The Flight of Dragons

From the dust jacket: "This thrilling book combines fact with fantasy, science with romance. In an elegant exposition Peter Dickinson, award-winning novelist, sets out to prove that dragons did exist. The mythology of dragons gives many surprisingly consistent clues as to the size and nature of the beasts. Peter Dickinson has woven these intriguing folk-tales and anecdotes into a riveting thesis on how so great a creature as the dragon actually managed to fly. His theory exactly ties in with reports on dragons' flight patterns, eating habits and family life. He reveals to us the dragon's special reasons for hoarding gold, their distinctive mating and evolutionary cycle, in a romantic yet well-researched and wholly satifying construction of the dragon's way of life."