What “Lost World” Actually Means Here

The phrase “lost world” has attached itself to Roraima and the tepuis with a permanence that no amount of scientific correction seems able to dislodge.

This is partly because Conan Doyle’s novel is so well-known that the phrase carries automatic associations with dramatic isolation and survival against the odds.

And it is partly because the phrase does capture something real about the tepui landscape, even if it gets the specific mechanism wrong.

The tepui summits are genuinely isolated from the surrounding lowland world in ways that are ecologically significant and that produce evolutionary results quite different from what you find in accessible lowland habitats.