Land Cryptids

Emela Ntouka. "Killer of Elephants"
    Inhabiting the same Congolese swamp region as the famed Mokele Mbembe is another creature that is said to resemble a dinosaur type. The Emela Ntouka, literal translation is  "killer of elephants", is described as large, between the size of a rhino and an elephant, having a crocodile like tail, semi-aquatic, and possesses a single large bone horn on its face. The creature is said to gore elephants to death by impaling them on its single, large horn, usually through the belly.

    Many believe that the Emela Ntouka is a Ceratopsian dinosaur, namely a Centrosaurus, although Roy Mackals speculation on this theory was cast down when many of the pygmies did not recollect a neck frill. Most skeptics believe the animal is a new species of semi-aquatic rhinoceros, however this theory is even less feasible considering the description of the creature and its habits. Rhinoceros horns are made of Keratin not bone or Ivory like describe (although native pygmies may not know the difference between Keratin and bone).

    One of the biggest discrepancies in the rhino belief is that rhinos rarely win in a fight with an elephant. and they are not known to be aquatic except for rolling in mud normally. The Ceratopsian idea has been strengthened by more recent expeditions by the Genesis Park team who gathered descriptions of the creature with a neck frill. The Emela Ntouka is said to be strictly vegetarian and is reported to feed upon the Malombo plants that Mokele Mbembe feasts upon as well.

    The Congo swamps seem to be a prime habitat for  living dinosaurs if they indeed are the animals behind the cryptids they are labeled as. With a large an unexplored swamp ( one of the best habitats for a reptile), it should be no surprise that it is reportedly home to several creatures that fit the description of dinosaurs. With continued efforts to document theses creatures, it should be suprisingly soon before they are proven to exist and be cataloged.

Muhuru

    The Muhuru is a seldom reported creature that supossedly lives in central Africa. Little is known about the creature and few sightings have been made or reported. The animal is said to have a heavily armored back and a tail that ends in a club like fashion. Some have said that this animal may be a stegosaur species but others have disagreed saying that the description better fits an Ankylosaur species.

    As of now little is known since so few reports have been made. It is possible that this creature is the same as the Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu, yet it may be a different animal and indeed an Ankylosaur type of dinosaur. The reports of it having an armored back and club-like end to its tail may have been misinterpreted and the "armor" meaning the back is covered in plates, and the "club" meaning that tip of the tail ends in a structure and not just a normal taper. However until there is more sufficient data, this creature remains subject to much debate and interpretation.

Burrunjor

 In northern parts of Australia reports of giant bipedal reptilian monsters have come out for many decades. The descriptions given by eye witnesses strongly resemble that of large Theropod dinosaurs. It is said to be a large reptilian animal that walks on two hind legs and measures at least 25 feet long and up to 20 feet tall. It has two small front arms and a large head with a mouth full of sharp teeth used the kill and even carry off cattle in some instances.

    To many this sounds like the anatomy of a Bipedal carnivorous dinosaur, animals said to have died out many millions of years ago give or take a few hundred thousand years. Many scientists and skeptics of still living dinosaurs quickly dismiss these reports as the stuff of mythology and misidentification, but many others believe that it means that there may still be some Theropod dinosaurs living in the remote jungle wilderness of northern Australia. Or at the very least some were alive within the last few hundred years.

    These creatures are reported to live in the Northern territory in Arnhem Land east to the Gulf of Carpentaria to Queensland's Cape York district. The area is very remote and inaccessible and rarely explored. It consists of many mountains and rock faces covered with forests and in some areas there are thick swamps. Humans rarely venture into these places but some that have have come back telling tales of giant reptilian monsters known to the Aborigines as Burrunjors.

    While not many sightings have occurred by people whom are not Aboriginal natives, the few that have identically match the descriptions given by native people. Given the startling fact that these descriptions match flawlessly across the board, many believe they may be credible and investigate further. It should be noted however that these animals have been known to the Aborigines for centuries, if not millennium, and thye will not travel to the places where these creatures live out of fear.

One of the earliest reports of a Burrunjor made by a non native was in the 1950's.

