Mokele Persists, Even Despite Prothero

Daniel Loxton & Donald Prothero's 2013 book Abominable Science! remains regularly cited in publications and praised as one of the best cryptozoological books, being one of the first in a wave of early 2010's general audience publications critically analyzing and scrutinizing cryptozoology. Cryptozoological enthusiast communities regularly dismiss Abominable Science! as a skeptical attack on the subject rather than good-natured criticism, from two authors otherwise unassociated with the subject ("skeptical" refers to coming from the skeptic community, the Dawkins fans and their Skeptic subscriptions). I cannot say I necessarily disagree, in part because Abominable Science! is full of sloppy scholarship and, at times, outright misinformation - so much for being "one of the most meticulously researched and checked" books on cryptozoology...

My focus here is on the chapter discussing mokele-mbembe, the alleged "living dinosaur" of Central Africa, written primarily by Prothero. This chapter, in particular, has had its claims uncritically regurgitated and exaggerated across the internet, acting as the primary source for popular videos by TreyTheExplainer, Dr. Polaris, and coldcrashpictures, amongst others.

The claims of the chapter are as follows, to be discussed and/or critiqued in order. Not all of them are wrong, but all have flaws in presentation or need some additional context:

1. Mokele-mbembe originates primarily from science writer Willy Ley, whose sources are not accessible for inspection, suggesting fabrication

2. Mokele-mbembe is a Western cultural projection, fueled by ideas of Africa as a "lost world" and 1920s "bronto-mania"

3. Roy Mackal's cryptozoological expeditions seeking mokele-mbembe in the 1970s gathered testimonies by leading witnesses, indirect threats of violence, and monetary bribes, suggesting little, if any, facticity

4. Mokele-mbembe cannot be a sauropod, as sauropod survival into the present day in essentially impossible

5. The primary faces of the modern mokele-mbembe search are Young Earth Creationists (YECs)

CLAIM ONE: Mokele-mbembe originates primarily from science writer Willy Ley, whose sources are not accessible for inspection, suggesting fabrication

Mokele-mbembe, in Western understanding, originates from the reports gathered by German military officer Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz (Stein from hereon), who led the Likuala-Kongo Expedition into the then-colony of Kamerun, now part of the norther Republic of the Congo, in 1913. The expedition ended early due to the outbreak of World War I the following year, causing Stein's account of the zoological and botanical findings of the expedition to go unpublished. The chapter incorrectly asserts that this report is “known to the cryptozoological literature only from the fragment translated by Ley in the 1940s - and the background for it is known only from Ley’s brief discussion" (p. 275), referring to the first publication of these passages in English by romantic zoologist Willy Ley in his 1948 book The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn.

Ley got this information, first published in German, from Wilhelm Bölsche who shared it almost twenty years earlier in his 1929 pamphlet Drachen. This fact is explicitly stated in several primary mokele-mbembe texts, including the introduction to Roy Mackal's A Living Dinosaur?, the go-to mokele-mbembe text, and a source heavily-utilized throughout the chapter. This oversight only becomes more inexcusable knowing that Drachen was scanned and made available to read by the Internet Archive in 2010.

Drachen was published while Stein was still alive, making any fabrication on Bölsche's part significantly more convoluted. I continue this post treating this possibility as highly unlikely - fabrication has yet to be proven, and the poor research of those who propose it gives their claims little merit. On Stein's end, it's necessary to emphasize that this was an academic manuscript resulting from a government expedition, part of a series which is still regularly cited in works on Cameroon's ethnology, hydrography, and other similar topics - fabrication here seem unlikely.

To my knowledge, no significant effort has been made to date to try and relocate Stein's unpublished manuscript in full, Stein's correspondences with Bölsche, or Ley's correspondences with Bölsche. Ley's materials are collected and fully processed at NASM's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia - this is likely the most promising place to start.

CLAIM TWO: Mokele-mbembe is a Western cultural projection, fueled by ideas of Africa as a "lost world" and 1920s "bronto-mania"

The notion of dinosaurs living in Africa was an incredibly popular one in early 1900s tabloids and science fiction literature - the popularity of a throwaway passage in Carl Hangenbeck's Beasts and Men certainly attests to this. Loxton and Prothero gather several hoaxes from this time period, from elsewhere in Africa (i.e. the Sahara, South Africa), and use them to assert broadly that because there were some projections and fabrications in some parts of Africa, all claims of living dinosaurs in Africa must be projections and fabrications; “We can infer that this African dinosaur was a cultural creation, a creature from the imagination projected onto the African landscape because it was projected everywhere - eventually including the Congo.” (p. 273)

