The Lost World

The boat the team finds is in remarkably good shape. They drive it down the jungle river and through the cave that Sarah Harding came in when she arrived on the island. When the boat hits the open ocean, Levine relaxes for the first time. He begins to marvel over their discovery of the mythic Lost World. Malcolm points out the island was anything but a pure example of a dinosaur ecosystem. Scientists had upended the island’s ecosystem. By feeding the first-generation dinosaurs the relatively cheap protein found in sheep, those dinosaurs had been fed a toxic virus, prions, that infected the feces and in turn most of the ecosystem. That, Malcolm points out, is why so few of the dinosaurs survive into adulthood and why there were so many predators as they fed on the piled-up carcasses. Hardly an unspoiled lost world. “Human beings as so destructive,” Malcolm says, “I sometimes think we’re a kind of plague […] we destroy things so well that sometimes I think that’s our function” (415).

But Thorne objects to such a bleak vision: “You feel the way the boat moves? That’s the sea. That’s real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That’s real.