And what of my parents’ sighting of Cadborosaurus—the event that propelled me into a career of skeptical paranormal investigation? I’ll leave you with my father’s closing thoughts:
Then it occurred to me: a half-dozen sea lions swimming nose-to-tail would look just like what we were seeing…. We stared and stared, trying to figure it out, debating the possibilities until it turned and swam out to sea. Even at that moment, looking right at it, we couldn’t be sure. Now, 30 years later, I’m almost certain that I saw six or seven sea lions swimming together in a line, one after the other.
But, my wife is still 100 percent certain that she saw Cadborosaurus.
Maybe she’s right.243
THE MONSTERQUEST AFFAIR
IN LATE 2008, I was asked to participate in an episode of a cable-television show called MonsterQuest. Like many of the newer “reality” shows on formerly scientific cable stations, it was pseudoscientific tabloid journalism: lots of moody music and dark, foreboding camera shots promoting one kind of legendary monster or another, with dubious “eyewitness” testimony and sketchy “evidence”—nothing concrete like an actual body or bones. Normally, I ignore such programs as a waste of time and focus on trying to improve real science documentaries. However, this episode concerned the alleged dinosaur in the Congo: Mokele Mbembe. Thought by cryptozoologists to represent a surviving population of sauropod dinosaurs, Mokele Mbembe has often been identified with Brontosaurus—the old name for the gigantic, long-necked, long-tailed Apatosaurus. As a vertebrate paleontologist with considerable experience with dinosaur fossils, I was qualified to speak to at least some of the usual claims made about the creature. I knew that I would be the token skeptic on the program, but I decided that at least one skeptic should appear on the show—otherwise, it would be entirely pseudoscientific fluff.
In January 2009, a two-man crew arrived to film my segments. I set up a quiet classroom with controlled lighting, so they had an undisturbed setting in which to film. I selected a number of real dinosaur specimens and casts to use as props or to fill the background of the shots. The crew set up my “talking-head” interviews in front of a cast of a large duckbill dinosaur skull and filmed me moving teaching fossils around on tables and rolling the cast through hallways on a cart. Most of the questions were relatively straightforward, and I gave them the answers that are found in this chapter.1
The one surprising moment came when I was handed a wrapped package and asked to unwrap it and interpret the contents as the camera rolled. In the package, I found a fist-size shapeless lump of plaster that looked like absolutely nothing. Hoping for a “gotcha” moment, the crew tried it again, showing me photographs of where the plaster cast had been taken and trying to get me to admit that it looked like a dinosaur footprint. They filmed the shot again and again, each time prompting me with more details about where the cast had been made, but it changed nothing. The cast was simply a lump of plaster that had been formed when it was poured into a random hole in the ground. It was clearly not a dinosaur track or, indeed, any animal track. All experienced vertebrate paleontologists have seen many photographs and casts of dinosaur footprints (figure 6.1), and most have visited a number of the important track sites, such as the Paluxy River site in Texas. Martin Lockley, a paleontologist who has spent his career documenting trackways, has written several excellent books on dinosaur tracks.2 Thus paleontologists know what dinosaur tracks actually look like—the tracks of not only sauropods, like the alleged Mokele Mbembe, but also three-toed theropods and many others. And the lump of plaster bore no resemblance to the track of any animal: no symmetry, no flat footpad impression, no distinct toe impressions. It was a fizzle, and the filmmakers were disappointed.
