Central Africa’s steaming rainforest canopies stretch, like a green ocean, to the horizon. Below, long, winding rivers thread through the wilderness — sometimes a silty shade of brown, other times a clear blue beneath an open sky. Forest elephants stomp through the undergrowth, hornbills circle overhead and silverback gorillas brood in the shadows. And somewhere in this primordial expanse lurks a dinosaur.
Emmanuel Mambou, a fisher who lives in the interior of the Republic of Congo, says he’s seen it. He’s fished a network of tributaries connected to the Congo River since boyhood. And he’s a man who isn’t shy about telling, in intricate detail, of his lone encounter with the basin’s alleged resident dinosaur, mokele-mbembe.
On a warm moonlit night last year, sitting on a lonesome riverbank, Mambou cooked freshly caught catfish over a crackling fire. His fellow fishers snickered as he began telling his mokele-mbembe story for what they teased was the hundredth time.
As he remembers it, the sighting happened in October several years back, as the monsoon season in the north of the Congo was in full swing. Mambou was gliding across the river in his pirogue. He recalls casting his net when, perhaps a hundred feet away, a large ripple disturbed the water. A dark shape emerged. And Mambou swears — on his daughters, his sons, his wife and even his god — that it was mokele-mbembe. But Joseph Oyange, a Congolese naturalist sitting around the fire with us, just shook his head and murmured to his friend, “Probably a hippo.”
Mokele-mbembe is the Congo Basin’s bigfoot. Or that’s what it’s become, anyway — a cryptid. Nobody is sure when the myth originated, but it was born among the basin’s communities, who passed it down as an oral tradition. Locals tell me the myth was spiritual at first — a metaphor, perhaps, for humankind’s delicate relationship with the land. But today, nobody can say with certainty what exactly it meant because foreigners long ago twisted it well beyond recognition.
“Congolese people originally believed mokele-mbembe was a spiritual being, not a real dinosaur,” Oyange told me last year. “But that all changed when the white man came to Africa.” A confluence of European colonial expansion into Africa and the birth of paleontology gave rise to a version of mokele-mbembe that was a literal, flesh-and-blood, swamp-dwelling reptilian beast. Tales passed around by explorers, missionaries and colonial functionaries became warped by notions from Victorian literature and emerging science.
“Everything that we now regard as the mokele-mbembe canon is based on European explorers in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” Darren Naish, a British vertebrate paleontologist and author, told me.
That “dinosaurization” of what was initially an abstract spiritual entity is now mokele-mbembe’s defining feature. The myth has become so altered, in fact, that many Congolese — including Mambou — speak of it as the Westernized monster it’s become, not the folkloric ecological metaphor it once was.
And now, more than a century later, this version of the myth is being embraced and perpetuated by zealous evangelical groups invested in the idea that a living dinosaur would upend some of the most significant Victorian-era science: evolutionary theory.
For Christian creationists, the prospect is worth salivating over — a sauropod-like dinosaur hiding in the jungle, in their view, would finally prove that the Earth wasn’t billions of years old after all. It’s why creationist organizations funded several expeditions into the Congo Basin, hoping to find mokele-mbembe — and, with it, a way to refute Darwinism.
Romantic as they are, these expeditions, again and again, have come up empty-handed — though they have largely succeeded in cementing mokele-mbembe as something literal, in the Western consciousness as well as in the minds of many Congolese. And if not literal, then simply laughable. What was once rooted in folklore has long since been coopted into something else — a story that still grabs headlines, but almost always misses the point entirely.
When William Gibbons first set foot in the Congo in November 1985, he wasn’t just chasing a dinosaur, he was on a spiritual mission. For nearly seven months, he scoured the jungle for proof of mokele-mbembe, hoping to debunk the theory of evolution.
Gibbons is a young Earth creationist. In other words, he believes that God created the planet in six literal days, that Earth is just a few thousand years old and that all the animals that ever existed — including dinosaurs — were led, two by two, onto Noah’s Ark. To young-Earthers like Gibbons, the Book of Genesis is not an allegory, but a historical record.
