The Mokele-Mbembe from Loren Coleman's book, "Cryptozoology A To Z"

The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman—these are the names of the elusive beasts that have caught the eye and captured the imaginations of people around the world for centuries. Recently, tales of these "monsters" have been corroborated by an increase in sightings, and out of these legends a new science has been born: cryptozoology—the study of hidden animals. Today we take a look at the Mokele-Mbembe... the African dinosaur...

The following is from the book "Cryptozoology A To Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature" by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark here.

For hundreds of years, stories of surviving dinosaurs have come out of the jungles of central Africa. The first printed reference, in a 1776 book, relates Abbe Proyhart's discovery of giant, clawed animal footprints in west central Africa, tracks that he claimed were three feet across. In 1913, a German expedition in the Congo met a band of pygmies who described an animal they called Mokele-mbembe, which means "one who stops the flow of rivers." They said this beast was about the size of an elephant or hippopotamus, with a long, flexible neck and a long tail like an alligator's. This description would be repeated by numerous witnesses since. It is consistent with a sauropod or other small dinosaur.

Mokele-mbembe reportedly does not like hippopotamuses and will kill them on sight, but it does not eat them. Perhaps lending credence to this allegation, cryptozoologist Roy Mackal has found that hippos are curiously absent from areas where Mokele-mbembe is said to live. Pygmies claim that Mokele-mbembe attacks and kills any humans who get too close to it, but it would not eat them, because of its strictly herbivorous diet. The pygmies of the Likouala swamp region report that the essential diet of Mokele-mbembe consists of the Malombo plant. (The term "Malombo plant" actually denotes two plants: Landolphia mannii and Landolphia owariensis.)

Numerous expeditions have been mounted in search of Mokele-mbembe. In 1980 and 1981, monster-hunter Mackal headed explorations into the Likouala and Lake Tele regions of the Congo, reputed hot spots of dinosaur sightings. Mackal documented a number of past eyewitness accounts, including one dramatic story of how one Mokele-mbembe was attacked and killed. Pascal Moteka, who lived near Lake Tele, said that his people had once constructed a barrier of wooden spikes across a river to keep the giant beasts from interfering with their fishing. When Mokele-mbembe tried to break through the barrier, the assembled villagers managed to kill it with spears. Celebrating their triumph, the people butchered and cooked the carcass, but everyone who ate the dinosaur meat reportedly died soon afterward.

Mackal never saw the creature himself, though he says he did have one close call. One day while paddling down the Likouala River in dugout canoes, his group heard a loud "plop" sound, and a large wake splashed up on the far bank. The pygmy guides cried out frightfully, "Mokele-mbembe! Mokele-mbembe!" Mackal and his colleagues believed that only a large animal diving under the water could have caused such a wake, and since hippos are not present in the Likouala area, they suspected that they narrowly missed seeing the elusive cryptid.

Marcellin Agnagna, a Congolese biologist who had accompanied Mackal on his searches, led his own expedition in 1983. Agnagna claimed to have a firsthand sighting of a Mokele-mbembe as it waded in Lake Tele. He described it as having the long-necked form typically attributed to the creature, though he could not see its legs or tail, which remained underwater. Agnagna had a movie camera, but he later reported that there was little film left when the creature appeared, and he began filming it without realizing that the lens cap was still on. Thus, even though he says he observed the animal for about twenty minutes before it submerged and vanished, Agnagna was sadly left with no photographic evidence.

In 1992, members of a Japanese film crew captured some of the best photographic evidence of a Mokele-mbembe. As they were filming aerial footage from a small plane over the area of Lake Tele, intending to obtain some panoramic landscape shots for a documentary, they noticed a large shape moving across the surface of the lake and leaving a V-shaped wake behind itself. The cameraman zoomed in and got about fifteen seconds of the object in motion before it dived under the surface.

The resulting footage, though jumpy and indistinct, shows a vertical protuberance at the front of the object—possibly a long neck. A second, shorter projection could be a humped back or a tail. If the object is not a dinosaur, it's difficult to say what animal it could be, since a crocodile would not have two such protrusions above the water, and an elephant would not submerge in the way the object does. The explanation that makes the best visual match is actually two men paddling a canoe, though the object's speed is too fast to be a nonpowered boat.

The existence of dinosaurs in central Africa is unlikely, but not a total scientific impossibility. According to cryptozoologist Karl Shuker, "If dinosaurs could exist unknown to science anywhere in the world, the Likouala is where they would be."

To read more, purchase the book "Cryptozoology A To Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature" by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark here.