May 23, 2012
A Dinosaur Expedition Doomed From the Start
There aren’t any sauropods in the Congo Basin. There’s not a scrap of evidence that long-necked, swamp-wallowing dinosaurs are hiding somewhere in the jungles of Africa, or anywhere else. And I say that as someone who was enthralled when I saw the puppet brontosaurs of 1985′s Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (see the clip above), arguably the best movie dinosaurs before Jurassic Park stomped along. After seeing that movie, I really, really wanted there to be living sauropods, but the evidence simply doesn’t exist.
Rumors that there might be an Apatosaurus-like dinosaur in the Congo Basin have circulated for years. Young earth creationists have been especially enamored with the idea, as they wrongly believe that finding a living, non-avian dinosaur will discredit evolutionary theory. (The existence of a living sauropod wouldn’t be any worse for evolutionary theory than the discovery of modern coelacanths. These archaic fish were thought to be extinct, but once living fish were discovered, they fell perfectly well within what scientists have understood about evolutionary patterns since Darwin’s day.)
Numerous expeditions have been launched in search of the legendary animal. None have come back with evidence that some Cretaceous holdover is hanging out in Lake Tele or anywhere else. You’d think that a population of huge, amphibious dinosaurs would leave plenty of tracks, scat and skeletal remains behind, but—surprise, surprise—apparently not. There is a collection of stories, fuzzy photos, audio recordings and supposed footprint casts, but none of this adds up to anything. The last of the sauropods died more than 65 million years ago. If they had survived beyond that time, we would have certainly picked up the trail of the survivors in the fossil record.
Even modern field ecology argues against the existence of large dinosaurs in the Congo Basin. Zoologists often conduct multiple searches for species that went extinct during recent history. Sometimes a few hold-outs turn up, and the search intensity is key here. In a study tracking the rediscovery of presumably extinct mammals, zoologists Diana Fisher and Simon Blomberg found that still-extant species were often found again after three to six searches were conducted. After that point, the likelihood of success plummets. Given that there have been over a dozen unsuccessful expeditions to the Congo Basin looking for sauropods—immense creatures that would leave plenty of evidence in the landscape if they existed—the conclusion is clear. There are no amphibious dinosaurs to find.
But the facts haven’t discouraged Stephen McCullah. A few months ago various news services reported that the wannabe biologist launched a Kickstarter page to fund a three-month expedition to the Congo Basin in hopes of capturing Mokele-mbembe, the name by which the mythical sauropod is often called. Sure, McCullah mentions that the trip’s goal will be “categorizing plant and animal species in the vastly unexplored Republic of the Congo,” but the focus of his pitch is clearly the search for a dinosaur that doesn’t exist. Not surprisingly, McCullah and his team don’t seem to have any formal qualifications to speak of. (McCullah’s bio says he studied biology at Missouri State University and UMKC, but that’s all.) Passion is great, but the Kickstarter page for the project gives no indication that he and his team are trained in field techniques or are approaching the trip with a scientific attitude. (See this video from Chicago’s Field Museum to see what responsible field biology really looks like.) It just seems like a kid’s bid for fame on someone else’s dime.
McCullah’s expedition recently hit its funding goal. It looks like the expedition is on, and rumor has it that the trip will be turned into another crummy basic cable documentary. If the program is anything like the MonsterQuest episode about Mokele-mbembe, it will be another hyped waste of time.
Throughout all this, many journalists have handled McCullah with kid gloves. The fact that someone says he intends to capture a living sauropod is apparently much more important to some media outlets than the fact that such a creature no longer exists. Some of the worst coverage has come from the Huffington Post, which, as science writer Seth Mnookin has commented, has featured plenty of bad science and facile reasoning. Lee Speigel, a journalist focused on UFO-related stories and a self-professed “truth seeker,” concluded his first article about McCullah’s expedition with: “One thing’s for certain: [McCullah] will have to bring enough equipment. Capturing a living dinosaur may require some very big nets.”
