Despite a lack of evidence, the possible existence of legendary creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot has piqued human curiosity for centuries. But there’s another ancient, lesser-known cryptid to the Western world whose sightings have also stretched back for centuries, mired in folklore.
This dinosaur-like beast is said to resemble a long-necked, rotund sauropod. It wades through the swamps and rivers of the Congo Basin in Central Africa, the local Bantu people told European explorers in the early 20th century. It’s thought to be the “size of something between that of a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros and an elephant.”
It’s known as the mokele-mbembe.
And, after a century of decreasing reports of the beast, sightings are on the rise once more, according to National Geographic. So could the dinosaur of the Congo really exist or is this a classic case of mistaken identities, as it so often is with cryptids?
Mokele-mbembe first became known to the European public at a time when the perfect storm of connected tropes about Africa, monsters, and dinosaurs were popular, says Darren Naish, Ph.D., who works as a palaeozoologist, studying animals like dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles. The idea that Africa was potentially home to prehistoric monsters gained steam due to the popularity of works of fiction like Henry Francis’s 1908 book The Last Haunt of the Dinosaur and zoologist Carl Hagenbeck’s Beasts and Men, published in 1909.
By this point, species living in the African rainforests had captured the Western imagination. Between 1909 and 1910, President Teddy Roosevelt led an expedition through tropical Africa—funded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute—hunting and collecting specimens for what is now known as the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. In addition, skeletons of giant sauropod dinosaurs, like the Diplodocus and Brontosaurus, were popping up at famous museums.
Many stories and TV shows (often written by Americans or Europeans) continue to perpetuate the notion that you’ll be able to find these mysterious cryptids by going to the Congo. Additionally, movies like Baby: Secrets of the Lost Legend and Jurassic Park suggest dinos could live among humans. And those who want to discover the mokele-mbembe continue to believe in the possibility of discovering a living prehistoric creature.
“[Europeans] viewed this part of Africa as a ‘primitive’ region inhabited by people who civilization, if not evolution itself, had left behind,” Edward Guimont, an assistant professor of world history at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts, wrote in 2019 for Contingent, a nonprofit history magazine. “Part of the European civilizing mission, therefore, was to ‘discover’ and identify their legendary creatures for them.”
For instance, the first time the British public saw an okapi was in 1901 when Sir Harry Johnson, governor of the newly established colony of Uganda in Central Africa, sent it to the Zoological Society of London to display. It was unlike anything Europeans had seen before—like a cross between a zebra and a giraffe. British academics called it an “African unicorn.” In truth, there was really nothing new or exotic about the okapi in and of itself; people from Central Africa knew of it for millennia.
“Even then, African facts were far less appealing than European ‘discoveries,’” Guimont wrote. “If there had been a unicorn waiting to be discovered by explorer-scholars, what else might there be?”
That may explain why a lot of the actual lore and even the sightings of the mokele-mbembe originated from a tradition of seeing animals that really do exist, but are misidentified as fantastical creatures.
The possibility of dinosaurs living in Central Africa was exciting for romantic zoologists and cryptozoologists (those who search for or study legendary or unknown species, like cryptids) because it made for a good story, says Loren Coleman, the director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. “My sense of those tales is that there could’ve been some sightings of what I think could’ve been aquatic rhinos, an animal that is much more contemporary.”
Experts further believe sightings of cryptids like the mokele-mbembe may boil down to wishful thinking or spotting undiscovered species (at least to Europeans), which can lead to the creation of a legend. “Many creatures supposedly seen in a given area are ‘seen’ because people expect them in the area,” Naish says.
Early sightings of the pygmy hippo, for example, were reported as an unidentified giant swine or pig. Since the Congo Basin is a largely unexplored tropical rainforest, Coleman suggests that when people go exploring in a mysterious state of mind and spot a new, unidentified creature, they assume it has to be something old, like a dinosaur. But that flies in the face of logic, she says.
“People put blinders on and forget they may run across new species,” Coleman says. Mysterious sightings could be reptiles, large rhinos, or other aquatic creatures that are simply unfamiliar to the explorer. Many people who have claimed to spot the mokele-mbembe, especially those not local to the region, are likely unfamiliar with the flora and fauna.
The recent sightings may be explained by deforestation in the Congo Basin, which is drawing creatures out of their habitats and exposing the terrain at an alarming rate. Between 2002 and 2023, the Democratic Republic of the Congo lost nearly 10 percent of its tree cover and 6.6 percent of its humid primary forest, according to Global Forest Watch.
A few accounts of a creature likened to an old-school version of a sauropod spotted mostly submerged in a lake sound like they may have been an observation of softshell turtles or large snakes, both of which are said to inhabit the region, according to Naish.
More Fascinating Creatures
In addition, the idea that the mokele-mbembe is a living sauropod dinosaur makes it the poster child for what’s known as the “prehistoric survivor paradigm,” Naish says. This idea, popular in cryptozoological literature, suggests animals known only from fossil records have survived to the present and explain monster accounts.
“The idea of giant undiscovered animals in a supposedly poorly explored region is tremendously exciting,” Naish says. “If we suppose that mokele-mbembe is real, its discovery would be sensational, one of the most significant zoological finds in history.”
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Jordan Smith is a writer and editor with over 5 years of experience reporting on health and fitness news and trends. She is a published author, studying for her personal trainer certification, and over the past year became an unintentional Coronavirus expert. She has previously worked at Health, Inc., and 605 Magazine and was the editor-in-chief of her collegiate newspaper. Her love of all things outdoors came from growing up in the Black Hills of South Dakota.