The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story is a 2017 nonfiction book by Douglas Preston.

It is about a project headed by documentary filmmakers Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson that used LiDAR to search for archaeological sites in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve of the Gracias a Dios Department in the Mosquitia region of eastern Honduras.

[1] The expedition was a joint Honduran-American multidisciplinary effort involving Honduran and American archaeologists, anthropologists, engineers, geologists, biologists and ethnobotanists.

The title of the book derives from four expeditions launched in the 1930s by the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation) in which Honduran informants described to explorers, including Theodore Morde, sensationalized stories of a lost city with a pyramid topped by a giant stone statue of a monkey god somewhere in the Mosquitia region.

They were able to confirm the presence of large abandoned prehispanic settlements and to document plazas, terracing, canals, roads, earthen structures including a pyramid, and concentrations of artifacts, among them decorated cylindrical stone vessels and metates, confirming the existence of an ancient city.