Speigel’s follow-up was even more credulous. After acknowledging that paleontologists have not found any indication of modern or recent sauropods, Speigel cites an ambiguous 5,000-year-old pictograph found in the Amazon as evidence that humans and non-avian dinosaurs overlapped in time. Speigel omits the fact that the two “researchers” who make the grand claims about the ancient art—Vance Nelson and Harry Nibourg—are creationists who have a strong bias in favor of modern dinosaurs because of their fundamentalist beliefs. In another evidence-free portion of the piece, Speigel writes, “Many previous expeditions have attempted to follow up on these reports [of living sauropods] by tracking the dangerous, swampy Likouala region of Congo, which has a climate not much changed since dinosaurs roamed in large numbers millions of years ago.” Never mind that the continents have shifted and the climate has in fact fluctuated widely over the past 66 million years—Speigel is setting up the Congo Basin as a pristine lost world where Cretaceous monsters still lurk.
The coda to the article is even better. Speigel reported that McCullah’s team planned to bring firearms on the trip, with the implication that expedition members might slay any dinosaur they find. McCullah wrote back: “Killing a creature like mokele-mbembe is really not an option as far as the team is concerned. If it were a life-threatening situation, that could change, but our plan for a confrontation with a mokele-like creature as of now is to chemically subdue the animal.” The plan is to bring “mokele-mbembe back alive,” McCullah said. Clearly he hasn’t seen 1925′s Lost World—sauropods and cities don’t mix. But it’s all absolutely absurd. McCullah’s team is carefully planning to use firearms on an imaginary animal. You can’t tranquilize a dinosaur that doesn’t exist.
Reports like Speigels are why I wish ill-informed journalists would just leave dinosaurs alone. It’s so easy to quickly and foolishly regurgitate fantastic claims, and when reality isn’t as wonderful as the claims being made, some writers aren’t above just making stuff up as they see fit. In this case, McCullah’s expedition was really a non-story. “Wannabe-adventurer seeks dinosaur that doesn’t exist” isn’t much of a headline. Some writers bought into fantasy to sell the story, leaving all those inconvenient facts behind.
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If that rock drawing is evidence of Amazonian sauropods, then Kokopelli has been cavorting around the Southwest for the past thousand years.
Funny you mentioned the movie ‘Baby’, my memory of it that I was the only person in the theater who laughed out loud when they decided to try and get a Carbon 14 date on a dinosaur bone. Good times.
Apparently their science was about as good as the Creationists.
‘Baby’ was great! Loved that movie when I was a kid. They used goofily tiny tranquilizers on the one they captured, though; doubt that the animal would have been affected at all.
LOL at the idea of shooting any sauropod, though. You need seriously massive firepower to down something the size of an African elephant, and sauropods were colossi compared to those; you’d need an antitank missile launcher.
Two things you should probably know about this trip.
The goal of this expedition is not to find Mokele Mbembe.
Mokele Mbembe is something I briefly mentioned as being reported to have been seen in the region. You can read about the goals of the expedition on our website: http://www.newmacexpedition.com. It also talks about our experience.
Some friendly advice..
You may want to look into the facts before you write another article.
SM, One of the first things on the page you linked to is of a person standing next to a dinosaur.
As for the group, the descriptions are pretty light on the details. You seem to have a scuba diver, a Business Major from Ohio, a guy from Missouri who’s “tough as nails”, a person who’s studying for an Environmental Sciences degree, and someone who’s participated in a few Study Abroad programs.
The paragraph that makes up your goals page almost exclusively talks about mokele membe, so why are you pretending that that is a small component?
Obviously you are free to do what you want, especially since a few companies are getting ad-space from it, but Switek’s assessment seems pretty on-the-mark.
This expedition will at the very least be better entertainment than 99% of the articles found (yawn) within the hollowed, peer-reviewed -to-death pages of SMITHSONIAN. There is a spirit of adventure here. They are risking life and limb to explore a mystery. Again, the scientific establishment refuses to take the local population at their word that there is something unusual in their forest. Nay-sayers such as the author of this article are a dime a dozen. Explorers who risk everything are a rarity.
“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.” — Sir Francis Bacon
What a boring stick-in-the-mud Switek is. I sincerely hope McCullah finds evidence of a living dinosaur — what an amazing discovery that would be! Whether dinosaurs still exist or not is not the point — it’s an adventure, and the desk jockey naysayers sipping their coffee out of official Smithsonian mugs completely miss the point.
However, I only have one concern — if evidence is found, or even a live dinosaur sighted, then I hope McCullah keeps the location secret. Otherwise, every man and his dog will be heading for the area to kill the poor dino.
