The Lost World is a science fiction novel by British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1912, concerning an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon basin of South America where prehistoric animals still survive. It was originally published serially in the Strand Magazine and illustrated by New-Zealand-born artist Harry Rountree during the months of April-November 1912. The character of Professor Challenger was introduced in this book. The novel also describes a war between indigenous people and a vicious tribe of ape-like creatures.

The idea of prehistoric animals surviving into the present day was not new, but had already been introduced by Jules Verne in Journey to the Center of the Earth. In Jules Verne's book, published in 1864, the creatures live under the earth in and around a subterranean sea.

In 1915, the Russian scientist Vladimir Obruchev produced his own version of the "lost world" theme in the novel Plutonia, which places the prehistoric species in a fictional space inside the hollow Earth connected to the surface via an opening in the Russian far north. In 1916, Edgar Rice Burroughs published The Land That Time Forgot. His "lost world" was discovered by German submariners in Antarctica.

In addition to lending its title to this subgenre, the title of Doyle's work was reused by Michael Crichton in his 1995 novel The Lost World, a sequel to Jurassic Park, and its film adaptation, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Two of the characters in Crichton's novel mention a palaeontologist called John Roxton. ... (wikipedia.org)