Living Dinosaurs

My children and I daydream about dinosaurs but in theory all that remains is the bones at some museum or so Paleontologists say. We all know that dinosaurs still exist in one form or another. I also theorized a little about this in the Cryptozoology section however honestly I am not sure we can view these creatures as Cryptids since at one time they ruled this planet and were very abundant Did you know that seismosaurus was 150 feet long and weighed 30-40 tons? So yeah we are dealing with incredible creatures.. I believe in theory that there is a lost world places on earth where dinosaurs still roam places maybe deep in the jungle we have not gotten to yet. The dinosaurs were said to die out from a great asteroid which collided with earth if this was the case and it did occur then what would have happened is nuclear winter where ashes and dust would block the sunlight making it very cold and all vegetation dying or if it hit water a tidal wave 2-3 miles high would sweep across all the lands wiping away and drowning most of these monolithic creatures. There are studies to show that at least 3-4 major asteroids hit the earth around that time period if this were the case mainly water creatures would survive such as today's sharks and whales which are very ancient creatures. I do believe most dinosaurs were wiped out but honestly its impossible for all of them to be think about it millions of dinosaurs if not billions all wiped out? Some had survive. Lets not forget that in theory earth has other dimensions, vortexes and planes it is possible that these dinosaurs exist on another plane and its almost possible that an ancient species from another world took some of these dinosaurs to there own planet. We may never know but one thing is certain scientist now know how to clone. What this means? It means that they can take the DNA from a preserved dinosaur and says they have found a mammoth, duck billed dinosaur all in tact and genetically manipulate and incubate the cells to create a living clone of it. Meaning someday some dinosaurs may be brought back to life if they already do not exist. Over the years however there has been reports of dinosaur sightings occasionally some of the tribes in Africa will talk about certain types they seen, some times prehistoric prints are found 2-6 feet, ancient birds are seen wingspans of 20 feet, things of that sort and yes they are increasing in today's world which means slowly things are coming back. I am going  share with you a little something a member of my organization told me that his cousin seen something prehistoric in the forest he also showed me video footage of a prehistoric print he found in the woods the only thing i can match it up to is a raptor and yes there have been a couple mutilated people found in the woods it was seen so its very possible that occasionally there is a freak accident or clone that may get loose who knows but in theory I think dinosaurs are very intelligent and are well capable of surviving without mankind. Just imagine you are walking at night in the woods you hear a rustle then see something move quickly past you then you turn around and a creature about 7 feet in height stands over you studying your eyes and you feel its breath on your face one quick move and it swings its claws at you and rips open your stomach as its jaws lock onto your throat. These things do happen in today's society unknown mutilations by unknown prehistoric type of creatures. They are the elders of the earth whether we like it or not.

Copyright By

Rick-AngelOfThyNight

 

 
 
In Search of Living Dinosaurs
For over 100 years, explorers have been told tantalizing tales of living, breathing dinosaurs that still inhabit remote areas of African rain forest. Could they be true? A new expedition will try to find out.

In 1997, a group of of Dolgan nomads in Siberia stumbled upon a huge tusk projecting from the frozen tundra. This chance discovery led to the recovery in October, 1999 of the body of a frozen, nearly intact woolly mammoth that died some 20,000 years ago, when pre-civilized man scavenged the land in packs like animals. The most astounding part of this story, however, is that scientists believe there may be enough DNA in the carcass to actually clone the ancient ancestor of the elephant. If the scientists are successful, woolly mammoths may once again walk the Earth.

Think of it. Humans will once again stand in the presence of a magnificent creature that has been extinct for tens of thousands of years. According to some cryptozoologists, however, some modern humans have set eyes on even more incredible animals with a far older lineage – dinosaurs.

Ever since dinosaur fossils have been recognized for what they are (this has been so for only about 150 years), fantasy writers have enjoyed the possibility that humans could meet these incredible monsters face to face. In The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle envisioned adventurers finding surviving species of dinosaurs in unexplored areas of jungle. And more recently, in Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton detailed how dinosaurs could be recreated through cloning, with strands of their DNA extracted from dino-blood-filled mosquitoes encased in amber.

Crichton’s vision may take a step toward reality when the experiment with the mammoth begins sometime in the year 2000. And some say Doyle’s story might not be entirely fantasy. Living dinosaurs, they claim, have recently been seen, heard, and possibly even killed in nearly inaccessible parts of the African Congo.

