Dragon Lizards of Komodo

An Expedition to the Lost World of the Dutch East Indies

In the early 1920’s, renowned American geologist, naturalist and hunter, William Douglas Burden, led expeditions to the Arctic as well as to tropical islands. His most widely publicized expedition was to the Dutch East Indies to the Island of Komodo in 1926. He and his first wife, Catherine White Burden, and their party went looking for a fierce direct descendent of the dinosaur, Varanus Komodoensis, which came to be known as the Komodo dragon and which had been rumored to be as long as 30 feet. No white man had captured one, and Mr. Burden was determined to do so…