A Creature From the Jungles of Africa: Tales of the Mokele-Mbembe

Some cryptids are more fun than others. Or to put it another way: Who doesn’t love a dinosaur?

Africa’s Mokele-Mbembe isn’t the first potential prehistoric reptile we’ve seen. Nessie and other glacial-lake monsters could be remnant populations of plesiosaurs. It’s not all that likely, and there are a number of answers to the question of what they might be, but the possibility is there.

The creature of the tropics is a bit different. Witnesses tell of a large, smooth-skinned, brownish-grey animal, at least 25 to 30 feet (7-10 meters) long, with a long tail, a heavy body with short, thick legs, and a long, serpentine neck. Its head is small, with a single tooth or curved horn. The description resembles a sauropod, perhaps a small Apatosaurus.

These gigantic herbivores lived in habitats similar to the Congo River Basin. Like them, the Mokele-Mbembe appears to feed on plants, though it may also eat fish. It’s not especially aggressive, and it doesn’t seem to attack humans unless provoked. At most it may capsize a boat or get in the way of local fishermen. In that it’s similar to other aquatic and semiaquatic cryptids.

The name Mokele-Mbembe means “one who stops the flow of rivers” in the Lingala language. Originally it seems to have been a spirit of the land and the waters, like the Australian Bunyip or the monster of Lake Okanagan. It’s European colonizers who made the connection with dinosaurs, riding the wave of discoveries in paleontology.

The first maybe-account by a European dates from the eighteenth century, but it wasn’t until the twentieth that descriptions and sightings became more common. Captain Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz was sent in 1913 to survey German colonies in what’s now Cameroon. He described the creature in detail, though he seems to have treated the story as folklore rather than scientific fact. His account captured the imagination of would-be monster hunters and, somewhat ironically, creationist Christians attempting to either prove or disprove that dinosaurs and humans have coexisted within the six-thousand-year history of the world.

Sightings increased in number and frequency through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. There was even a Smithsonian expedition in 1920-21, which investigated large tracks of an unknown animal, and heard unidentifiable roaring. The expedition ended tragically, without ever finding the source of the tracks or the sounds.

Around 1959, an actual Mokele-Mbembe was killed near Lake Tele, as reported by an American missionary, Rev. Eugene Thomas. According to him, the creature had been interfering with fishing in the area. Locals built a spiked fence to repel it, but it broke through and was killed. The story goes on to relate that the hunters cooked and ate their quarry, but they all became ill and died.

That seems to be the only story in which anyone managed to capture a Mokele-Mbembe, let alone kill and eat it (and pay for it with their lives). There’s an element of cautionary tale here, and a distinct whiff of folklore as well. The Reverend does seem to have believed in the beast, and claimed to have seen it twice himself, though he doesn’t seem to have produced any physical or photographic evidence.

Multiple expeditions have been mounted to find the animal. A Japanese team in 1992 claimed to have captured footage. It shows a blurry, pixelated image of something dark in a stretch of water, which may have a large, rounded body and a long, curved neck. Real animal? Pareidolia? It’s hard to tell.

As always, we have to ask, is this real? Mythical? Misidentified? The idea of a dinosaur in the jungle is tremendously appealing to the modern imagination, but could it be something known to science? A hippo, a rhinoceros, a crocodile? Even an elephant?

The lack of physical evidence is frustrating as always, but in the world of cryptozoology, hope springs eternal. Someday, maybe, just maybe, someone will find a living specimen. Or at the very least, the remains of one.

In the meantime, there’s a lesson to be taken, and a possible reason for the increase in sightings. The area in which the Mokele-Mbembe is supposed to live is suffering from human encroachment. The rise in deforestation has detroyed critical habitat for many known species, let alone one that may not in fact exist—or still exist, if somehow a population of sauropods survived into the modern era.

What was once a cautionary tale of dangers in the water has become a broader warning. Earth is being destroyed. The climate is changing. We’re already on the threshold of mass extinctions. One of those might just be the last of the sauropods.