We've moved to a better place...

You will be automatically redirected to the new address. If that does not occur, visit
http://www.relativelytinteresting.com
and update your bookmarks.

Showing posts with label dinosaurs. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 6, 2011 ~ Have your say...

The hunt for mokele-mbembe: the Congo dinosaur

, , , , , ,

Mokele-mbembe - Almost Like Nessie

In the Lingala language, Mokele-mbembe literally means, "the one who stops the river". Just like Nessie, the Mokele-mbembe is said to be a living dinosaur of the sauropod kind which dwells in the Republic of Congo in the depths of the Likouala swamp region. Loosely, it is analogously comparable to Nessie, or the Loch Ness Monster of the Scottish Highlands.

According to eyewitnesses, especially the natives, the Mokele-mbembe have the body of an elephant, three clawed feet, with long reptile-like neck. It is hairless, and is said to be gray, brown, or reddish brown in color with very a long tail.

The First Mention

The first recorded mention of witness related to the Mokele-mbembe is dated back to 1776, in a book by Abbe Lievain Bonaventure which reports the exhibition of the French missionary to the Republic of Congo to explore the animals, plants and people of the region. The team stumbled upon a three clawed foot print, which was said to be three feet wide. When they asked the natives, they told the story of the river monster.

Spirit of the Congo River Basin

While most who had witnessed it believes that it is a living sauropod dinosaur, many elderly pygmies believe the folklore that the Mokele-mbembe is only an apparition of the spirits dwelling in the Congo River Basin. They believe in animism, that an immortal godlike being inhabits the Mokele-mbembe and serves as the guardian of the region. Because of these, they believe that Westerners should stop doing expeditions, leave it alone and treat the Mokele-mbembe with respect, or macabre shall befall them.

The Smithsonian Tragedy

During 1919 to 1920, the Smithsonian Institution sent 32 men on an expedition to the Republic of Congo to collect specimens of plants and animals. They often heard mysterious roars, which were described to be as 'unheard of and didn't belonged to any known being'. They also stumbled upon huge, unexplained trails. During a train ride, they had to go through a flooded area. It was said that villagers around there were screaming and terrified because they saw the Mokele-mbembe, and it was the cause of the flood (consistent to its name, 'one who stops the river').

However, it ended in tragedy as the train suddenly derailed, which killed four members, and seriously injuring 6 others. This was consistent to the folklore of the macabre befalling those who angers the Mokele-mbembe. This expedition was documented in the H.L. Shantz papers.


According to the Skeptic's Dictionary...

"Cryptozoologists argue that since a coelacanth was caught off the coast of South Africa, it is reasonable to think that a dinosaur might also have avoided detection for a few million years. However, there is a big difference between finding a fish thought to be extinct and finding a dinosaur. The fish is small and lives in the ocean. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth and have depths of up to 35,000 feet. That is a lot of space to hide specimens and fragments of specimens. Dinosaurs are massive (at least the mokele-mbembe kind), occupied the third of the earth mostly visible to its other inhabitants, and thus would be much more likely to be detected than the coelacanth."  Well said.


Forever In Pursuit

So, is it a spirit? Is it a cryptic animal yet to be discovered that has eluded humans for ages? Dubbed as the 'last living dinosaur', the Mokele-mbembe is still hot in pursuit. Most believe that eye witnesses see what they want to see, or actually see the shape of another animal, thinking it is the Mokele-mbembe.

Even after 30+ expeditions over the years, the Mokele-mbembe still had not been found. There is no genuine, legitimate physical evidence that has been collected. Although ardent researchers and cryptozoologists do believe that there are living dinosaurs hiding in the depths of the wild today, with the Mokele-mbembe being one of them, there's no evidence ample enough to prove its existence.





References:

Saturday, November 20, 2010 ~ Have your say...

The Cambodian Stegosaurus: Proof That Humans And Dinosaurs Coexisted?

, , , ,

Deep within the Cambodian jungle lie the magnificent ruins left by the Khmer empire, including the temple of Angkhor.  The structures were built in the beginning of the eighth century AD until the fourteenth century AD.  The artistic skills of the Khmer are evident throughout the complex: most notably, their reliefs, carved into the stone surface of the walls and buildings.


One particular relief displays a number of animals:  what appears to be a monkey, a deer, buffalo, parrots, various swans, a gecko lizard, and... a stegosaurus!  

Hold the phone:  if an artist was able to carve a stegosaurus, the he must have seen one with his own eyes, and therefore, this is amazing evidence that humans and dinosaurs actually coexisted!  

Or so the folks over at Bible.ca claim.

The reliefs of the other animals are not necessarily easy to identify.  The "swans" could be any related species.  In fact, had the author not pointed out that it was a swan or water buffalo, I wouldn't be able to identify either.  In fact, I would only go so far as to say "a bird with a long neck that looks like a swan".  The dinosaur in question, at first glance, looks like a stegosaurus.  Or does it?