I’ll go out on a limb and say while yes – there is some spirit of adventure with this expedition – it’s the same sort of excitement behind shows like “finding bigfoot” and “ghost hunters”. I find it hilarious that a gullible public just eats this stuff up and watches shows that have not shown even a second of footage of the subject of the show, over the course of how many seasons. The simple reason is that they just don’t exist, and neither do Holocene dinosaurs in Africa.
“Local populations” in Africa also think that killing and eating albino humans will bring them good luck.
I agree, it’s a stupid idea (cretinous?) to entertain the idea that Cretaceous critters are lingering amidst the foliage of deepest Africa. It’s also like knocking at the door of Mr. Critical Thinking and finding nobody home.
If there’s an upside to this kind of shallow media entertainment it’s the possibility that younger viewers might find their sense of wonder being ignited. There’s nothing wrong with kids imagining a world were dinosaurs still exist! Unfortunately, we live in a world were a lot of adults would rather believe in massive, elaborate cover-ups than the reality that dinosaurs are extinct.
“If there’s an upside to this kind of shallow media entertainment it’s the possibility that younger viewers might find their sense of wonder being ignited.”
But we already have this, much of the BBC caters to this without needing to add the shallow nonsense.
“There’s nothing wrong with kids imagining a world were dinosaurs still exist!”
We also already have this, and it is properly labeled fiction.
I think he is more likely to find Dina Shore than Dinosaur…JMO
Steve McCullah,
Dude, congratulations on getting money from your creationist friends for your media expedition. You know your audience ! And like all scientists, I certainly look forward to any support you can come up with for a designer. and how your finds will refute the central theorme in the biological and life sciences! Very exciting stuff. The scientific community will be,,,uh, amazed! Furthermore, it would be awesome if you actually did find a dinosaur. It would fit in so well with scripture! Not the scripture I learned as a young Lutheran of course, but whatever scripture it is that you guys read.
Ponce de Leon and Steve McCullah ! Have fun.!!Its the Stone Ages all over again.Menatlly that is. but with modern equipment. How cool is that!
‘Speigel omits the fact that the two “researchers” who make the grand claims about the ancient art—Vance Nelson and Harry Nibourg—are creationists who have a strong bias in favor of modern dinosaurs because of their fundamentalist beliefs.’ … Uh, like the Smithsonian does not have an equally strong bias in ‘disfavor’ of modern dinosaurs because of their evolutionary beliefs?
Jonathan Henry, scientists do not have a bias against the idea of living dinosaurs because of their evolutionary “beliefs”. Living, non-avian dinosaurs would not falsify our understanding of evolution. As the author pointed out, “Young earth creationists … wrongly believe that finding a living, non-avian dinosaur will discredit evolutionary theory. (The existence of a living sauropod wouldn’t be any worse for evolutionary theory than the discovery of modern coelacanths. These archaic fish were thought to be extinct, but once living fish were discovered, they fell perfectly well within what scientists have understood about evolutionary patterns since Darwin’s day.)”
Scientists doubt the existence of a large sauropod in the Congo because of a lack of any hard evidence to support such claims, not because they run contrary to evolutionary processes. The author correctly describes sauropods as “immense creatures that would leave plenty of evidence in the landscape if they existed”. It is the lack of evidence to support the existence of Mokele Membe, not a “bias” in favor of evolution, that leaves scientists skeptical. Qualifying a claim as unlikely given the lack of evidence to support it is a completely different proposition from making subjective, grandiose interpretations of cave paintings which conveniently fit into one’s religious beliefs.
There is little doubt that Mokele-mbembe is a living animal. However, what kind of animal, is another question entirely. Having spend some considerable time interviewing eye-witnesses from different cultural & tribal groups (they are quite diverse in their languages, cultures, social make-up and religious beliefs), I am struck by a number of facts:
1. They all describe a semi-aquatic animal that is present in the rivers & swamps.
2. It is rare, and dangerous when approached
3. Its diet is entirely vegetable.
4. The names given for this animal (fifteen different tribal names), differ from one another, but the description remains almost exactly the same.
5. The animal is hostile towards hippos and elephants, which it will drive away or kill if found in its territory.
6. All eye-witnesses describe an animal that is up to 30 feet long, with a long, thin neck, long flexible tail, reddish brown in color, a head resembling a snake or lizard, and remains in the river when feeding on leaves and fruits of overhanging tree branches.
