a theory was nothing more than a substitute for experience put forth by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.”

The novel juxtaposes the craggy-faced Thorne against the academic Levine—representing on the one hand the real-time real world of raw nature and the fuzzy world of scientific observations and theorizing. Thorne shows his contempt for the scientists bound in labs and classrooms who never experience nature firsthand.

“He was amused by the imperious way Arby behaved whenever he was working with a computer. He seemed to forget how young he was, his usual diffidence and timidity vanished.”

The two middle-school students who stowaway on the expedition symbolize an appreciation of the intuitive abilities and resourcefulness of kids. Kelly and Arby both reveal unsuspected savvy, innovative problem-solving, and guts. Thorne reveals that he is just beginning to see these are not two ordinary kids.

“Dinosaurs were now seen as caring creatures, living in groups, raising their little babies. They were good animals, even cute animals…the new sappy look was from those reluctant to look at the other side of the coin, the other face of life.”

The novel works to reveal the complexity of nature, how nothing in nature is simply this or that. The team regularly finds even the most savage of dinosaur predators, like the tyrannosaurs, revealing a gentler, loving side. It is Malcolm waxing eloquently here: we must see nature in its complexity.

“Brave hunters and attentive parents, they lived in a remarkably complex social structure—and a matriarchy as well. As for their notorious yelping vocalizations, they actually represented an extremely sophisticated form of communication.”

Sarah Harding, doing field research, deflates the conception of the hyena as a ruthless predator. Harding has learned how the hyenas are caring creatures who sustain complex communities and who communicate with clever subtly, foreshadowing similar conclusions about the island dinosaurs.

“How many hunters have a stuffed elk head on their wall? The world’s full of them. But how many can claim to have a snarling tyrannosaurus head, hanging above the wet bar?”

Nothing better represents the reptilian veniality of the Biosyn team than this scene when Dodgson lays out his ambitious (and entirely amoral) plan to steal fertilized dinosaur eggs. His idea is to develop enough synthetic dinosaurs that he can open a shooting range for rich amateur hunters. The animals are commodities to be negotiated over, objects that can be hunted as trophies.

“To the local people, these islands are not happy places […] They say, no good comes from them […] But they do not know. They are superstitious Indians.”

The guide who says this to Dodgson knows the truth—and so does the reader. As the Biosyn team prepares to launch for the island, this warning reminds the reader of the danger the team: that no good comes from the island, a foreshadowing of the doomed nature of any enterprise that seeks to conquer Isla Sorna.

“Oh, yes […] they’re real.”

As the only surviving member of the original InGen team, Malcolm sounds a warning as much as an affirmation of Eddie’s question. Malcolm knows what happens when science messes with species development. In confirming to Eddie that these great animals are real Malcolm reveals his own misgivings.

“Thorne was impressed by the delicacy of her movements, the attentive way she cared for her young. The father, meanwhile, continued to tear small pieces of meat. Both animals kept up a continuous purring growl, as if to reassure the infants.”

Even as the encounters with the island animals grow violent, the novel never a vision of the animals as parental and attentive. Though this scene foreshadows the dismemberment of Dodgson as he is fed to the T. Rex offspring, here the novel reminds us that the animals are more than their savagery.

“‘Because […] this island presents a unique opportunity to study the greatest mystery in the history of our planet: extinction.’”

Long before the other members of the team, Malcolm is certain that the laboratory experiment that is Site B will collapse into chaos. Here, he cautions Levine, who is trumpeting his high hide observation tower as a perfect vehicle for observing these animals, that he sees only the promise of doom.

“But what nobody imagines is that the animals themselves might have changed—not in their bones but in their behavior […] a change in group behavior could easily lead to extinction.”

Malcolm’s radical vision of the theory of extinction as a self-willed phenomenon caused by the decisions of animals themselves has broader implications that the dinosaurs. It could be applied to the human species itself and our reckless decisions that have created the species-threatening conditions of climate change.

“‘God is in the details,’” Levine once reminded him.

“‘Maybe your God,’” Malcolm shot back, “’Not mine. Mine is in the process.’”

