Searching for Dragons

The third edition of Searching for Ropens will be retitled “Searching for Dragons,” with an official publication date that will probably be early in 2012. Some of the revisions are extensive. I here quote from the present version of this edition, from the first two paragraphs of the first chapter.

It looked like a dead pterodactyl, not fossil bones but with skin, like it had died recently. Could those creatures, non-extinct, still fly? Although I never verified the authenticity of the photograph in the soon-forgotten library book, the idea behind that image would be awakened four decades later, plunging me into the most dramatic adventure of my life: exploring a remote tropical island, searching for giant living pterosaurs.

My first exposure to a remote tropical island with a giant reptile—when my younger sister Cindy and I were infants—came from Mommy reading Peter Pan. (When I was four, my second younger sister was born, not to the name chosen by Cindy and me, “Captain Hook,” but to a name of judicious parental compromise: “Wendy.”) Each character of the story had a role, but the crocodile enigma at first puzzled me; it eventually resolved into both good and bad: useful to Peter Pan as enemy to Hook, but generally dangerous.

Those who enjoyed the first or second edition of Searching for Ropens should be happy reading Searching for Dragons, for much has been added, including new eyewitness accounts. Here is one report from Australia:

Around the late 1990’s, in the state of Victoria, near the Dandenong Ranges, just east of Melbourne, at about 9:00 p.m., he saw what he first thought was a pelican flying about 3000 feet high; but he soon felt that it was too big to be a pelican. . . . This thing was at least as large as a light plane, say a Cessna. It was about 5 klms away and was lazily flapping its wings, flying to the east, at that point a clear sky. It appeared to be lit up by the moonlight and shining as if it had no feathers . . . I could see it quite clearly.

Cryptozoology Book (Searching for Dragons)

Quoting an early version of the last paragraph of the title page of the book:

“Believe what you will about Darwin’s writings on the common descent of all life on earth. But these pages extol the credibility of natives whom Darwin would have thought less evolved than himself, natives some Westerners consider superstitious and unworthy of belief when their testimonies appear to contradict the extinction assumptions that support Darwin’s ideas. Believe what you will about Darwin, but most native and Western eyewitnesses that we have interviewed have been found credible.”