In Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger series, this phrase used as a title denotes a plateau where dinosaurs survive. Of course, surviving dinosaurs are an sf sub-genre:
The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Night Shapes by James Blish
Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear
The Sky People by SM Stirling
Poul Anderson does not have surviving dinosaurs but does have time travelers meeting dinosaurs. And another of his time travelers finds an entirely different meaning for the phrase, "the lost world":
"...he was brought in a closed carriage to a palace atop that hill called Montmartre in the lost world..." (The Shield Of Time, p. 291)
Keith Denison, remembering a history and a twentieth century that were almost identical with ours, two World Wars followed by a Cold War etc, finds himself in an almost medieval Paris in 1980, where he is about to be interviewed by "...his Venerability, Albin Archcardinal Fil-Johan, Grand Duke of the Northern Provinces..." (ibid.) Although Denison will pretend to be from Mars, the truth is that he remembers events, and indeed an entire life, that have not happened in Albin's past and that will never happen in his future. Could any entire world possibly be more lost than that?
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