The Lost World

The Lost World is a techno-thriller novel written by Michael Crichton and published in 1995 by Knopf.It is a sequel to his earlier novel Jurassic Park.Like Arthur Conan Doyle's novel of the same name, Crichton's novel concerns an expedition to an isolated Central American location where dinosaurs roam—though in this case, the dinosaurs were recreated by genetic engineering, rather than surviving from antiquity.

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

Simultaneously, another group—geneticist Lewis Dodgson, Howard King and George Baselton—also go to Isla Sorna, with plans to steal dinosaur eggs for Biosyn, the rival company of InGen, the company that created Jurassic Park. On the way to the island, Sarah Harding, an animal behaviorist who has worked in the African savanna, is on her way to meet with Dr. Thorne and Malcolm when she encounters Dodgson and his party. Dodgson at first dismisses Sarah until she reveals she is trying to make her way to Isla Sorna. He then offers to take her, but just before they reach the island, Dodgson throws Harding off the boat and leaves her for dead; she is then rescued by Malcolm's group. The entire rogue group is later killed by dinosaurs on the island.

The group finds Levine alive and well, but bitten. A velociraptor attack leaves Eddie dead and Malcolm is injured by the Tyrannosaurus Rex parents looking for their baby. Malcolm then spends much of the novel high on morphine, leaving him prone to talk at length about evolution on Isla Sorna, whose raptors are antisocial compared to those living on Isla Nublar. He discovers that InGen fed dinosaurs sheep infected with prion disease, which causes life spans of dinosaurs to be shorter than normal. The disease passes to animals bitten by them, leading to an eventual extinction of the dinosaurs on Isla Sorna. Kelly discovers a boat in an abandoned building and the group escapes the island. On the boat, Malcolm tells Levine about the prion disease, which was spread island wide by the scavenger procompsognathus species, but tells Levine his bites are fine and the disease would only infect dinosaurs.