Dinosaurs living in the present is a hot subject; people young and old seem captivated by ancient beasts who sometimes grew to enormous sizes and once roamed all the earth, including its seas.

In retrospect, The Lost World is somewhat of a father to all the tales of prehistoric beasts roaming the modern world. Conan Doyle's underlying idea was that a region isolated from the rest of the earth might not have been affected by the evolution that exterminated species by natural selection. The Amazonian jungles, still not very well known to outsiders, were even less well known in the early part of this century — an era in which large areas of the earth's lands had yet to be mapped. Into the mysterious jungle, Conan Doyle dropped a great mesa that had been pushed up during the era that dinosaurs dominated the world, and which...