The Lost World

In the quartet of characters that make up the team that goes the Isla Sorna, the wealthy bespectacled Yale-trained zoologist Dr. Richard Levine represents the intellect. Physically lanky and gaunt (he resembles a praying mantis) Levine is fascinated by the myth of the Lost World. Driven by his curiosity over speciation and drawn to the island in the hopes of studying living dinosaurs, Levine regularly sets aside common sense to attend to the risky business of his observations. He puts all of the team members at risk because he only sees the animals as means of teaching alert observers. He travels to the island initially alone, and, in the process, makes inevitable the brutal death of his island guide. He never fully appreciates the efforts the others take to find him when he keeps disappearing to pursue his observations.

Arrogant and socially awkward (he is, in fact, widely disliked), living within his specialized world of intellectual pursuit, Levine has little interest in the living planet; he is far more interested in the past, which he studies with “obsessive intensity” (18). Given his fortune, Levine travels to the most remote corners of the world to investigate so-called aberrant forms, often tooling about in his flashy red Ferrari.