When I watched this film on TV a while back, I was on the fence about whether those were real-life lizards fighting — their motions were so jerky, their skins so fake-looking, I just thought they were really well-done Harryhausen-style stop-motion creations. But no — as various commenters have pointed out, those are real life lizards, being harmed in the making of this film. As English professor Michael Delahoyde puts it on his Dino-Films page:

The dinosaurs are photographically enlarged lizards, and are enjoyable to see eating and slurping the air, but distressing to see encumbered with all the glued-on crap to make them into things that look like dinosaurs only insofar as they don't look like lizards anymore. Pitting the two lizards against each other for the fight scene is inexcusable. More humans need to be killed instead.

It is really depressing to think of the film-makers making the lizards fight, just for a dumb spectacle. We definitely do not condone cruelty to lizards or other critters in the making of terrible monster movies.

In any case, to make it up to you, here's a giant green spider that hopefully was allowed to scuttle away unharmed after this take:

In 2007, the UN named Edinburgh, Scotland its first “City of Literature,” acknowledging Edinburgh’s place as one of the literary capitals of the world. Each year since then, Edinburgh has held “One Book One Edinburgh” (this year joined by the cities of Glasgow and Bristol) a citywide reading campaign in which residents are encouraged to read a particular book from Edinburgh’s history. The Literature Trust selected The Lost World as its 2009 book in part because Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, where he also began his literary career.

But the choice of book is also to celebrate the life of Charles Darwin, born 200 years ago next year. Like Doyle, Darwin studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he joined the Plinian Society and developed his interest in natural history. To get readers thinking on the way evolutionary science connects to Doyle’s tale of prehistoric creatures that managed to escape extinction, the campaign has paired it with a comic book biography of Darwin’s life.

This isn’t the first science fiction tale to star in Edinburgh’s literary campaign. Last year, they highlighted Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Lost World Read 2009 runs through February 2009, when the project will hold companion activities and events.

[The Lost World 2009 via The Early Days of a Better Nation]