"Back in 1950, cattlemen lost stock to some mysterious beast that left the mutilated, half-eaten remains of cows and bulls in its wake over a wide area, stretching between the border country and Burketown. Searchers on horseback found huge reptilian tracks of some bipedal-walking beast. They followed these three-toed tracks with their cattle dogs through some rough jungle terrain until they entered swampland beyond which was more dense scrub.

However, it was at this point that the cattle dogs became uneasy and ran off. The horses were also uneasy and obviously did not want to cross the swamp. While most of the cattlemen decided their animals knew best, two men set off on foot with their carbines.

The story goes that they soon came across further tracks in an open area beyond the swamp. While his mate searched about, the other man briefly spotted the dark form of an enormous creature, perhaps 30ft in height, further off in dense timber. The men left the scene in haste."

One report comes from a person of Aboriginal decent. He reported his sighting to an investigator.

Johnny Mathews, a part-Aboriginal tracker, claimed to have seen a 25ft tall bipedal reptilian monster, moving through scrub near lagoon Creek on the Gulf coast one day in 1961. “Hardly anyone outside my own people believes my story, but I known what I saw”, he said to me in 1970.

    Possibly the most famous of the stories of Burrunjor encounters is recorded in Rex Gilroy's book Out of the Dreamtime – The Search for Australasia’s Unknown Animals. The story details the events of a man getting lost in Northern territory and the search for him by a policeman and two Aboriginal trackers.

    Back in 1978, a Northern Territory bushman and explorer, Bryan Clark, related a story to me of his own that had taken place some years before. While mustering cattle in the Urapunji area, he became lost in the remote wilderness of that part of Arnhem Land. It took him three days to find his way out of the region and back to the homestead from where he originally set out.
He had not known at the time, but his footprints had been picked up and followed by two Aboriginal trackers and a mounted policeman. On the first night of their search they camped on the outskirts of the Burrunjor scrub, even though the two trackers protested strongly against doing so. The policeman hobbled his horse, cooked their meal, then climbed into his swag and went to sleep.

    Later that night the two Aborigines shouting intelligibly and grasping for their packs and saddles suddenly woke him up. The policeman also realized at this moment that the ground appeared to be shaking. Hurriedly getting to his feet, he too gathered up his belongings, and shortly afterwards, the three galloped away. As he told Bryan Clark later at the Urapunji homestead, he had also heard a sound, somewhat like a loud puffing or grunting noise, certainly loud enough to be coming from some large animal.

    When asked if he intended to include this incident in his report, he replied he would not because he feared no one would believe him.
The policeman warned Bryan never again to return to that area, because if he got lost there again he’d be “on his own”, as he would not come looking for him! The region’s cave art, thousands of years old, depicts these monstrous animals. Many Aborigines believe these monsters wander back and forth across the Gulf country and Cape York to this day.

    The most recent known sighting was made not by Aborigines, but by a family of "modern day people" driving to a mission.

In 1985 a 4-wheel drive vehicle and it s family of travellers, the Askeys, heading for Roper River Mission, happened to take a back road for some sightseeing. Just before they were to pull up and turn around to resume their journey to the mission, they all saw, moving together across an open plain some distance away, two bipedal-walking reptilian creatures a good 20ft tall respectively.
“The monsters were a greyish-brown colour and dinosaur-like in appearance. We didn’t wait around”, said the father, Mr Greg Askey.

 

    Some have suggested that Burrunjors may be a type of giant Monitor lizard such as Megalania. Monitor lizards are known to adopt a bipedal stance for short periods of time. The problem with this interpretation however is that Burrunjors are never reported to walk on all fours, only bipedally, whereas Monitors do not walk bipedally and only adopt a two legged stance to survey an area or reach something above them. Burrunjors are also described as being far too massive to be a monitor species and leave tracks with three toes, not five.

    Without many reported sightings it seems that the Burrunjor may be nothing than fictional stories, although it is significant that all the reports describe the same animal, and in at least one case, a pair of animals. This fact would suggest that the animals being reported are indeed some species of Theropod Dinosaur that is still surviving in the remote regions of Australia.

    In addition to the stories there is some physical evidence. In 1984 near Narooma, New South Whales, large 3 toed reptilian tracks from a bipedal animal were found. They were confirmed and collected by the top Australian Cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy. He made a plaster cast of one of the tracks as proof.