A common creationist belief is that if dinosaurs still existed in, say, the Congo, the Amazon or Papua New Guinea, it would topple Darwinism — or at least cast serious doubt on the scientific method.
“Perhaps the most exciting prospect for the world of creation science is the possibility that dinosaurs may still be living in the remote jungles of the world,” Gibbons wrote in 2002 for the Institute for Creation Research, a nonprofit ministry that says it investigates scientific evidence challenging evolutionary theory.
“Evolution and its accompanying necessity of long ages of evolutionary development would be hard pressed to accommodate a living dinosaur,” he suggested. “Such is the story of Mokele-mbembe, a creature that some scientists believe could be a surviving sauropod dinosaur. The one area today that would favor living dinosaurs is the vast and unexplored swamps of equatorial Africa.”
Gibbons lingered around Lake Tele in the Republic of Congo’s remote north for months. He and his team spotted gorillas, chimpanzees, pythons, crocodiles and turtles — but no dinosaurs. However, he did write that “the fear of mokele-mbembe was considerable among the rural Congolese.”
In November 1992, Gibbons headed back into the Congo with the same objective. After traveling by river to a remote northern area, Gibbons described his experience in an article for the institute. “Although many of the inhabitants of the Likouala Region know exactly where we can observe and film a specimen of mokele-mbembe,” he claimed, “they believe that to speak openly of the animals to white outsiders means death.”
Civil war interrupted his plans for a third expedition. So instead, Gibbons set his sights on Cameroon to continue his search. In 2000, he and a team set off to the country’s south, where they were rewarded with “firsthand, eyewitness accounts of mokele-mbembe activity dating from 1986 to April 2000,” his account of the time recorded. In February 2002, Gibbons returned to Cameroon once again with what he described as a “four man Christian expedition.” But as Naish, the paleontologist, told me over a Zoom call, “William Gibbons and his buddies who love going searching for mokele-mbembe basically never found anything.”
A lack of concrete evidence still hasn’t stopped people from hunting for mokele-mbembe. And in the last few decades, it hasn’t just been creationists like Gibbons who have gone searching for the monster. Countless television channels and news outlets have all dedicated airtime to the creature, too.
In 2011, Vice News released a nine-minute documentary hosted by the zeitgeisty American graffiti artist David Choe. The aim? To find the Congo’s supposed dinosaur. Early in the film, Choe narrates the scene: “There’s an area of thick, dense, untouched rainforest about the size of Florida,” he says in dramatic tones. “It’s the only area that survived the last ice age, and it’s the last place on Earth believed to have living, breathing dinosaurs.”
From Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo’s capital, and accompanied by a Vice film crew and a team of Pygmy guides, Choe travels north, headed toward Lake Tele, the place he’s told the mokele-mbembe most likely lives. Choe’s documentary is odd and chaotically entertaining; he’s seen sitting on his hotel bed, playing the drums, while a trio of completely naked Black women dance behind him. Later, an American missionary tells Choe about two other American missionaries — Gene and Sandy Thomas — who supposedly had seen the beast firsthand. After that, a visit to a remote village ends with copious, ritualistic alcohol consumption and a dinosaur-costume-wearing villager who runs out of the bushes and frolics before a booze-stupefied Choe.
But no dinosaurs — no actual dinosaurs, anyway — are found. In fact, the film ends with a dejected Choe, in a lake, saying to the camera, “We might have to come back. We’ll see,” before he submerges himself into the murky water, prompting the credits to roll. If the film is judged on its success in searching for mokele-mbembe, it was a flop. But if it’s regarded as an exercise in grabbing attention, well, then it was a massive hit. It racked up over 1.7 million views on YouTube and even caught podcaster Joe Rogan’s notice. Several years later, in 2020, Choe appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he told of his multiple attempts to find mokele-mbembe. “When I saw your show,” Rogan tells Choe during the podcast episode, “I was like, ‘Look at this dude, this is crazy. He’s looking for a fucking brontosaurus in the middle of the Congo.’”
