In 1985 Douglas Adams was sent by a newspaper to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to search for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. Mark is an experienced zoologist and his role on the expedition was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. Douglas, on the other hand, was an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise, the biggest of which was that they actually found one. Douglas was absolutely riveted by this experience and decided he wanted more of it. Three years later, he and Mark set off on a further six expeditions - to Mauritius to find the world's rarest fruitbat and a mad Welshman; to Zaire to find man's closest living relatives, the gorillas; to Indonesia to find the man-eating dragons of Komodo; to China to find a blind dolphin; and to New Zealand to find the world's fattest and least aerodynamic parrot, the kakapo. The resulting book tells the story of the animals they found, but also of the journeys they made to find them, the people they met and the difficulties they overcame.