Figure 6.1 Typical sauropod footprints from the Morrison Formation of the western United States, dating to the late Jurassic period (ca. 156–147 million years ago), showing their characteristic shape and evidence of front claw marks: (left) from the Tidwell Member; (right) from the Salt Wash Member. (Photographs courtesy of John Foster)
The episode on Mokele Mbembe first aired in June 2009. It was generally as I had expected from other episodes of MonsterQuest: a soundtrack of spooky music and shots of “explorers” trying to find their way up the Congo Basin through the jungles of Cameroon—but no concrete evidence. No footage of the animal, not even old photographs from past films; no carcasses, bones, or other physical remains. The “explorers” tried to interview local people, but immediately biased their efforts by showing them pictures of a sauropod, thus “leading the witnesses.” If they had let the natives do the drawing, they would have been somewhat more believable, although the Western conception of an “African Brontosaurus” has been widely disseminated across Africa for more than a century. The specter of contaminated testimony is raised by anecdotes told by Mokele Mbembe proponent William Gibbons (one of the MonsterQuest explorers), who relates that when an expedition he led in 2001 pulled into a random “non-descript, one-horse town” in rural Cameroon, a young man turned to a friend and said, “These must be the people looking for the dinosaur.”3 Even worse was an exchange that took place in 2003, while Gibbons was visiting Langoue, Cameroon (the same site to which he took the MonsterQuest crew in 2009). Cryptozoologists find it highly significant when African villagers pick out sauropod pictures from a set of animal flashcards or draw a sauropod-like profile, because (as the MonsterQuest narrator pronounced) they have “virtually no contact with the outside world.”4 But consider the witness who presented himself to Gibbons, and then “immediately picked out a picture of the Diplodocus. ‘Brontosaurus,’ he said, without hesitation. Brian [Sass] and I looked at each other. A brontosaurus? ‘Why did he call it that?’” It turned out that the witness simply recognized the dinosaur from television.5 Finally, it is difficult to know when and if the local people make the same distinctions among myth, legend, and reality that Westerners do.6
The MonsterQuest episode showed a few fuzzy images on underwater sonar, but nothing definitive—especially in waters that support crocodiles, hippos, huge fish, and many other large aquatic animals. The investigators made a big fuss about the holes in the ground from which the “footprint” casts had been made. Finally, they reached the peak of absurdity when they concluded the episode by poking around a large hole in the bank of a river and claiming that a Mokele Mbembe had dug the burrow and was inside. The burrow—if that’s what it was (there are many random holes along riverbanks that are not true burrows)—was definitely not large enough for any creature matching the size of the dinosaur they were hunting. If it was a burrow, it may have been big enough for a snake, a crocodile, or possibly one of the monitor lizards that live in the area. But the investigators claimed that their huge hypothetical dinosaurs squeeze into riverbank caves or burrows, and then seal up the entrances behind themselves, leaving only relatively narrow “air vents.” (These supposed hibernation burrows are vaguely similar in concept to the nesting chambers created by hornbill birds.) Although the sheer size of sauropods renders the burrowing idea silly, the larger problem is that this whole scenario is made up from whole cloth.7 There is absolutely no reason to guess that small holes in the riverbanks may in fact lead to hibernating dinosaurs—nor do the dinosaur hunters seem to have made any effort to support their hunch with any actual digging. It is utterly baseless speculation, pulled as completely from thin air as if they announced that the holes led to pirate treasure or the remains of Jimmy Hoffa. Such breathtaking leaps showed how little actual training in field zoology they have had.
It turns out that none of the “explorers” seems to have had any relevant training in biology. The “chief scientist” and most experienced Mokele Mbembe hunter in the episode, William Gibbons, is a creationist with degrees in religious education.8 His fellow “explorer,” Robert Mullin, is a creationist as well.9 Gibbons has published books on cryptids from a creationist perspective and with no peer review, the most recent of which includes the MonsterQuest expedition.10 Neither their lack of appropria
te training, including the simplest field biology, nor their creationist bias was mentioned in the film or in the narration. Both Gibbons and Mullin were treated as legitimate scientists. To anyone, such as myself, who has done a lot of field research in both biology and geology, their ignorance of basic procedures was painfully obvious by their approach and conclusions. Adding to the play-acting feel of the affair was Mullin’s later declaration that “we were aware that the animal had moved on long ago, we knew when we set out on this particular expedition that it was really more of an opportunity to make a television episode raising awareness of the animal itself than it was a full-fledged expedition.”11
My own part in the film was chopped down considerably, but I was pleased that most of my statements were left intact and not edited to contradict what I had really said (except for the final segment, in which a key phrase had been cut). Oddly, the filmmakers gave me more screen time pushing the cart with the duckbill skull and sorting fossils on the table during the voice-over, compared with the time I actually talked into the camera about the facts of the case. This is consistent with how the rest of the episode was filled with fluff about “explorers” in the Congo, rather than with evidence to support the claims for the existence of Mokele Mbembe.
