The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan Doyle with Richard Fallon

In 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle dragged four men to the far edge of the map and brought Dinosaurs back to reality! The Lost World is the first major work to put dinosaurs, rather than marine reptiles, at the centre of prehistoric fiction, and it remains the book that comes out on top whenever I ask a guest for their favourite.I am joined by Richard Fallon, research associate in natural history humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge, author of Contesting Earth’s History and currently editing a new scholarly edition of the novel. He has read it roughly twelve times, six of those in the last year alone!Richard takes me through Edwardian palaeontology, the arrival of Dippy the Diplodocus, and the real men behind Challenger, Summerlee, Malone and Roxton. We get into the fake photographs and Doyle’s ambition to publish the whole thing as a hoax, the Piltdown Man connection, and what the manuscript gives away about Roxton’s voice. And we finish on the novel’s colonial logic, its homosocial heart, and the one illustration of Central Lake that Doyle cared about more than any other.GuestRichard FallonBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/richardfallon.bsky.socialCambridge profile: https://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/staff/dr-richard-fallonSedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences: https://www.sedgwickmuseum.orgThe Book: The Lost World (1912)Project Gutenberg, free, and the text Richard reads from in this episodehttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/139Richard’s booksCreatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters, Valancourt Books 2021 (affiliate link)https://amzn.eu/d/07x8bkXXContesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935, Oxford University Press 2025 (affiliate link)https://amzn.to/4gbXuUDReimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature, Cambridge University Press 2021 (affiliate link)https://amzn.to/4wysYdoRichard’s writing, free onlineProfessor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature, The Public Domain Review.https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/richard-owen-and-victorian-literature/Seen through Deep Time: Occult Clairvoyance and Palaeoscientific Imagination, Journal of Victorian Culturehttps://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/28/2/143/6759198Richard on his own book, Making Science Public bloghttps://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2025/04/03/contesting-earths-history/LinksE. Ray Lankester, Extinct Animals (1905), Doyle’s key source and the book Challenger quotes at Malone. Free on Internet Archivehttps://archive.org/details/extinctanimals1905lankAllen A. Debus, Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction: A Thematic Survey (affiliate link)https://amzn.to/4fCoPPHThe Lost World (1925) Free to watch on Internet Archivehttps://archive.org/details/TheLostWorldCompleteVideoQualityUpgradeNext time: a tribute to Sam Neill with James Mottram, 19 August.Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaursSupport the showEnjoying the show? A quick rating and review on Apple Podcasts would mean the world, it’s one of the best ways to help fellow Jurassic fans discover us.Presented and produced by Roland Squire☕️Buy Me A Coffee:https://buymeacoffee.com/roadtorebiq🎥 YouTube: https://youtube.com/@jurassicpiratespod?si=DJOlBmPoF75YE8It📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jurassicpiratespod?igsi=cmswOTFwM29pOWhl&utm_source=qr🎵 Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)🎨 Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist