History Literature / TheLostWorld1995

''The Lost World'' is a 1995 {{Science Fiction}} {{Thriller}} novel written by Creator/MichaelCrichton. It is the sequel to ''Literature/JurassicPark''.

* AbortedArc: Oddly enough, continuing one that was set up on [[Literature/JurassicPark the previous book]]. The first couple of chapters or so are the investigation on the mystery of various animal attacks on Costa Rica and the appearance of strange unidentifiable animal corpses ([[spoiler:which are the ''Velociraptors'' who managed to escape from Isla Nublar before it was firebombed]]) and the apparent [[GovernmentConspiracy conspiracy of the Costa Rican government]] to keep this under wraps. Once the narrative switches to the other characters and they go to Sorna, this is never brought up again. Then again, see BusCrash.

** Funny enough, the novel takes a couple of digs at ''[[Literature/JurassicPark its predecessor]]'' (and most especially, [[Film/JurassicPark the movie]] [[TheFilmOfTheBook adaptation thereof]]). Look on ViewerFriendlyInterface and LampshadeHanging for the full explanation.

* ArtisticLicensePaleontology: At the end of the book, Malcolm talks about the extinction events at the end of the Triassic and Jurassic. While the Triassic did end with an extinction event (one of the big five, in fact), the Jurassic didn't (some taxa did go extinct around the time, but not enough for it to be considered an extinction event).

*** None of dinosaurs engineered by InGen were exactly like the original animals (this was brought up several times by Henry Wu in the original novel). Their creations even had version numbers, life software releases. Given they accidentally engineered the ability to spontaneously change sex, it's not actually unbelievable that chameleon-like camouflage could occur. There is even a wild-bred juvenile raptor in the original novel that HAS chameleon-like colour-changing capability.

* BlatantLies: As soon as Levine is rescued by Thorne, Eddie, and Malcolm, he tries to explain away his original panicked phone call begging to be saved as him trying and failing to work the phone Thorne gave him. He even has the audacity to admonish Thorne for this while surrounded by [[DeathGlare death glares]] from everyone.
* Malcolm himself in the beginning of the book. He repeatedly tells Levine that he was never on Isla Nublar and there were never any dinosaurs, and Levine mentions Grant and Ellie told him the same. It's revealed that Malcolm is lying due to a non-disclosure agreement, and that as part of his silence two years of medical bills and rehabilitation were paid for by InGen for his silence. Sarah also doesn't believe him, though she doesn't call him out on it, she just knows that she spent a lot of time with him during his recovery process, and remembered all the times he had nightmares and spoke in his sleep, talking about dinosaurs and being particularly fearful of velociraptors when he mentioned them while sleeping.

* LampshadeHanging: The book takes an entire chapter to point out how stupid it is to assume a ''T. rex'' can't see you if you don't move, killing a character who tries it. It also handily suggests another explanation for the fact that it apparently worked in the first film and book — the tyrannosaur had just eaten and simply wasn't hungry.[[note]]And if you pay attention in that movie, the ''T. rex'' did indeed not eat Genarro; she tore him in half.[[/note]]
** In the film, all that is said is 'I think this was Gennaro'; 'I think this was too.' We never see what they're referring to, so there could only be small parts left. Neither character reacts like they just saw half a man, rather lifting the fronds that have fallen obscuring the remains and looking slightly disgusted.

** Malcolm didn't die for sure in the book. There's a flyaway moment where Muldoon shakes his head, and precisely ONE line where Grant notes that they won't release the bodies of those that died. But Grant could very easily have just been misinformed based on Muldoon's vague head shake when he asked him about Malcolm.
** Crichton himself, via his website, said he resurrected Malcolm because he needed an iconic commentator. See entry under "retcon" below.

** Then again, possibly not. There are a lot of thriving populations on the island, and the characters' conclusions that there are no true grown adults on the island is incorrect, as there are breeding Velociraptor, Maiasaur, Triceratops, Sauropods and T. rex. The rexes especially are a big hole in several of Levine and Malcolm's theories regarding the island, the prion disease, and also behaviour. Not only are they ''full grown'' (which they claim none of the Sorna dinosaurs are), they are breeding, hunting and carefully rearing young very successfully. Given that one of the raptors dies in the day or two they are there, it's likely they will die off, leaving the prey animals to the rexes and carnotaurus. They don't even know for sure that the adult dinosaurs are affected by scrapie in the same way as mammals with the same pathology.