THE SEARCH FOR MOKELE MBEMBE
Although not as well publicized as those of Bigfoot, Nessie, and the Yeti, the legends of Mokele Mbembe, the alleged dinosaur of the Congo, have a long history. The name is said to come from the Lingala language and is usually translated as “one who stops the flow of rivers.” The creature is most often reported in the upper reaches of the Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic, with the most intense interest focused around Lake Tele and the surrounding regions in the Republic of the Congo.12 Like those of other cryptids, the lore and eyewitness descriptions of Mokele Mbembe are very discrepant, but a canonical image has emerged in the cryptozoological literature and in popular culture: it is envisioned as a sauropod the size of an elephant (or larger), with a long neck, no hair, and a long tail. Its skin is reddish brown, brown, or gray, depending on the report. It is said to live in the deeper water of the lakes in the Congo Basin and in the deep channels in the cut banks of the rivers. Some descriptions suggest that it has pillar-like legs and leaves tracks with a three-clawed foot impression, although other accounts differ about its trackways.
Early Testimony
Rumors of enormous beasts hidden in the Congo region date back to at least the sixteenth century. In 1776, French missionary Abbé Lievain Bonaventure Proyart’s History of Loango, Kakonga, and Other Kingdoms in Africa alleged, “The missionaries have observed in passing along a forest, the track of an animal which they have never seen; but it must be monstrous, the prints of its claws are seen on the earth, and formed an impression on it of about three feet in circumference. In observing the posture and disposition of the footsteps, they concluded that it did not run this part of its way, and that it carried its claws at a distance of seven or eight feet one from the other.”13 Of course, stories about giant footprints are as widespread as human storytellers, and there seems no reason beyond geographic coincidence to infer any connection between the Proyart anecdote (the two sentences quoted from his book are the entirety of the story) and the modern Mokele Mbembe cryptid. While cryptozoologists have sought confirmation of their “living dinosaur” story in both African rock painting14 and Middle Eastern art and literature of antiquity—citing as evidence even the sirrush dragons on the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, which was 2,800 miles away from Lake Tele in present-day Iraq (figure 6.2)15—the idea of an elusive African dinosaur-like animal seems to have developed only after the discovery in the nineteenth century of fossil dinosaurs and other reptiles from the Mesozoic era (250–65 million years ago). This is not to say that there weren’t monster yarns in Africa; of course there were. It’s just that Africa’s teeming menagerie of folkloric monsters did not in any clear way describe dinosaurs—not, that is, until the twentieth century.
Figure 6.2
A sirrush dragon from the Ishtar Gate, ca. 575 B.C.E.
This is a familiar story. As seen in the discussion of sea serpents and the Loch Ness monster, dinosaur discoveries influenced popular fiction—especially pulp and science fiction—and the folklore (and fakelore) of monsters as well. As early as 1833, arguments were advanced that ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs might survive in the oceans; by 1864, Jules Verne and other authors had made encounters between modern humans and relict prehistoric beasts into a familiar literary trope.16 The golden age of dinosaur paleontology reached a frenzied peak at the dawn of the twentieth century, igniting the imagination of millions. In particular, the world’s first exhibits of mounted sauropod skeletons opened to teeming crowds and buzzing press in 1905. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Brontosaurus was unveiled at a gala luncheon attended by celebrities, titans of industry, and scientific superstars (including J. P. Morgan and Nikola Tesla) (figure 6.3).17 When the doors opened to the public, “crowds poured by thousands” into the museum for a peek.18 Meanwhile in London, the Natural History Museum revealed with similar fanfare its mounted, cast replica of another enormous sauropod, Diplodocus—which was a personal gift from Scottish American industrialist Andrew Carnegie to King Edward VII.19 Other heads of state clamored for Diplodocus replicas for their own national museums, and Carnegie was happy to oblige. In 1907, American crowds stood in awe of Carnegie’s original Diplodocus in its mounting in the newly constructed Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh. Further replicas of Diplodocus were installed in Berlin in 190820 and Paris in 1910 (figure 6.4),21 with still others going to the great museums of Austria, Italy, Russia, Spain, Argentina, and Mexico.22