This claim is quite poorly evidenced, and to me reeks of skeptical hypocrisy - the replacing of a pseudoscientific theory with another, equally implausible one in skeptical literature. Their framing of these projections solely as pure fabrications further neglects the fact that some legitimate events and folklore were swept into this craze, labeled and branded as dinosaurian. For example, in On The Track Of Unknown Animals (p. 547-550), Bernard Heuvelmans discusses the Angolan lipata, sought out as part of a Swiss expedition in 1932. Although treated as "some kind of 'brontosaurus'" by the Swiss team, which included trained zoologists, it was determined that the lipata "consists merely of large and old specimens of [Crocodylus] vulgaris (niloticus)." The only projection here was the claim that these were dinosaurian - if Loxton and Prothero intended to make this point, their poor evidencing and prior claim of mokele's fabrication muddles it.

Did anything dinosaurian makes it way into Stein's manuscript? To answer, I've reproduced the passages on the subject in full from pages 164 and 165 of Willy Ley's The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn, the same source used by Loxton and Prothero. Quotes from Stein's manuscript are italicized, while Ley's input is not:

“In 1913, the German government sent an expedition under the leadership of Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz to make a general survey of its colony in the Cameroons. The official report of this expedition, which is still in manuscript, contains a fairly extensive section dealing with Schomburgk’s unknown animal. It is only natural that Captain von Stein worded his report with the utmost caution, referring guardedly to a "very mysterious thing"; which "possibly does not exist except in the imagination of the natives"; but which is "probably based on something more tangible." Captain von Stein's evidence consisted, as he expressed it, of "narratives of natives of the former German colony" (Cameroons) about a "creature feared very much by the Negroes of certain parts of the territory of the Congo, the lower Ubangi, the Sanga, and the Ikelemba rivers." He stressed the fact that the narratives came from "experienced guides who repeated characteristic features of the story without knowing each other." The natives named the creature Mokele-mbembe, but whether the name had any special meaning was uncertain. Captain von Stein wrote:

“The creature is reported not to live in the smaller rivers like the two Likualas, and in the rivers mentioned only a few individuals are said to exist. At the time of our expedition a specimen was reported from the non- navigable part of the Sanga River, somewhere between the two rivers Mbaio and Pikunda; unfortunately in a part of the river that could not be explored due to the brusque end of our expedition. We also heard about the alleged animal at the Ssombo River. The narratives of the natives result in a general description that runs as follows:

The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus. It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn. A few spoke about a long muscular tail like that of an alligator. Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies. The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends. It is said to climb the shore even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable. This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth. The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and apple-like fruits. At the Ssombo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food. The path was fresh and there were plants of the described type near by. But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty.”

There is nothing explicitly dinosaurian here. Stein's report is vague enough to be interpreted several ways (and has been), from pangolin to seerpent, from crocodile to sauropod. The only projection here seems to be from subsequent authors.

It's also necessary to note that in their quoting, Loxton and Prothero entirely omit Stein's hesitant framing, something seen elsewhere in the book.

CLAIM THREE: Roy Mackal's cryptozoological expeditions seeking mokele-mbembe in the 1970s gathered testimonies by leading witnesses, indirect threats of violence, and monetary bribes, suggesting little, if any, facticity

Loxton and Prothero correctly point out that, by Roy Mackal's own word in A Living Dinosaur?, gifts and compensation were offered to villages where testimonies were gathered, armed guards were present with the group, and information was seemingly fed to local informants. To my knowledge, these facts had not been mentioned in the literature prior, despite it directly affecting the credibility of all testimonies gathered. I applaud the authors for bringing these facts to light. Even so, the statement “this is merely the extent of the leading that Mackal tells us they did” (p. 281) is pretty superfluous and unnecessary - this book is full of little jabs of that sort.

All of the information gathered by Mackal's expeditions is, deservedly, suspect, but there have been several corroborated claims which do suggest some facticity. As a ground rule, more scrutiny is needed when analyzing not just cryptozoological anecdotes, but their presentation by authors, especially because of cases like this.

Mackal was told of genuine mystery animals. The authors list “a giant turtle, a giant crocodile, a giant snake-like creature, a water elephant with a great horn but no trunk, an animal with plank-like structures growing out of its back, and of course, the Mokele-mbembe proper” (p. 238), but curiously omit the ngomia, a giant bird and subject of chapter 22 of A Living Dinosaur?, identified as the African crowned eagle (p. 283-287), as well as two reports of an elephantine aquatic monster and one of an unidentified skeleton, all of which turned out to be manatees (p. 106-107, 187-188, 198-199). That "giant turtle", ndendecki, also seems to have some merit.