But 21st-century mokele-mbembe expeditions like those led by Gibbons and Choe are nothing new. Throughout the 20th century, many Westerners macheted their way into the Congo’s dense undergrowth with the intention of glimpsing the creature.
Oyange, the Congolese naturalist, says that these cryptozoological expeditions seeking out a literal, breathing dinosaur have been misguided pursuits. “You know, if foreigners thought it was a spiritual being, the way I was taught it was, they probably wouldn’t waste all this time looking for it. Because if it exists, it doesn’t exist the way an elephant does, or the way you and I do,” Oyange told me at an Indian restaurant in Brazzaville last March. “Nobody searches for Pachamama in the Andes, for example,” he said, referring to the Incan goddess. “And if you do go searching for her, you take your eyes and your soul, not a camera. Because Pachamama, like mokele-mbembe, is a spirit, not an organism.”
Starting in the late 19th century, a “dino-craze” swept across Europe and the United States. The public’s fascination with the prehistoric world took off during the “Bone Wars” — also known as the “Great Dinosaur Rush” — an absurdly fierce rivalry between two mustachioed paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope, from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and Othniel Charles Marsh, a professor of paleontology at Yale, who prospected across the western U.S. in search of fossils. So competitive were the two men in their race to name new dinosaur species that both resorted to extreme means to outdo the other — theft, slander and libel, bribery and even destroying fossils. In the end, the rivalry left both men in total financial and social ruin.
But the Bone Wars were more than just two men’s cutthroat rivalry. The ordeal led to several major discoveries. New prehistoric species were officially named in scientific literature and dinosaurs were, for the first time, catapulted into the American mainstream.
Around the same time, the American Museum of Natural History in New York was founded and, across the Atlantic, London’s Natural History Museum opened. By the early 20th century, the former hosted one of the world’s largest dinosaur fossil collections. Along the American East Coast and throughout major European capitals, museums displaying grand fossil exhibits were popping up, luring droves of curious onlookers. The period was referred to as the “first golden age of fossil collecting.”
In 1907, Andrew Carnegie funded an expedition that discovered a diplodocus skeleton in Wyoming. Carnegie had casts made, which he then sent to museums across Europe, including London, Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg.
Meanwhile, on the Berlin Museum of Natural History’s dime, the German paleontologist Werner Janensch led expeditions to Tanzania’s Tendaguru fossil beds. Janensch’s team dug up piles of Jurassic-era dinosaur bones. Local Tanzanians — often underpaid and coerced into the labor — did most of the actual digging. But the fossils didn’t stay in Tanzania, being instead shipped off to Europe.
Along with the burgeoning field of paleontology and the soaring popularity of museums came a broader cultural fascination with the prehistoric world. Much literature was published, stories featuring rugged white adventurers who braved exotic and faraway tropical lands where dinosaurs still roamed.
In a way, this period establishes a paper trail for mokele-mbembe’s modern interpretation. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, published “The Lost World” in 1912 — a fictitious tale of dinosaurs surviving on an isolated jungle plateau. A few years later, films like “The Dinosaur and the Missing Link” and “King Kong” leaned into the zeitgeist’s appetite for “primitive” places, people and, most of all, dinosaurs.
Just a year after “The Lost World” hit shelves, the German colonial officer Ludwig Freiherr von Stein reportedly sent unpublished accounts of his time in the Congo to the writer Wilhelm Bolsche.
“The first report by von Stein in 1913 described mokele-mbembe as a cave-dwelling, reptilian entity that combined features from several known African animals,” explains Adrienne Mayor, a historian of ancient science and classical folklore at Stanford University.
Western newspapers jumped on the story, likening the mystery animal to the popular brontosaurus. The hype drew in more explorers, who arrived with dinosaur sketches and loaded questions for the Bantu and other peoples of the Congo Basin. For decades, this cycle fed itself, turning speculation into supposed evidence. Along the way, it chipped away at mokele-mbembe’s original cultural significance.