From the author:

"A few skeptics have based their objections on anatomical differences between popular Stegosaurus restorations and the Cambodian sculpture. The fact that the average Jr. High student immediately identifies the sculpture as a Stegosaurus is considered of no consequence. "The head is too large Stegosaurs had no horns or frills on the head" The sculpture has no spikes on the tail... Therefore, they conclude that the sculptor never saw a Stegosaurus."
It may be true that a 13 year old who sees the carving would jump to the conclusion that it is a stegosaurus, likely because of the "plates" on the spine of the creature and because stegosaurus is one of the most recognizable dinosaurs, along with T-Rex, Apatosaurus, Velociraptor, and Triceratops.  But that doesn't mean it's true that the artist saw a stegosaurus. And it certainly doesn't prove that the creature is a stegosaurus either.   It just proves that it looks like a stegosaurus.

The creature in the relief, except for the "plates" (which we can't even prove are plates - they could be decoration behind the animal, since many of the other animals have similar decorations) doesn't really looks like a stegosaurus.  The head is too large; the spikes on the tail are missing; the carving shows two giant horns or frills above the eyes; and the front legs are the same size as the back legs (the front legs of a stegosaurus are much shorter).

As many other bloggers on the Web point out, the carving looks like a chameleon, which are incredibly fascinating reptiles.  One could see how a color-changing creature could earn its way onto a temple wall.  If you spend enough time on searching, you can find a better match than the one in the image to the right.


Or it could be another lizard altogether.  'Acanthosaura' is a genus of lizards commonly known as 'mountain horned dragons', or 'pricklenape agamas'. They are so named because of a row of dorsal spines which run down the back of their neck. They are arboreal lizards that are found in Southeast Asia.

At least three species are native to Cambodia, so there is a decent chance that the artist would have been exposed to them.  ''Acanthosaura capra'' resides in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. ''Acanthosaura crucigera'', resides in Myanmar, Thailand, C Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia. ''Acanthosaura lepidogaster'' are also native to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and China.

A quick invocation of Occam's Razor once again provides us with a simple solution:  it's not a stegosaurus, it's some other native animal to Cambodia.

Stegosaurus lived between 150 and 145 million years ago, in the Late Jurassic period.  The fossil record does not yield any more stegosaurs after their extinction. It is an extraordinary leap to assume that one carving of a barely identifiable creature is a stegosaurus, and an even bigger leap to then suggest that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, thus "proving" Creationism and a young Earth.


As a child, I wanted to be a paleontologist.  Jurassic Park was the best book ever, and the movies were fantastic.  I would be thrilled if the carving was that of a stegosaurus.  But, unfortunately, one anomaly does not disprove a massive convergence of evidence to suggest that dinosaurs (all dinosaurs) went extinct about 65 million years ago and never, ever, coexisted with humans.
Even the folks over at the GeoChristian blog don't buy into the story:
"In conclusion, to use the Ta Prohm carving as evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together only a short time ago is bad apologetics. This is one more thing to make us look silly in the eyes of nonbelievers. Don’t feed this to your kids, and don’t use it to try to convince anyone of the truthfulness of Scriptures."
And besides, if you're still on the fence:  the carving could be a fake, created in recent history.

The temple has been used in the Lara Croft Tombraider movies, after all.




References:
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=196
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2009/03/12/stegosaurus-rhinoceros-hoax/
http://geochristian.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/stegosaurus-in-cambodian-temple/
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2009/03/12/stegosaurus-rhinoceros-hoax/
http://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks-cambodia.htm 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stegosaurus 

Thursday, September 23, 2010 ~ Have your say...

Two New Horned Dinosaurs Discovered... on Lost Continent?


Two new dinosaur species were discovered, and boy-oh-boy, are they strange ones.


The artist's rendering to the left shows the two new dinosaur species -- Utahceratops gettyi (top) and Kosmoceratops richardsoni -- discovered in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument of southern Utah.   Credit: Courtesy of Utah Museum of Natural History.


The rather sensationalized title of this post references the location of the find.

"These new dinosaurs are part of a wave of discoveries made in the southern part of Laramidia that could help solve a mystery roughly a half-century old.
Starting about 50 year ago, paleontologists began noticing that although they found major groups of dinosaurs all throughout Laramidia, different species of these groups appeared in the north than in the south — for example, Alberta and Montana versus New Mexico and Texas. Such provincialism seemed odd, given the small size of the continent. For comparison, there are currently five rhino- to elephant-sized mammals on the entire continent of Africa, while there may have been more than two dozen giant dinosaurs living on Laramidia, a landmass about one-quarter that size.
Apparently, some kind of barrier existed near the latitude of northern Utah and Colorado that limited the exchange of dinosaur species north and south. Perhaps there were physical barriers such as mountains or rivers, "but we have no evidence of such then," Sampson said. "That means that perhaps these areas were separated by ecology, with different plants found in both regions, which in turn would spur different sets of herbivores to evolve and then different sets of carnivores."
Investigations into the roots of this provincialism have been severely limited by the dearth of dinosaurs found in the southern part of Laramidia compared with the north. Scientists are now overcoming this shortfall, unearthing more than a dozen species of dinosaurs in the last decade in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument."
And interestingly enough, it's now thought that the horns were not used as a self-defense mechanism, but were used to attract the opposite sex, much like a peacock's tail feathers.  

The full article can be found here:
http://www.livescience.com/animals/bizarre-horned-dinosaur-discovered-southern-utah-100922.html

Older Posts
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...