The material universe, within Malcolm’s chaos field theory, is endlessly, wondrously changing, that constant fluidity revealing patterns or purpose only in retrospect. Like the fractal formations that Malcolm uses to explain his conception of the dynamics of evolution and simultaneously the dynamic of extinction, the process alone reveals the pattern. It alone provides its own sense of order.

“These were obviously quick, intelligent animals, yet they fought continuously. Was that the way their social organization had developed?”

Animal behaviorist Sarah Harding is perplexed by the feeding frenzy of the island’s dinosaurs. She has studied animals feeding and such communities are traditionally orderly once the prey is down, using a kind of buffet system to give the feeding a cooperative choreography. The dinosaurs’ brutal feeding frenzy is for Harding the first indication of the problem on the island—there are too many predators.

“They’re nothing but oversized cows.”

Dodgson’s constant dismissal of the island animals as anything but commodities and his refusal to give to these great animals any respect thins his character into cartoon villainy. Here, he and his henchman are about to head into the Mosasaurus’ nest, dismissing the gentle, loving animals as nothing but livestock.

“What did you mean, girls aren’t good at mathematics?”

This conversation between Kelly and the woman she so admires focuses on the bias women face in the fields of science and math. Kelly is harassed by her classmates to the point where she feels the need to hide her acumen. Sarah assures the young girl to be proud of her mind and to ignore those who are threatened by independent smart women.

“It seemed to be happening to someone else. He was many miles away. He had a moment of surprise then when he felt the bones of his neck crunching loudly.”

This novel offers several gruesome accounts of the dinosaurs attacking and killing. Here, the novel offers a close perspective of a dinosaur attack on one of Dodgson’s henchmen that takes the reader into the helplessness and the terror of the attack until we also feel the crunch of the man’s head being crushed.

“He twisted it around his feet, trying to hold on. But he began to slip, and then he felt a sudden burning pain in his scalp.”

Trapped in the joined trailers now dangling over the cliff, Malcolm sustains a leg injury and struggles to follow Sarah’s lead up to safety through the narrow confines of the trailers. At the moment he surrenders to the T. Rex attack when the dinosaurs tag team the trailer over the cliff, Malcolm is saved when Sarah pulls him up by his hair. 

“There was a disorderly, chaotic feeling to the scene before him: ill-formed nests; quarreling adults, very few young and juvenile animals; the eggshells crushed; the broken mounds stepped on.”

When the team moves into the raptor nest, the scene grows appropriately scary. Unlike the tidier and cleaner nests of the mosasaurs or the tyrannosaurs, this nest more reflects the ferocity of the predatory raptor. But even in this forbidding landscape stinking of carcasses and strewn with animal parts, the team will find in the raptors the same kind of gentle loving parental attention to the offspring.

“At least we were right about one thing. The island was a true lost world—a pristine, untouched ecology. We were right from the beginning.”

Levine never ceases to reveal how little he learns. Keen on trumpeting his discovery of the mythical lost world of dinosaurs, he will not see what Malcolm reminds him: this is hardly a lost world. This is a poorly controlled attempt by humanity to control a species for no higher reason than greed.

“For a while Dodgson struggled against her, and then suddenly his body moved easily, and she saw that the tyrannosaur had taken his legs in his jaws.”

In a psychologically complex moment, Sarah, the novel’s hero, shoves a cowering and helpless Dodgson out from the protection of the Explorer under which they both hide from the tyrannosaurs. Sarah coolly dispatches Dodgson to what will be a most gruesome death as food the T. Rex babies. We are reminded of Malcolm’s earlier caution that no animal—including humans—are entirely good or bad.

“Dodgson howled. He saw the baby eating the flesh of his own face. His blood dripping from its jaws. The baby threw its head back and swallowed the cheek, and then turned, opened its jaws again, and closed over Dodgson’s neck.”

Dodgson’s death is the novel’s most gruesome. He is not snapped to death in the T. Rex jaws—rather he is taken to the nest and there dismembered by the mother who lovingly feeds his body parts to the hungry infants. That Dodgson is alive for most of his own consumption seems a fitting end to the man who comes to island only to pilfer eggs for his own mercenary gain.