As Europeans and Americans became more interested in fossils, a wave of sauropod-seeking explorers ventured into the Congo. To outsiders, Africa was the “Dark Continent” and the Congo its “Dark Heart.” Naish told me that these explorers “didn’t go in cold” — they already regarded equatorial Africa as a place where such creatures might exist, a place where prehistory was still alive.
“The concept of mokele-mbembe, and the other prehistoric monsters that are supposed to be in tropical Africa, stems from the idea that the African tropics are some sort of prehistoric backwater,” said Naish. “It’s not like a modern, advanced, beautiful place like other parts of the world, it’s seen as a tropical, fetid swamp where there are things still living from prehistory. That’s this colonial, in a sense racist, view of what Africa is like.”
Last spring, I sat at a streetside cafe in Brazzaville, sipping coffee on my first morning back from a few weeks reporting in the rainforest. I was still a bit dirty and disheveled, which drew curious stares from passersby. A woman sitting at a nearby table asked if she could join me. Her name was Veronique and she spoke good English. We split a croissant while chatting about several topics — everything from President Denis Sassou Nguesso to mokele-mbembe. “Growing up, I was told that it is a protector of the waterways, like rivers,” Veronique said. “It is a symbol, actually. Sort of how nature gives life, but can also cause death.”
Similarly, Selah Abong’o, a local wildlife advocate, told me that growing up in a northern Congolese village, she came to view mokele-mbembe as something more abstract — a metaphor for Mother Nature. The creature, she explained, is considered sacred and perhaps even a little taboo. “Basically, I think of mokele-mbembe as a cautionary tale,” she said. “It is like a warning that people must respect the river and the forest. Because if we do not, we could be destroyed.”
As Mayor points out, the misreading and consequent distortion of folklore isn’t unique to mokele-mbembe. In 1997, claims were made that a stegosaurus dinosaur was depicted on the carved stones of Angkor Wat, Cambodia — the long-abandoned ruins of an ancient Hindu-Buddhist temple. To Western eyes, the carving in question appeared to show a strange, bulky animal with large plates running upright along its spine. Some have speculated that it was a hoax, one perpetrated by film crews who visited the site before it became a tourist hub.
Mayor visited the vine-engulfed temple in 2010. She told me her Cambodian guide, a former teacher, considered the carving a joke. “The amazing, overgrown ruins of Angkor Wat offer a perfect setting for outsiders to imagine a lost, primitive civilization that coexisted with prehistoric dinosaurs,” she said. In her view, just as the outside world has hijacked the story of mokele-mbembe, it has done the same with Angkor Wat — imposing interpretations that distort and even disrespect the original cultural significance.
She also pointed out how the dinosaurization of mokele-mbembe as an oral tradition paralleled how ancient petroglyphs and pictographs in the American West have been misinterpreted as dinosaurs, too. Creationists and young-Earthers argue that certain imagery etched into the rock slabs implies that the Indigenous paleo-Indians must have lived alongside dinosaurs.
The most notorious example, Mayor said, is the two rock art panels at Kachina Bridge in Utah’s Natural Bridges National Monument. Some — including creationists — claim that the imagery is a depiction of a sauropod and triceratops dinosaur.
“If our story is told to the world by the oppressor,” I remember Veronique telling me as she clucked her tongue, “then whose story really is it? Ours, or theirs?”
The night before I left the Republic of Congo, a man invited me to his home for dinner. Just like my chat with Veronique a few days prior, I couldn’t help but steer the conversation toward mokele-mbembe.
He told me that as a young boy, his mother described mokele-mbembe as “a spirit of the water. If I disturbed the places where it lived, she used to warn me, I would have some bad luck. Nature would get revenge, and I would have some misfortune.”
I took a swig of Ngok beer, then asked, “So, you don’t think there’s a dinosaur somewhere out there?”
Oko stared at me, cocked an eyebrow, and then burst out laughing. “No,” he shook his head. “I don’t.”
This article was published in the Spring 2025 issue of New Lines‘ print edition.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our stories in your inbox.