7. Although the animal is rare, almost everyone we have interviewed that have encountered the animal have exhibited considerable fear of it. Theses are people who fearlessly hunt hippos (which kill more people in Africa annually than any other animal), elephants and crocodiles, with little more than spears & nets.
Whatever Mokele-mbembe is, we cannot with any certainty claim that it is a dinosaur. However, the discovery of a totally new species and genus would be just as exciting.
In the meantime, I hope to return to a specific location in Cameroon this November to continue our research.
Best Wishes,
Bill Gibbons
africanmysteries@yahoo.ca
Billy Gibbons ! Wow, dude, you stopped playing guitar?
Too bad you didn’t quit the hallucinogenics too.
Your post is hilariously menatlly ill.
Get an education.
SM, I hope you find one. I hope you catch one. If you bring back evidence, don’t expect Smithsonian to believe you.. it goes against their Dogma. They would not acknowledge the existence of one if it bit them in the ass. I’m glad you’re going. Be careful , Congo is rough (especially where you’re headed). Hope you get a very good guide.
@Will Fraser – when you have nothing of any value to add to add to this exchange, just resort to cheap insults, right?
I have taken the time and trouble to actually travel to Africa, explore remote areas, get to know the people and LEARN about them and their cultures. Even if I find nothing, I have been rewarded by many other experiences in life.
By the way. it’s “mentally ill.”
And you suggest that I get an education?
I’m with Bill Gibbons on this one. Exploratory inquiry is always better than a dismissal on the basis of “Don’t bother because it’s impossible, okay?”
We might disagree with him about other things, but he has a point when observing that there is a lot more commonality in the Mokele-Mbmembe stories than Brian Switek lets on. It was serious enough to have an exhibit mention Mokele as a possible living dinosaur at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center. I don’t know what to make of these stories, myself, but I do think they warrant further investigation by a serious, experienced, thorough, well-funded expedition. Whether such a thing is currently possible is another matter altogether.
From all of the reports their is somthing and I for one hope they get photos and somthing to prove what it is without harming it.
@ Bill Gibbons- You have definitely found something exceptional. You don’t need to find a dinosaur; your description of the tribes you encountered are fascinating enough to any anthropologist. I’m particularly interested in the tribes that hunt fearlessly hippo’s and elephants with nets. Can you tell a bit more about them: who are they, what languages do they speak (many different ones, you mention),..
I’m also quite sure you have a lot of footage of the dinosaurs themselves. As the tribes know so much about it’s behaviour and considering it kills elephants and hippo’s when disturbed they must have observed the animal often and for extended periods. A very rare sighting of an animal would be hard to reconcile with seeing that animal exactly at the moment of a fight with hippo’s one time, another time with elephants. And to know for sure the animal is vegetarian you need more than a glimpse from afar.
Not that it matters very much. As a child I loved Huxley’s professors and the newspaper guy, I couldn’t get enough of Jules Verne and ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’ still had a romantic ring to it. And some of that feeling still lingers. So please go on telling the world about monsters in swamps (add some local black amazones perhaps).
As to the money of an expedition, I consider it well spent. Some musea give millions for a painting that is only of interest to a very few admirers, while your stories may excite children and stimulate their fantasy and even their interest in study -as Huxley and Vernes did with me.
A small piece of advice: find yourself a good writer to write a novel loosely based on your travels, it could be a best-seller and with part of the profits you can fund many more glorious adventures. I’m serious
Although I have serious doubts about finding a ‘living sauropod’, I have even more doubts about this ‘unbiased’ article. The simple comment..”are creationists who have a strong bias in favor of modern dinosaurs because of their fundamentalist beliefs.” is about as biased as it can be! I find it very interesting that evolutionists insist that all the evidence support their ‘theories’. Just a short look at the ‘evidence’ shows that new discoveries are constantly causing evolutionists to tweak their theories. That is why they should be called and identified as theories instead of being taught as fact. I also find it offensive that the author implies that if you don’t have an advanced degree then you aren’t smart enough to figure things out for yourself. Go ahead, cling to your ‘truth of theories’ and constantly change what is true in your life. “As for me & my house we will cling to the unchanging truth.” To paraphrase the greatest best-seller of all time!