A mountain with sheer cliffs on all sides inspired the lost plateau in 'The Lost World'
Mount Roraima is a tabletop mountain, or tepui, rising about 2,800 metres at the border of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana, with vertical cliff faces on nearly every side that kept its summit plateau botanically isolated for millions of years. Conan Doyle's 1912 novel 'The Lost World' was partly inspired by 19th-century explorers' accounts of it, and the plateau still hosts unique carnivorous plants and amphibians found nowhere else on Earth.