This is the feeling that Arthur Conan Doyle, who never went to Roraima, captured intuitively in his description of the fictional plateau: the sense that a place so visually extraordinary must contain something correspondingly extraordinary — that the walls and the clouds and the isolation must be protecting or concealing something that justifies all that drama.

What Roraima actually contains is more complex, more interesting, and more significant than anything Conan Doyle imagined.

It does not contain dinosaurs.

It contains something more interesting than dinosaurs: it contains the living record of evolution’s response to long isolation in a specific environment, the ongoing geological process of ancient rock being shaped by erosion into new forms, the hydrological function of an elevated water system feeding some of the world’s largest rivers, and the cultural significance of a landscape to people who have known it for far longer than the scientific or literary tradition reaches.

None of those things fit into a novel as easily as dinosaurs.