Regular Episode
043 – CRYPT O’ ZOOLOGY: DINOSAURS IN AFRICA!
The episode also touches on the forthcoming book Don is co-writing with Skeptic magazine’s own Daniel Loxton — a skeptical survey of cryptozoology that was still in draft at the time of recording (it would eventually be published as 📚 Abominable Science! 💵).
🦕 What Even Is a Sauropod?
For the uninitiated, Don walks through the basic taxonomy: sauropods are the long-necked, long-tailed giants — Apatosaurus (the artist formerly known as Brontosaurus), Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus — while theropods are the bipedal branch that includes T. rex and, crucially, modern birds. The conversation touches on why birds fossilize so poorly (hollow, delicate bones), why crocodilians and turtles sailed straight through the K-Pg boundary while non-avian dinosaurs did not, and why the extinction event is still more complicated than the “meteor hits Earth, end of story” version favored by documentary producers.
Don also touches on why the sauropod body plan has never been replicated by mammals — the short answer involves gigantothermy, surface-area-to-volume ratios, and the fact that fully endothermic animals the size of Brachiosaurus would essentially cook themselves. The largest land mammals ever — the rhino-relatives Paraceratherium (which Don worked on) — got nowhere near sauropod proportions before running into the same thermal wall.
🌍 The Claims Behind Mokele-Mbembe
The Mokele-Mbembe legend draws on a mixed bag of sources: 19th-century missionary accounts, 20th-century explorer reports, and more recent expeditions up the rivers of Cameroon and the Congo. Don notes that the descriptions are strikingly inconsistent — some sound vaguely sauropod-like, others resemble entirely different animals, and some match nothing in the paleontological record at all. As he puts it, inconsistency in witness descriptions is usually “the tip of the history of most cryptids.”
A key interpretive problem is translation and leading-the-witness. Blake relays a vivid example from his correspondence with herpetologist Kate Jackson, author of 📚 Mean and Lowly Things 💵: while living in the Congo to study snakes, Jackson went swimming in a river and a local woman — who had never seen a white woman in the water — began shouting that there was a mermaid. The woman wasn’t lying; she was reaching for the nearest available category. Don makes a similar point about rhinos: jungle-dwelling peoples who have never left the Congo Basin would find an accidental rhino encounter just as inexplicable as a sauropod, since rhinos are savanna animals and the two ecosystems don’t overlap. And, as Kate Jackson also noted, one common translation of “Mokele-Mbembe” is simply “thing that isn’t real.”
🔬 What the Fossil Record Actually Says
Don’s strongest skeptical case is paleontological, not anecdotal. Africa has an excellent fossil record — the finest Brachiosaurus specimen comes from Tanzania, a few hundred kilometers from the Congo Basin. Through the entire Cenozoic (the 65 million years since the non-avian dinosaurs vanished), Africa yields large animals in abundance: early relatives of mastodons, the bizarre Arsinoitherium, and more. A breeding population of multi-ton sauropods would not be subtle in the fossil record — and it simply isn’t there, anywhere on the planet, at any point after the K-Pg boundary.
There’s also a more up-to-date problem with the cryptozoological image of Mokele-Mbembe: the creature is consistently described as a swamp-dwelling, semi-aquatic animal that lurks in deep water. But modern paleontology has thoroughly revised the sauropod lifestyle. Track assemblages and sediment analysis make clear that sauropods were not swamp creatures — they were essentially dinosaurian giraffes, living in open, seasonally dry habitats and using those long necks to browse treetops, not to snorkel. The Mokele-Mbembe image, Don argues, is frozen in the early-20th-century conception of sauropods as sluggish, semi-submerged giants — which means it’s a cultural artifact, not a biological observation.
📺 MonsterQuest, Plaster Casts, and Bible Colleges
Don recounts being recruited as the token skeptic for a MonsterQuest episode on Mokele-Mbembe. The producers handed him an elaborately wrapped plaster lump on camera and asked him to identify it as a dinosaur footprint. (Spoiler: it looked like a shapeless lump of plaster, because it was a shapeless lump of plaster.) The expedition footage, meanwhile, featured two “cryptozoology explorers” navigating the river in Cameroon — men whose highest academic credentials turned out to be degrees from Bible colleges, a fact the episode conspicuously failed to mention. Their field biology, Don notes, reflected this: they were visibly baffled by a deep spot in a river and identified what appeared to be a crocodile burrow in a riverbank as a potential dinosaur den — claiming the creature crawled in and filled the hole in behind itself.