* ArtisticLicensePaleontology: At the end of the book, Malcolm talks about the extinction events at the end of the Triassic and Jurassic. While the Triassic did end with an extinction event (one of the big five, in fact), the Jurassic didn't.

* PlotHole: As one of the FixFic aspects of the book, the story portrays the raptors as being extremely violent and disorganized outside of when they hunt, and being bad parents because they had no parent animals to teach them how to rear their own young, but notably the raptors are the ONLY dinosaurs on the island that appear to display this behavior, and are in stark contrast to the Rexes and herbivore dinosaurs with young we see, who appear to take care of their babies just fine.[[note]]Another interpretation is that this is actually the raptors' intelligence being {{Deconstructed}}. Because they [[ItCanThink can think]], they also consciously need to ''learn'' certain things that other dinosaurs simply do on instinct, [[FridgeBrilliance and as a result they're incapable of functioning in an environment where they never had elders to learn]] ''[[FridgeBrilliance from]]''.[[/note]]

* PlotHole: As one of the FixFic aspects of the book, the story portrays the raptors as being extremely violent and disorganized outside of when they hunt, and being bad parents because they had no parent animals to teach them how to rear their own young, but notably the raptors are the ONLY dinosaurs on the island that appear to display this behavior, and are in stark contrast to the Rexes and herbivore dinosaurs with young we see, who appear to take care of their babies just fine.[[note]]Another interpretation is that this is actually the raptors' intelligence being {{Deconstructed}}. Because they [[ItCanThink can think]], they also consciously need to ''learn'' certain things that other dinosaurs simply do on instinct, [[FridgeBrilliance and as a result they're incapable of functioning in an environment where they never had elders to learn]] ''[[ItCanThink from]]''.[[/note]]

* PlotHole: As one of the FixFic aspects of the book, the story portrays the raptors as being extremely violent and disorganized outside of when they hunt, and being bad parents because they had no parent animals to teach them how to rear their own young, but notably the raptors are the ONLY dinosaurs on the island that appear to display this behavior, and are in stark contrast to the Rexes and herbivore dinosaurs with young we see, who appear to take care of their babies just fine.[[note]]Another interpretation is that this is actually the raptors' intelligence being {{Deconstructed}}. Because they [[ItCanThink can think]], they also consciously need to ''learn'' certain things that other dinosaurs simply do on instinct, [[FridgeBrilliance and as a result they're incapable of functioning in an environment where they never had elders to learn ''from'']].[[/note]]

* PlotHole: As one of the FixFic aspects of the book, the story portrays the raptors as being extremely violent and disorganized outside of when they hunt, and being bad parents because they had no parent animals to teach them how to rear their own young, but notably the raptors are the ONLY dinosaurs on the island that appear to display this behavior, and are in stark contrast to the Rexes and herbivore dinosaurs with young we see, who appear to take care of their babies just fine.[[note]]Another interpretation is that this is actually a {{Deconstruction}} of ItCanThink. The raptors are so intelligent and conscious of their environment that it means they actually need to be ''taught'' certain things that other dinosaurs simply do on instinct, [[FridgeBrilliance and as a result they're incapable of functioning in an environment where they never had elders to learn from]].[[/note]]

* PlotHole: As one of the FixFic aspects of the book, the story portrays the raptors as being extremely violent and disorganized outside of when they hunt, and being bad parents because they had no parent animals to teach them how to rear their own young, but notably the raptors are the ONLY dinosaurs on the island that appear to display this behavior, and are in stark contrast to the Rexes and herbivore dinosaurs with young we see, who appear to take care of their babies just fine.[[note]]Another interpretation is that this is actually a {{Deconstruction}} of ItCanThink. The raptors are so intelligent and conscious of their environment that it means they actually need to be ''taught'' things that other dinosaurs simply do on instinct, [[FridgeBrilliance and as a result they're incapable of functioning in an environment where they never had elders to learn from]].[[/note]]

* PlotHole: As one of the FixFic aspects of the book, the story portrays the raptors as being extremely violent and disorganized outside of when they hunt, and being bad parents because they had no parent animals to teach them how to rear their own young, but notably the raptors are the ONLY dinosaurs on the island that appear to display this behavior, and are in stark contrast to the Rexes and herbivore dinosaurs with young we see, who appear to take care of their babies just fine.

