The Lost World

At the Santa Fe Institute, a prestigious think tank for scientists, 40-something mathematician and chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm lectures a small group of researchers on his theory that some species choose not to adapt to a changing environment.

After his lecture, Malcolm is pestered by Richard Levine, a wealthy globetrotting paleontologist known for his belief in the reality of a so-called “Lost World”, the theoretical possibility that there could exist in some remote areas a thriving dinosaur world. Malcolm, despairing over the question, dismisses the idea out of hand as a “delusion” (8).

Malcolm is assisted out of the lecture hall by Sarah Harding, a renowned field animal behaviorist who had helped nurse Malcolm through a difficult recovery from experiences on a Costa Rican island some five years before, an experience the details of which Malcolm has never entirely shared with her.

Malcolm was part of an ambitious project conducted by InGen, a genetics research company, that attempted to reproduce living dinosaurs from trace DNA and then make a theme park featuring the animals. The project went horribly wrong, and In-Gen has since filed for bankruptcy and destroyed the park. When Levine persists and tells Malcolm of large carcasses that have been found along Costa Rican beaches, Malcolm insists the rumors of living dinosaurs was a “techno-myth” (10).