Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  In 2008, an episode of Destination Truth filmed possible Mokele Mbembe footage on location at Lake Bangweulu in Zambia, the original Rhodesian home of the “African Brontosaurus,” but this long-distance sequence proved to be of two partially submerged hippos. “I think the people in this lake, they know this myth, they see something like this, which certainly we couldn’t identify, and that’s I think how this legend gets more and more heat on it until people are really just, you know, believing it,” said the host, who concluded, “I think we can lay the mokele to rest.”103

  This brings us back to the MonsterQuest expedition of 2009, with all its flaws. Perhaps the silliest sequence features the small riverbank holes taken to be air vents for concealed, hibernating Mokele Mbembes. On camera, Gibbons pokes ineffectually at a bank with a small shovel, declaring, “Once they’re sealed in there, it’s very difficult to get them out. It’s just a pity we didn’t have any other way of finding out what’s on the other side of this mud wall.” Not so much “a pity” as absurd: this was the third expedition to travel all the way to Africa to examine the riverside burrows, only to (according to the leaders’ confident assertions) stand idly chatting within a few feet of hibernating Mokele Mbembes—and not once did they bother to come prepared to dig out the dinosaurs they were there to find? Or even to send a camera inside the alleged air vent? The investigation of the “cave” for MonsterQuest literally consisted of poking a stick into the hole.104 Then, Gibbons explained, “By 3:00 P.M., we all had quite enough of the baking heat and headed back to Langoue for an early dinner.”105 The weakness of this investigation is so obvious that Mullin has acknowledged, “Some have wondered why better equipment hasn’t been taken on some of these trips.” His explanation is that “we go with what we can afford; not every expeditioneer is rich, and often we do what we can at great cost to ourselves and our personal lives.”106 Perhaps, but many expeditions do little more than arrive and turn around, each burning several thousand dollars in the process. The Gibbons-headed BBC expedition alone enjoyed a budget of at least $65,000. In 2006, Marcy shipped an entire inflatable zodiac boat and outboard motor to Africa for his trip.107

  As more and more expeditions have been mounted in the past thirty years, with access to increasingly sophisticated technology, much less evidence has been recovered. It is also striking that the descriptions of Mokele Mbembe are so inconsistent that one group of Westerners, having heard about its long neck, thought that it was a sauropod dinosaur, while another, having heard about its horns, assumed that it was a ceratopsian dinosaur. Finally, many of the leads have turned out to be hippos or crocodiles in the water. (Rhinoceroses sometimes have been suggested as culprits. Since they usually live in savannas, scrublands, and grasslands, not in the Congolese jungle, out-of-place rhinoceroses presumably would appear to be as exotic as dinosaurs.)

  REALITY CHECKS

  Sauropod Biology

  What is even more revealing about the descriptions of Mokele Mbembe is that they are based on the antiquated image of sauropod dinosaurs as lumbering beasts that lived in swamps, ate aquatic plants, and dragged their tails in the muck (figure 6.8). This was still the standard depiction of sauropods when early-twentieth-century explorers in the Congo Basin interpreted eyewitness accounts—and even as late as the 1970s, when proponents such as Roy Mackal formed their impressions. But more recent scientific research has shown that sauropods were nothing like this century-old image. Numerous track-ways of actual sauropods that date from the Jurassic period (208–144 million years ago) show that they were not slow-moving, tail-dragging dinosaurs. On the contrary, they walked fairly quickly and efficiently on dry land, had a relatively upright straight-legged posture, and held their tails out behind them (figure 6.9), as portrayed in movies like Jurassic Park (1993). The reinterpretation of the famous sauropod bone beds in the Morrison Formation in the western United States and Canada, which dates to the Late Jurassic (150–144 million years ago), has demonstrated that most sauropod fossils do not come from swampy deposits, for the dinosaurs lived in seasonally dry woodlands with very little standing water.108 Evidence from their teeth shows that sauropods did not subsist on aquatic plants, as Mokele Mbembe is alleged to do, but fed on tough conifers and cycads, as well as on ferns.109 Thus a century-old image of sauropods still influences the ideas of the cryptozoologists who believe in the existence of Mokele Mbembe and try to fit the inconsistent accounts of local peoples into an outdated concept.

  Surviving Dinosaurs?

  The biggest obstacle to proving the existence of Mokele Mbembe, however, is not the absence of hard evidence. It is that cryptozoologists seldom or never address the basic principles of biology and paleontology:

  Figure 6.8 The Mokele Mbembe of legend resembles Charles R. Knight’s painting of Brontosaurus (now called Apatosaurus), shown dragging its tail and supporting its bulk in the water. Knight’s reconstruction was cutting edge in 1897, but the modern understanding of sauropods is very different.