Figure 6.3 The mounted skeleton of Brontosaurus (now called Apatosaurus) in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. (From W. D. Matthew, Dinosaurs: With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections [New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1915], fig. 19)
Anyone who has ever marveled at a dinosaur skeleton—perhaps even one of the original mountings of Apatosaurus or Diplodocus—will agree that these fossilized animals are an impressive and humbling sight. Yet it may not be possible for us to truly appreciate what it was like for the crowds who flooded into museums in the years 1905 to 1910 to see sauropod dinosaur skeletons for the very first time. They had never before seen a toy or a movie or a video-game depiction of these titanic creatures. To behold these reptiles’ impossible-looking necks stretching into the rafters was a shock to the imagination. The wondering question echoed from country to country: What would it have been like to encounter dinosaurs in the flesh? Fiction writers leaped to answer that question, with Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) stranding its bold adventurers on a remote plateau teeming with prehistoric animals. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books explored several variations on this “lost world” genre, with his heroes confronting dinosaurs and primeval beasts in a hollow Earth (At the Earth’s Core [1914] and its sequels), on a mysterious island (The Land That Time Forgot [1918] and its sequels), and in a hidden African valley (Tarzan the Terrible [1921]).
Figure 6.4 Museum workers installing a replica of Andrew Carnegie’s Diplodocus in the Musée d’histoire naturelle in Paris. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
As much a promotional coup as a marvel of natural history, Carnegie’s Diplodocus was an international sensation. Admiring accounts appeared in the African press, just as they did elsewhere. In Africa, however, mentions of Diplodocus and Brontosaurus took on a competitive edge after 1907, when mining engineer Bernhard Sattler and paleontologist Eberhard Fraas discovered the fossilized bones of a massive new sauropod in German East Africa (a colonial territory that encompassed most of present-day Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania).23 It was against this backdrop of sensational sauropod skeleton exhibits in
Europe and dramatic sauropod fossil discoveries in Africa that famous exotic-animal dealer, animal and ethnographic entertainment showman, and zoo pioneer Carl Hagenbeck24 stepped forward to present a seductive possibility: What if sauropods like Brontosaurus were not truly extinct, but instead lived on in the remote swamps of Africa? According to Hagenbeck’s book Beasts and Men (1909) there was reason to think that was the case:
Some years ago I received reports … of the existence of an immense and wholly unknown animal, said to inhabit the interior of Rhodesia. Almost identical stories reached me, firstly, through one of my own travellers, and, secondly, through an English gentleman, who had been shooting big-game in Central Africa…. The natives, it seemed, had told both my informants that in the depth of the great swamps there dwelt a huge monster, half elephant, half dragon…. [I]t seems to me that it can only be some kind of dinosaur, seemingly akin to the brontosaurus…. At great expense, therefore, I sent out an expedition to find the monster, but unfortunately they were compelled to return home without having proved anything, either one way or the other…. Notwithstanding this failure, I have not relinquished the hope of being able to present science with indisputable evidence of the existence of the monster. And perhaps if I succeed in this enterprise naturalists all the world over will be roused to hunt vigorously for other unknown animals; for if this prodigious dinosaur, which is supposed to have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years, be still in existence, what other wonders may not be brought to light?25
This startling suggestion was merely an aside in Hagenbeck’s book, but his celebrity as an expert on novel foreign animals (he was the first person to introduce many now-familiar species to Europe—and even to science)26 ensured that his claim made headlines from New York to New Dehli.27 “Brontosaurus Still Lives,” proclaimed the Washington Post.28 With those headlines, Hagenbeck’s book launched what would become the modern cryptozoological legend of Mokele Mbembe. This press no doubt enhanced the appeal not only of the book, but of the cement-dinosaur attraction that Hagenbeck added to his zoo in Hamburg the following year—featuring as its centerpiece a 66-foot Diplodocus (“an exact copy of the skeleton of the same animal … with the addition of having the flesh on”) (figure 6.5).29
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