Exploring The Lost World

First published in 1912, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle is generally considered to be the first dinosaur story. The thrilling adventure yarn – familiar to millions – is a true landmark of popular culture. 

Initially serialised in the Strand Magazine, the story is told to us by journalist Edward Malone. In order to win the love of his fiancé, Gladys Hungerford, Malone has agreed to accompany Professor Challenger on an expedition to South America to investigate tales of a plateau where dinosaurs still exist. Together with the sceptical Professor Summerlee and big game hunter Lord John Roxton, they start to find evidence to support Challenger’s theory. Accessing the isolated plateau by climbing a rock pinnacle and felling a tree to form a bridge, they become trapped when the bridge is destroyed by treacherous aids.

As Conan Doyle’s characters explore, they discover numerous prehistoric species that have survived in this isolated corner of the world. The plateau is wondrous but dangerous, roamed by vicious pterodactyls and carnivorous Megalosaurus. The explorers also discover that it is home to a tribe of natives who are at war with a species of primitive humanoid – a form of ‘missing link’ between Homo sapiens and the great apes. The explorers help the natives defeat the ape-men and in doing so win their friendship. Eventually, the chief’s son shows the explorers a way down from the plateau.

When the characters return to London to share their discovery with the scientific community, no-one believes them until they produce a young pterodactyl they have brought back. The creature quickly escapes, causing alarm, but undeniably proving their case. Hailed as heroes, they retire to Lord Roxton’s rooms where he reveals another export from the plateau: diamonds valued at £200,000. With the proceeds from these precious stones, Challenger plans to open his own museum and Summerlee retires to catalogue his fossils. Malone (rejected by Gladys, who has married a solicitor in his absence) and Roxton plan a return expedition to the lost world.

Arthur Conan Doyle had broad-ranging interests: alongside his keen advocacy of spiritualism, he was interested in judicial reform, criminology and palaeontology. His home, Windlesham in Crowborough, East Sussex, was on the Weald – an area of rock formations that date back to the Upper Jurassic (145.5–150.8 million years ago). This contributed to the author’s fascination with prehistoric life and, in the spring of 1909, he wrote to the Natural History Museum requesting an expert come and view what appeared to be Iguanodon tracks found at a nearby quarry. Conan Doyle hand-drew the tracks in his letter and the discovery directly inspired a passage in The Lost World, where the first evidence of Iguanodon on the plateau also takes the form of footprints.

In November 1911, Conan Doyle wrote again to Arthur Smith Woodward, the Museum’s keeper of Geology reporting that ‘we have something in the old quarry that is beyond me’. He claimed that this mysterious object was ‘not an impression but a body’. However, when geologist Charles Dawson was dispatched to examine it, the body proved to be a ‘mere concretion of oxide of iron and sand’. The experts perhaps viewed him as a happy amateur, but Conan Doyle persisted in his hope of finding extinct reptiles in some state other than fossilised. In September 1922, he wrote to Smith Woodward stating he had seen an ichthyosaurus in the Aegean Sea.

Conan Doyle started The Lost World in October 1911 and, for details of the prehistoric life, he referred to Extinct Animals by E Ray Lankester, then Director of the Natural History Museum. This book, described by its author as ‘[nothing] more ambitious than attempt to excite in young people an interest in a most fascinating study’, contained illustrations and descriptions of many species Conan Doyle included in his adventure. However, he interpreted some of the science in peculiar ways. In Extinct Animals an image of an ichthyosaurus skull shows the parietal foramen, a hole which in modern reptiles contains a photoreceptive organ call the parietal eye. The Ichthyosaurus in The Lost World has a visible third eye on top of its head. Also, despite a clear description in Extinct Animals of Megalosaurus as bipedal, Conan Doyle’s animal walks on either two or four legs and resembles a horrible toad.

Conan Doyle may well have been inspired by the model dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Park, opened in 1854. The reconstructions, including a quadruped Megolosaurus, were already deemed obsolete by the 1900s. Like the fictional plateau, the exhibition in Sydenham featured a mixture of species from different time periods, all apparently living together around a lake. From Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs to the much more recent Toxodon and Irish elk, almost all of the species at Crystal Palace appear in Conan Doyle’s book.

Conan Doyle also took an interest in exploration. In 1909 he spoke at a luncheon for Ernest Shackleton and later appeared with Robert Falcon Scott at a fundraiser for the British Antarctic Expedition. The following May he jovially admonishing American explorer Robert Peary for making the job of storytelling much harder. Previously it had been possible to write about remote parts of the world without fear of contradiction. Now that so much of the world had been explored, he asked where ‘the romance-writer is to turn when he wants to draw any vague and not too clearly-defined region’.

The answer apparently lay in the Amazon Basin. At a time when the border between Brazil and Bolivia was poorly defined, Conan Doyle’s close friend Percy Harrison Fawcett led the Bolivian Boundary Commission, tasked with preventing border disputes. When Fawcett returned to England, he brought with him tales of the Huanchaca Plateau and an impenetrable jungle where anything could be hiding.

Conan Doyle knew that exploration had led to the expansion of the British Empire, through the acquisition of new territories. He also recognised that the Empire required defence. Covering a quarter of the globe, and home to 285 million people, it was difficult and expensive to police. Britain’s small professional army was surrounded by the larger, conscripted, armies of her European neighbours: old enemies like France and Russia, and a more recent concern – Germany. The less than glorious victory of the Boer War led to genuine fears that a future conflict might lose Britain her colonies or even her independence. These worries were countered by a brash imperialism that permeated middle and upper classes British culture. In 1907, Robert Baden-Powell set up the Scout Movement to promote health, exercise and teamwork in boys. There wasn’t an implicit military connection, but he stated that they should ‘be a brick’ in the ‘wall of Empire’.

In the years preceding The Lost World, Conan Doyle wrote several Roman-era short stories, as allegories for contemporary British issues. The Last Galley was a fable about Britain’s naval superiority in the face of expanding German sea power. The Lost World’s brash imperialism is evident the admiration heaped on Roxton’s military skills and in the plot’s focus on British explorers aiding natives in defending their territory against an inhuman aggressor. Malone enthuses that, following his adventures on the plateau, he should receive a commission as correspondent in the next Great War.

The Lost World was adapted into a film in 1925 by American film-maker Willis O’Brian, using stop-motion effects to realise the dinosaurs. The movie reduces the book’s militaristic tone by adding a female character to the party and many subsequent adaptations have followed suit, overlooking Edwardian social conventions to add romance to the story. The 1925 movie also removes the conflict between the natives and ape-men, while the belligerent presence on the plateau is reduced to an actor in an ape costume and a chimpanzee. Even the treachery that traps the explorers is replaced by a brontosaurus feeding on the felled tree. Perhaps, after the First World War, the book’s soldierly fervour was considered inappropriate for cinema audiences.

By downplaying the battles between humans and ape-men, the story is refocused on exploration and scientific discovery. Although the original text is arguably diluted, the most exciting element is retained, and even magnified. The notion of an isolated place where prehistoric animals continue to thrive was first explored in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but Conan Doyle was the first novelist to make this a central premise of his work, thus creating the archetypal dinosaur narrative. The narrative has reoccurred frequently since 1912, with tales in which people discover some remote location inhabited by creatures long thought to be extinct, become trapped and must endeavour to escape.  Jurassic Park is essentially The Lost World combined with a fear of modern technology.  At its core is the thrill of the unknown and this tale is an adventure that audiences of all ages can enjoy. As its author stated:

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.