There, facing me, less than four yards away, crouched the dragon.
He was enormous. From the tip of his narrow head to the end of his long-keeled tail he measured truly twelve feet. He was so close to us that I could distinguish every beady scale in his hoary black skin, which seemingly too large for him, hung in long horizontal folds on his flanks and was puckered and wrinkled round his powerful neck. He was standing high on his four bowed legs, his heavy body lifted clear of the ground, his head erect and menacing. The line of his savage mouth curved upwards in a fixed sardonic grin and from between his half-closed jaws an enormous yellow-pink forked tongue slid in and out…
    No, not a dinosaur, but a Komodo Dragon, as first encountered by the young David Attenborough in his Zoo Quest for a Dragon.  By the 1950s, they were still looking for Doyle's imaginary land, this time in TV nature programs, the BBC, headed up by Attenborough, went hunting modern dragons. The Lost World, done for real, was a gross disappointment and the Komodo Dragons no match for an Allosaurus.
    But who could have guessed that this was the beginning of a man who would be everyone’s friend for my whole lifetime?