* CoversAlwaysLie: The cover of the book has the silhouette of an ''Allosaurus'', a dinosaur which does not appear in the book.

*** None of InGen's engineered dinosaurs were exactly like the original animals (this was brought up several times by Henry Wu in the original novel). InGen's creations even had version numbers, life software releases. Given they accidentally engineered the ability to spontaneously change sex, it's not actually unbelievable that chameleon-like camouflage could occur. There is even a wild-bred juvenile raptor in the original novel that HAS chameleon-like colour-changing capability.

*** This is less of a FixFic, given it was a much-discussed point between Wu and Hammond regarding the 'versions' of their dinosaurs. Wu wanted to adjust the dinosaurs to make them more docile and match the expectations of a paying public, but Hammond wanted authenticity, 'real' dinosaurs. The process described is ''very'' suggestive of a difficult development and testing process, none of which was seen by the visitors to the park in the first novel.

* HistoryRepeats: [[spoiler:The dinosaurs of Isla Sorna are doomed to go extinct all over again, due to the carnivores contracting scrapie from eating prions-infected meat and the disease infecting the herbivores as well.]]

Six years after the disaster at Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm -- who is revealed to have actually survived the events of the previous novel via a retcon -- teams up with paleontologist Richard Levine after learning about Site B, the "production facility" where the park's dinosaurs were hatched and grown, on Isla Sorna near Isla Nublar (the Jurassic Park site). When Levine leaves without Malcolm, he plans a rescue, with a team consisting of engineer Jack "Doc" Thorne, mechanic Eddie Carr, and two stowaway children, R.B. "Arby" Benton and Kelly Curtis.

** Early in the novel, Levine and Guitierrez come across the carcass of a horse or cow-sized dinosaur that washed up on a Costa Rican beach, estimated at around one-hundred kilograms in weight. Levine later identifies it as an ''Ornitholestes'', a dinosaur which tops out at maybe three feet tall and fifteen kilograms in weight. The presence of chromatophores in a skin sample from the carcass suggests it might have actually been a ''Carnotaurus'', but confusing ''Ornitholestes'' with ''Carnotaurus'' (estimated at one to two tons) is just as silly.

** The ''Carnotaurus''' utterly ridiculous ChameleonCamouflage, which allows them to become virtually invisible in seconds, even against a complex structure like a chainlink fence. This is purely a RuleOfCool invention that would not be likely for any land animal, period (although the camouflage of some cephalopods comes close).

* BigBad: Lewis Dodgson, who had bribed Dennis to steal genetic material in ''Jurassic Park'', has taken on an active role this time around.

* ExtinctAnimalPark: The book explores the infrastructure that such a park would logically require. The process of cloning dinosaurs shown in the first novel was too streamlined to be realistic, [[FixFic so this novel patches up that plothole]] by retconning that all the real cloning work was carried out at "Site B" on a completely different island, while the labs at Jurassic Park itself were just a show to impress visitors. In the present day, the protagonists explore the long-abandoned Site B in hopes that its ecosystem of feral dinosaur clones can shed some light on the actual behavior of prehistoric megafauna.

* MeaninglessVillainVictory: The death of Hammond and downfall of InGen in the first novel were ultimately this for Dodgson and Biosyn. Yes, Dodgson's actions set off a chain of events that brought down their biggest corporate rival -- but that wasn't much of a victory for Biosyn. Dodgson's agent (Nedry) failed to acquire viable dinosaur embryos from Jurassic Park before its destruction (to say nothing of the money Biosyn lost on Nedry's down payment). Dodgson's subsequent attempts (legal or otherwise) to acquire the InGen technology in the wake of their bankruptcy and dissolution also failed -- and end up costing Biosyn even more money.