Tourists visiting Tikal today can only imagine what the once-great Mayan city looked like over 1,000 years ago. 

The film opens in the jungles of Guatemala. A lightning storm illuminates a prowling black jaguar and the ruins of the lost city of Tikal, once the heart of the ancient Mayan civilization. One thousand years ago, this great metropolis was mysteriously abandoned. What happened here? What decided the fate of this place, and what can the distant events that befell it tell us about our own cities, our own civilization? What keeps all cities alive?

In the search for answers, "Lost Worlds" takes the audience on a journey up into a world high above the streets of New York City, and down into the soil of the Catskill Mountains and beyond; we plunge into the kelp forests of the Pacific and investigate biodiversity with a team of scientists in the remote and fantastic table mountains of Venezuela. Weaving together the stories of these different worlds, the film provides insight into the diversity and interrelatedness of living things, and ultimately, into the puzzle of human survival itself.

En route to the Lost World, expedition members thread their way past the slippery backside of plummeting Hacha Falls in the Venezuelan highlands.