  Figure 6.9 Modern reconstructions of sauropods feature upright legs for life on land, a horizontal tail posture—and, in some species, an adornment of iguana-like dermal spines. (Illustration by Daniel Loxton, with Julie Roberts)

  • Population constraints: As has been pointed out in relation to Bigfoot and Nessie, Mokele Mbembe cannot be a singleton or a handful of individuals. For dinosaurs to have survived in the Congo for the past 65 million years, there would have to be a sizable population of them. If there were, there would not be just a handful of inconsistent accounts and no direct evidence, but hundreds of carcasses and thousands of skeletal parts found throughout the Congo Basin over the 150 years of Western exploration. Although the swampy regions of the Congo are not ideal habitats in which to preserve skeletons, skeletal remains of elephants, hippos, and many other animals are found all the time. For a population of animals as large as Mokele Mbembe is believed to be, some hard evidence of its existence would surely have been discovered by now.

  • Aerial surveillance: A large population of air-breathing sauropods would not be able to hide underwater indefinitely, especially since they preferred dry, open habitats and fed on conifers. They would have been seen by members of the many zoological expeditions that cross the Congo Basin every year, especially by the aerial surveys that are frequently undertaken to count large animal populations. For example, if you type the coordinates 10.903497,19.93229 into Google Earth and zoom in, you can see clear images of an entire elephant herd, with the details of their trunks, ears, tusks, and tails. Indeed, with spy satellites able to spot an object that is less than 3 feet across, and Google Earth able to resolve the details of your own backyard, a population of sauropod dinosaurs should have been caught by such surveillance.

  • The fossil record: Although the jungles of the Congo Basin are not the ideal habitat in which to preserve or find fossils, there is an excellent fossil record of the past 200 million years from many parts of Africa. In South Africa, fossil beds from the Permian (286–250 million years ago) and Triassic (250–208 million years ago) periods have yielded excellent specimens of synapsids (formerly but incorrectly called “mammal-like reptiles”) and some of the earliest dinosaurs. In the Tendaguru beds in Tanzania, which date to the late Jurassic, have been found some of the best-known sauropods, including the huge Brachiosaurus in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, which is the largest nearly complete sauropod skeleton known. There are also fossils of sauropods (mostly titanosaurs) from the Cretaceous period (98–65 million years ago) in a variety of regions in Africa (figure 6.10), including the remarkable discoveries of diplodocoid sauropods by Paul Sereno in the western Sahara.110 And then, in Africa just as in every other locality around the world, the nonavian dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, and not one bone has been found to show that they survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. The African fossil record of the past 65 million years, the so-called Age of Mammals, is excellent, with many localities that have preserved large-bodied animals like mast
odonts and rhino-like arsinoitheres—but not one sliver of a dinosaur.111

  Figure 6.10 Paleontologist Enas Ahmed poses with a fossil humerus from the North African titanosaurian sauropod Paralititan, dating from the Cretaceous period, at the Egyptian Geological Museum, Cairo. (Photograph courtesy of Jason Loxton)

  THE HIDDEN AGENDA: CREATIONISM

  Most of the active explorers seeking Mokele Mbembe have a nonscientific agenda: Young Earth creationism (the evangelical Christian belief that Earth was created about 6,000 years ago by God, as described in the book of Genesis). For example, Roy Mackal’s expeditions were shaped by their interpreter and guide, Pastor Eugene Thomas, an American missionary whom Mackal matter-of-factly described as “with us not only to interpret, but also to spread Christianity.”112 Thomas went on to personally convert and baptize William Gibbons in the Congo in 1986,113 following a harrowing supernatural attack that Gibbons experienced while staying at Thomas’s Impfondo mission station. Gibbons described this experience in terms that exactly match the classic symptoms of sleep paralysis (a presence in the room, physical paralysis, terror, a feeling of pressure on the upper body), a well-understood and common sleep disruption that many victims interpret in paranormal or supernatural terms:

  While I was slowly drifting toward sleep, something caused me to suddenly snap awake. There was something else in the room with me…. Within a minute, perhaps less, a dark and thoroughly evil entity began to fill the room. I tried to call out … but my voice died in my throat. I tried to sit up … but I was completely paralysed. Steadily the evil presence approached my bed. I was fully awake, yet completely immobile, soaked with sweat and beginning to go out of my mind with terror…. [T]he most unbearable pressure suddenly began to squeeze down on my chest, shoulders and arms.

  In the days before this experience, Gibbons had become uneasy about his past “dabbling in the occult” (he mentions spiritualism and tarot cards) and had confided this behavior to Thomas. When experiencing his episode of paralysis in bed, Gibbons writes, “the words of Gene Thomas sprang into my mind. ‘Only Christ can set you free.’ With every last vestige of conscious will, I cried out in my mind to the saviour that the Christians worshipped. ‘Jesus, help me!’ … The suffocating, evil presence in the room recoiled, and then vanished.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this experience triggered a dramatic and sudden religious conversion.114

  Gibbons went on to become the leading proponent of the Mokele Mbembe legend—a project he took on with overt missionary zeal. All the expeditions to the Congo led by Gibbons were undertaken with the objective of proving the truth of Young Earth creationism, and most of those who promote Mokele Mbembe are also creationist in their approach.115

  In a book on cryptozoology, Gibbons and his coauthor (and flamboyant creationism activist) Kent Hovind shared their “hope and prayer” that their cryptozoological work would inspire “a new generation of Godly, Christian explorers, who will endeavor to venture forth to find and present these amazing mysteries of creation to an unbelieving world.”116 But why would creationists look to legendary monsters to support their biblical literalism?