Even the gathered reports of mokele-mbembe itself may have more truth to them than previously suspected. As discovered by cryptozoological researcher Andrew Paget (and later shared here), an anonymous Belgian author described Mokele-mbembe as having “a large crest like a coxcomb” in a 1934 article written for Avenir Colonial Belge and reprinted in L'Etoile de l'A.E.F. The coxcomb was independently reported to the Mackal expeditions, and until this discovery, this trait was thought to originate solely from the testimonies gathered by Mackal. The Belgian article predates the Mackal expeditions by fifty years and is absent from the bibliographies of Mackal, Heuvelmans, or other contemporary authors writing about Mokele-mbembe. The coxcomb is an incredibly specific trait, absent in contemporary paleoart depictions of sauropods, and is unlikely to have been coincidentally fabricated or coaxed out of the natives, as Mackal seemingly did not know about it before departure. This, to me, indicates that the coxcomb is a genuine feature of Mokele-mbembe, bringing to mind the folkloric crested cobras found elsewhere in Africa.

CLAIM FOUR: Mokele-mbembe cannot be a sauropod, as sauropod survival into the present day in essentially impossible

There is no compelling evidence for the persistence of non-avian dinosaurs into the Cenozoic, and instead a mountain of evidence to the contrary - one could argue that our own existence as a species actively disproves this notion. I've written about this briefly and will share it on the blog in due time.

With that said, the context of the dinosaur claims, particularly those made by cryptozoological authors such as Mackal and Heuvelmans, need to be viewed in the context of their proposition. The cause of the K-T extinction was not confidently identified until after the end of Mackal’s expeditions, and theories available at the time were generally unsatisfactory (see Benton, 1990). This uncertainty, combined with the minimal paleontological experience of these authors and their reliance on general-audience publications recycling nineteenth-century depictions of semi-aquatic sauropods (see Taylor, 2010) made the living sauropod hypothesis seem more appealing.

These authors all suggested and entertained other speculative identities, finding them more plausible than a living sauropod, though their identities are clear examples of speculative cryptozoological creature building. Heuvelmans suggested some sort of mammal as an identity for mokele-mbembe, and in the same book, Les derniers dragons d'Afrique, suggested his infamous long-necked seal as potentially being responsible for sightings of the grootslang, a giant snake of South African folklore potentially allied to mokele-mbembe. Mackal excluded mammals and instead proposed a giant monitor lizard or iguana (p. 223-229), one “quite unlike any known forms, living or extinct” (p. 295-296).

CLAIM FIVE: The primary faces of the modern mokele-mbembe search are Young Earth Creationists (YECs)

The end of the chapter is used to highlight the appropriative nature of Young Earth Creationists, something that should be applauded, especially as other cryptozoological authors continue to use testimonies and opinions from Creationist literature uncritically.

To clarify though, mostly to correct online comments who have misconstrued what the chapter says, YECs are a relatively recent presence in the mokele-mbembe story. Lausnitz, Bölsche, Ley, Heuvelmans, Mackal, and those on Mackal’s expeditions were all not creationists, and even Bill Gibbons, the primary creationist source cited in Abominable Science!, did not convert to Christianity until after he had already led an expedition in search of mokele-mbembe. Creationists first inserted themselves into Mokele-mbembe in the late 1980s, long after it first appeared in the cryptozoological literature.

CONCLUSION

The claims of this chapter are poorly researched, make some curious omissions, and overall not well-evidenced. I find this beyond disappointing, a drastic difference in quality from other significant modern cryptozoology texts.

Beyond the problems above, a significant issue I have with the chapter, and other recent skeptical works, is the lack of any attempt to investigate mokele-mbembe within the context of African folklore. Mokele-mbembe shares several features with stories of river-blocking and village-swallowing monsters, rainbow dragons, crested cobras, giant turtles, and folktales of megafauna such as hippos and rhinos with large tails. Mokele-mbembe does not likely represent an animal, or at least not an unknown one, but is still clearly a complex piece of local lore. The chapter even cites testimony stating that Mokele-mbembe is “spirit and not a physical being” (p. 284-285) which should have elicited further study! The absence of such a perspective and instead the claims of fabrication and projection again reek of skeptical hypocrisy, pushing a purely Western perspective onto indigenous tradition. There's more to be said on mokele's folkloric origins, watch this space.