    Regardless of how ridiculous the idea of Dinosaurs still surviving in present day may seem to some, it is in fact quite possible and maybe even likely since a number of other organisms believed long dead have been found living in present day and known to natives as local flora and fauna, but to scientists it was considered a rock solid fact that these creatures died out many millions of years ago. It is quite possible for a population of Theropod Dinosaurs to survive undetected in the remote areas of the Outback and the Northern territory in swamps and jungle. the best way to solve such a mystery is not to scoff at the idea based on teachings drilled into us since kindergarten, but to mount serious expeditions until such creatures are found.

Ngoubou.

   In the swampy recesses of the river laden jungles and savannah regions of Cameroon in Africa the native tribes are well acquainted with a large reptilian animal they call the Nguobou. As with the other cryptid animals reported by natives around the world, the Nguobou is not considered a mythical animal, but a population of flesh and blood local fauna that they encounter from time to time. The first reports of Ngoubou were gathered in 2000 by William Gibbons and his team while in Cameroon doing preliminary investigations on Mokele Mbembe. The natives told him about another animal that they encountered every once in a while. The word Ngoubou means Rhinoceros and sometimes also Hippo but is also used to refer to an as of yet unknown creature they say is similar to a rhino but is much larger and has more horns.

   The natives say that this animal is no ordinary rhino and has a beak on it's face and multiple horns as well as a large frill on it's neck. One report stated that an Ngoubou had 6 horns on it's head not including the horn on it's nose. Gibbons showed a series of animal pictures to the natives whom stated that while it resembled the Triceratops in one picture, that it was not the animal they are acquainted with. Williams eventually looked through a list of Ceratopsian dinosaurs and came to the conclusion that Ngoubou is a Styracosaurus, a Ceratopsian dinosaur that has multiple horns on it's frill. The problem many people point out is that these animals' fossils are not known from Africa, only North America, but many Creationists point out that surviving populations would not leave fossil remains and could have easily moved to or have occurred in areas other than where fossils are associated since fossils only form under special conditions.

   The native people have reported a decline in he creatures in recent years, making them rarer, although the father of one of the tribes senior members had killed an Ngoubou with a spear a number of years ago. It has been theorized that Ngoubou may be a synonym for Emela-Ntouka, another Ceratopsian animal reported in Africa, though Emela-Ntouka is said to have only one horn, so maybe it is the younger form of the same species.

   The best known encounter with an Ngoubou was reported in Bernard Heuvelmans book On the Track of Unknwon Animals. The sighting occurred on November 17, 1919 by a man named Lepage who was in charge of railroad construction in the Belgian Congo. Lepage said that while he was hunting in the Congo rainforest he came upon an extraordinary monster, which charged at him. Lepage fired but was forced to flee, with the monster in chase. The animal before long gave up the chase and Lepage was able to examine it through his binoculars. The animal, he says, was about 24 feet in length with a long pointed snout adorned with tusks like horns and a short horn above the nostrils. The front feet were like those of a horse and the hind hooves were cloven. There was a scaly hump on the monsters shoulder.

This long and clear sighting gives a lot of detail, more than many encounters do and helps to show that the Ngoubou's anatomy agrees very well with that of a Styracosaurus. While many people will be "skeptical", and simply turn a blind eye to any notion of a population of Dinosaurs still living in the 21st century alongside humans, this attitude is just the kind that stifles scientific inquiry by stating quite plainly that "if it hasn't been proven already then it's not real", leaving no room for investigation or following new data. The same type of overzealous denial has been seen time and time again in the controversy of Creation vs Evolution by anti Creationist advocates that say there is no evidence for Creation (of which there is in reality an overwhelming amount) and any attempts to find such evidence is merely a waste of time and money. How can we discover if we cannot explore? It seems that while Cryptozoology is not a strictly Creationist field, it has brought forth many reports of living Dinosaurs that heavily contradict what Evolution says. If Ngoubou is in fact a surviving population of Ceratopsian dinosaurs in the Congo it would be one more of many evidences against "Goo to You" Macro-Evolution and long ages of millions and billions of years of history and radical change in organisms as would be other Dinosaur Cryptids. Hopefully an expedition will soon prove one of these creatures still alive and show many people that the Creation account of history and life is more than a mere story.

Kulta.