'The Lost World: Jurassic Park' website from 1997 is somehow still online

“Something Has Survived”-- or so said the tagline for “The Lost World,” Steven Spielberg’s 1997 follow-up to his beloved “Jurassic Park."

While that “something” turned out to be a bunch of dinosaurs living on a second dino-filled island (that no one ever bothered to mention in the first movie for some strange reason), it turns out that something else has also survived: the original promotional website for “The Lost World” is still online almost 20 years after its release, collecting whatever the internet equivalent of dust and cobwebs is.

If you simply go to www.lost-world.com you may see a fleeting glimpse of the original homepage before one of two things happens: 1) your computer will freeze, not unlike a mosquito trapped in amber, or 2) you’ll be quickly re-routed to the far shinier and more sophisticated website for “Jurassic World” which opens this week.

But…if you’re more interested in low-res .jpegs of Jeff Goldblum than high-def videos of Chris Pratt, you can access the vintage site by going here. If successful, you should see a map of Isla Sorna (which I believe is Spanish for “island of narrative convenience”), with various points you can click on, such as “The Jungle” and “Valley of Death."

Click outside of the map and you’ll be whisked away to "Jurassic Park" creator John Hammond’s office! This part of the site is a sort of point and click game-- like “Myst” if “Myst” was constantly trying to convince you to see a certain movie.

If you click on John Hammond’s desk, you’ll find it contains a letter for Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum’s brilliant and sometimes provocatively posed mathematician). Also, oddly, Hammond’s desk contains a VHS copy of the first “Jurassic Park,” meaning that Hammond is probably now coping with the existential nightmare of realizing that he’s merely a fictional character in a Hollywood blockbuster.

Do enough clicking, and you’ll eventually discover that the game of rummaging through John Hammond’s stuff actually has an objective in the form of an “online sweepstakes”-- the more clues you find, the more details you’re given about the contest.

Before you get too excited though, the contest, which featured a grand prize trip to Hawaii, ended in June of 1997. Still, you can poke around Hammond’s office purely for the fun of it. You’ll catch Easter eggs such as Hammond’s amber-topped cane leaning against a bookcase.

And apparently Ian Malcolm gave Hammond an autographed photo in which he really rubbed in that whole “life finds a way” business. It’s also signed “Your Nemesis, Ian” which seems kind of crazy.

There’s loads more tidbits to uncover, including character bios and links to various dinosaur websites-- hopefully at least one of which explains how it’s possible for a small child to defeat a velociraptor using the power of gymnastics.