  Mokele Mbembe, in particular, is an idea that Young Earth creationists like Gibbons find natural and attractive: “To the Bible believing Christian, the idea of dinosaurs living with man in the past or even some still living today, is scientifically possible. Christians know that God made all the animals, including dinosaurs, about 6000 years ago.”117 But the creationists’ fascination with Mokele Mbembe is not merely that its existence seems plausible within a creationist worldview, but that its existence has important ideological or theological ramifications. For some reason, creationists believe that the discovery of a dinosaur in Africa will overthrow the entire theory of evolution. This belief is poorly founded. The reality of evolution is based on a gigantic amount of evidence from the fossil record,118 and a single find of a relict species does not overturn this mountain of data.

  Creationists point to the discovery of the coelacanth in 1938 as upsetting the evolutionary story, but all it really did was extend the range of a species known rarely from fossil beds of the Early Cenozoic era (65 million years ago–present) into the Late Cenozoic. Gibbons shows their typical thinking:

  The Coelacanth was discovered alive and well in 1938 after having been dismissed as extinct for as long as 200 million years. The embarrassing thing about that for evolutionists was that it was thought to be a foundational species for the transformation of fish into amphibians and[,] as such, should be extinct, since foundation species are not supposed to continue surviving past their progeny. The Coelacanth paid no attention to those scientists and just kept right on “keeping on” to the present day.119

  The many errors in this statement show the creationists’ ignorance of the fossil record. Coelacanths were not thought to have been extinct for 200 million years, since there are fossils as young as 20 to 5 million years in age.120 Contrary to the creationists’ notions of evolution, coelacanths were not “foundational species for the transformation of fish into amphibians,” but are an order of primitive lobe-finned fishes that appeared in the Late Devonian period (400 million years ago) alongside the earliest relatives of amphibians, as well as the earliest lungfish (also lobe-finned). Coelacanths were never thought to be ancestral to amphibians by any evolutionary biologist or paleontologist. Even more revealing is that Gibbons is following the outdated “ladder of creation” notion of evolution, according to which ancestors must die off to give rise to their descendants. This idea is completely erroneous and is akin to saying that your grandfather must have died when your father was born, and your father died when you were born.121 Evolution is bushy and branching, and ancestral groups often survive and live alongside their descendant groups.

  If it were not clear enough from their general arguments, the creationists’ motives are clearly spelled out by Gibbons:

  In case there is any doubt about our motivation for this work I should tell you that we feel that the discovery of any of these creatures will be an earthshaking event. It is our belief that eliminating common objections regarding why the Bible can’t be trusted, and demonstrating the historical and scientific accuracy of Scripture[,] will naturally lead people to the next logical step in thinking: If the Bible is true in other respects, what does that tell us about its spiritual ramifications?

  When the evolution hypothesis was proposed 150 years ago, it was with the expressed intent of destroying the church and Christianity along with it. If a wrench of this kind could be thrown into the machinery of evolution it would go a long way toward turning people back to the only real truth, the Word of God.122

  There are many distortions in this statement, but the one that really stands out is the claim that evolution was proposed expressly to destroy Christianity. Evolution was proposed only to explain the observed pattern of life. Many evolutionary biologists are devoutly religious and have no conflict with the theory of evolution.123 Evolution undermines the religious beliefs of only fundamentalists, who insist that Genesis must be true in every detail, despite a large amount of evidence to the contrary.124

  Thus the quest for Mokele Mbembe is not just an idle search for a cryptid, but part of the effort by creationists to overthrow the theory of evolution and undermine the teaching of science by any means possible. As such, it cannot be dismissed or treated lightly, but must be subjected to the full scrutiny of the scientific community.

  THE CRYPTOZOOLOGY SUBCULTURE

  WHO ARE THE PEOPLE who spend a significant amount of time, money, and other resources thinking about and searching for Bigfoot, Nessie, and other cryptids? What motivates them? Are they scientists or pseudoscientists? If they are not practicing real science, is it possible to transform cryptozoology into a real science? Is cryptozoology just a hobby of no particular consequence, or does it make genuinely useful contributions—or can it, perhaps, lead to harm?

  Whatever the case, the cryptozoological impulse is not new. Monsters have always stirred in
the shadows of the imagination, as have sincere efforts to understand them. Projects to describe, categorize, and probe claims of legendary beasts extend back through the modern era and medieval period, to such classical authors as Pliny the Elder.

  Journalist Elizabeth Landau put it this way:

  Across human societies, variations on mythical creature stories like that of Bigfoot have persisted for thousands of years, and accounts of seeing or hearing them still abound. There may be some basic culture-based need for these fantastical tales, said Todd Disotell, professor of anthropology at New York University.

  Monsters represent dark aspects of our subconscious worlds and can be metaphors for the challenges of life, said Karen Sharf, a psychotherapist in New York.

  “Some monsters are scary. Some monsters are friendly. Sometimes in movies or myths, we befriend the monster, and it’s just like in our inner world: There are monsters; there are dark aspects that we have to face,” she said.