⛪ Creationism and the Dinosaur Hunt
Don flags what he calls the defining characteristic of recent Mokele-Mbembe expeditions: they are almost entirely creationist enterprises. Cryptozoologist Roy Mackal — a legitimate University of Chicago geneticist who went somewhat off the rails after becoming convinced he’d seen the Loch Ness Monster — was one of the last non-creationist researchers active in this area. Since then, figures like Bill Gibbons have run repeated expeditions whose stated purpose, spelled out plainly on their own websites, is to disprove evolution. The logic: if a creature officially extinct for 65 million years were found alive, it would somehow undermine evolutionary theory. Don is mystified by the reasoning — after all, birds are non-avian dinosaurs’ living cousins, and the coelacanth‘s rediscovery didn’t upend anything. But the glamour of Indiana Jones-style jungle exploration (and the fundraising appeal it has to congregation members) keeps the expeditions coming. Roy Chapman Andrews — the real-life model for Indiana Jones — was, fittingly, a paleontologist.
The creationist thread pulls the conversation into a brief detour on Noah’s Ark expeditions and the baramin concept — the creationist workaround that compresses all of cat evolution, all of dog evolution, and so on into a single “created kind” on the ark, then requires rates of speciation that would make any bacterium blush.
📉 The Evidence Gets Worse the More You Look
Don closes with what he identifies as the signature pattern of all major cryptids: the more people look, and the better the technology they bring, the less they find. Congo jungles that were genuinely remote a century ago are now traversed by professional zoologists year-round. Google Earth — civilian-grade, not even military satellite quality — can resolve individual elephants from orbit. A breeding population of large animals surfacing in open rivers would not escape notice indefinitely. The evidence for Mokele-Mbembe is not holding steady; it is actively shrinking. Which is, as Don puts it, “a description of almost all the other cryptids.”
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Abominable Science! 💵 by Donald Prothero and Daniel Loxton (the book discussed in draft during this interview)
– 📚 A Living Dinosaur?: In Search of Mokele-Mbembe 💵 by Roy P. Mackal
– 📚 Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo 💵 by Kate Jackson
– 📚 Things and More Things 💵 by Ivan T. Sanderson
– 📖 Beasts and Men by Carl Hagenbeck (“Of Beasts and Men” per the show notes)
🔗 Related Links
– Mokele-Mbembe (Wikipedia)
– Roy Mackal — University of Chicago biologist turned cryptozoologist
– Ivan T. Sanderson — naturalist and cryptozoology pioneer
– Bernard Heuvelmans — “father of cryptozoology,” mentioned in passing
– Sauropoda — the dinosaur group at the center of the Mokele-Mbembe claim
– Paraceratherium — largest known land mammal, discussed in context of body-size limits
– Coelacanth — the “living fossil” creationists hoped would overturn evolution (it didn’t)
– Roy Chapman Andrews — the real-world model for Indiana Jones, and an actual paleontologist
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
FROM THE LOST WORLD to Alley Oop to The Flintstones, the idea of dinosaurs and humans living together has captured the imagination of readers across the globe. But there are some who believe that this idea isn’t fictional. Is there a population of sauropod dinosaurs living in Africa in modern times?
In this episode of MonsterTalk, we interview paleontologist Dr. Donald Prothero at TAM9 about his research into the creature known as Mokele Mbembe! Cryptozoology, paleontology and creationism converge in the jungles of the Congo.
Cryptozoologist literature on Mokele Mbembe
- “Of Beasts and Men” by Carl Hagenbeck
- “A Living Dinosaur?” by Roy Mackal
- “Things and More Things” by Ivan Sanderson
Music
- Music for the intro included traditional African music from Archive.org used through a creative commons license. This was from a collection of Congo music and sounds collected by Thomas Ladonne.
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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