num_pages: 338
description: A born naturalist and a fearless traveler Vladimir Dinets wrote travel guides conducted field research and lived a couple of lives before he was accepted into the PhD program in zoology at the University of Miami. He thought crocodiles were a dead-end research topicsurvivors from the age of the dinosaurs but not much elseuntil he witnessed groups of up to seventy alligators performing mating choruses that included infrasound vibrationsa form of communication extremely rare in natureand a dance unknown in the scientific literature but that resembled a scene from Jurassic Park . To prove his thesis about the language of crocodiles he spent the next six years traveling around the world on shoestring budgets and in extreme circumstances studying almost every living species. At the same time as a man desiring companionship in life he sought love.With adventures on five continents Dragon Songs is his account of this quest. It includes an escape from a boiling lava lake in the Afar Desert being chased up a tree by a tiger in India hitching a ride with a cocaine smuggler in Bolivia and diving with giant Greenland sharksall in the name of studying crocodiles among which he routinely paddled in his inflatable kayak. Of course not everything went according to plan. But in the end his ground-breaking research helped change the field. And during the course of his adventures he met and courted his future wife.
language: English
title: Dragon Songs: Love and Adventure among Crocodiles, Alligators, and Other Dinosaur Relations
publisher: Arcade Publishing