Tales from the Jungle
The evidence for living dinosaurs is almost exclusively anecdotal. In fact, few people other than natives have claimed to have actually seen the animals: 

  • In 1776, Abbe Proyhart wrote of the discovery of clawed footprints in West Africa that were as large as three feet in diameter.
  • The first recognized reports of what were described as dinosaur-like creatures emerged from central Africa in the late 1800s. Native tribe members told explorers of a large animal they called jago-nini, which translates to “giant diver.” Footprints said to be of this creature were about the size of a Frisbee. Other tribes who said they were familiar with this creature had other names for it, including dingonek, ol-umaina, and chipekwe.
  • In 1913, a German explorer named Captain Freiheer von Stein zu Lausnitz was told stories of an animal that was “brownish gray with a smooth skin, its size approximately that of an elephant, at least that of a hippopotamus.” The native Pygmies called it mok’ele-mbembe (meaning “stopper of rivers”) and described it as having a long, flexible neck and a vegetarian diet, but would kill humans if they came too close.
  • In 1932, cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson was told by tribesmen of a strange creature that left oversized hippo-like footprints, and which they called mgbulu-em’bembe.
  • Cryptozoologist Roy Mackel and herpetologist James Powell set off on their own expedition for mok’ele-mbembe in 1980. They returned only with interviews with natives who had heard of the long-necked, 30-foot-long creature. They said that around 1959 one had even been killed by natives along Lake Tele to stop it from interfering with their fishing. Their legend stated that whoever ate meat from the animal, died. When Powell showed pictures of various local animals to the natives, they correctly identified them. When he showed them a drawing of a sauropod dinosaur, they said that was mok’ele-mbembe.

Apart from these stories, there is no direct evidence for living dinosaurs. Some expeditions claimed to have photos of some large, unidentified creature, but the images are quite fuzzy and the results inconclusive, at best. In 1992, a Japanese expedition to the area returned with 15 seconds of film taken from an airplane flying over Lake Tele. The footage showed a large object moving across the surface of the water, leaving a V-shaped wake behind it. But the object could not be positively identified.

Flying Reptiles
Aside from the apatosaurus-like creatures of Africa’s jungle swamps, sightings of other long-extinct monsters have been claimed – in the skies above the dark continent, and even in the United States!

  • A. H. Melland, a Native Commissioner in Northern Rhodesia, was told by local natives of a flying lizard with membranous wings that stretched up to seven feet across. They called the creature Kongamato, and unhesitatingly identified it when shown a picture of a pterodactyl.
  • Natives of the Gold Coast knew of an animal they called Susabonsam that was about the size of a man with large, bat-like wings. At first it was thought that they were merely exaggerating the size of a large bat, but the natives have names for each kind of bat they know.
  • While driving to work one morning in 1976, several school teachers reported a large flying creature with a 12-foot wingspan that swooped down on their cars. Some research at the school library turned up an impossible identification: a pterosaur.
  • In the early-morning hours of one day in 1976, police officer Arturo Padilla of San Benito, Texas was surprised by a the sight of a huge “bird” caught in his headlights. Minutes later, fellow officer Homer Galvan saw its huge, black silhouette crossing the sky without flapping its wings. A few hours later, Alverico Guajardo, a resident of Brownsville, Texas, claimed to see the monstrous animal outside his mobile home, describing it as bird-like, but “not of this world.”
  • In 1982, James Thompson was driving near Fresno, Texas when he saw a dark gray, featherless, hide-covered creature with a 5- to 6-foot wingspan gliding close to the ground.

What are to make of these sightings? Humans are notoriously bad witnesses, and many could have misidentified known animals with which they were not familiar. And what of the native tribespeople who surely knew well the many animals of their region? It’s been suggested that they simply could have been pulling the leg of the eager and gullible white explorers.

The anecdotal evidence leaves the question open, however. And the search for living dinosaurs is continuing.

 

Dinosaurs May Have Survived Giant Meteor Impact
Source: ABC News / By Kenneth Chang

T A L A R N, Spain — Maybe it wasn’t a meteor, after all, that killed off the dinosaurs.

     According to one paleontologist, dinosaurs continued to live for hundreds of thousands of years after that event, at least in one part of China.

     Many paleontologists considered the case of the dinosaur extinction closed as of 65 million years ago, when a large meteor slammed into Earth. Dirt and dust tossed up by the impact blotted the sun, and the resulting chill shoved the dinosaurs into evolutionary oblivion.

     Geologists had found the equivalent of gunpowder burns — a layer of the radioactive element iridium, commonly found in meteors — detected in rocks around the world dated to this time.

     They even found the gunshot wound - a huge crater off Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

     Except there were a few nagging details that didn’t quite fit the picture.

 

Other Pieces to the Puzzle

Many believe dinosaurs were already in decline for millions of years before the supposed impact.

     There was also another suspect — massive volcanic eruptions that spewed noxious gases into the air and buried much of India in lava flows a couple of miles deep over several million years. Volcanoes can also be a source of iridium.

     Next theory: Maybe shock waves from the meteor impact traveled through the Earth, triggering the Indian eruptions, which occurred almost exactly at the other side of the planet from the crater site.

     That explanation doesn’t work, either. Radiometric dating of the lava flows indicate they started long before the meteor impact. So maybe dinosaurs were just unlucky. The volcanic eruptions triggered climactic changes that caused their decline, and the meteor impact was just the coup de grace that finished them off.

     Now Zikui Zhao of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleoanthropology in Beijing suggests the meteor didn’t even do that. At the First International Symposium of Dinosaur Eggs and Babies in Talarn, Spain Saturday, Zhao presented evidence of dinosaurs laying eggs long, long after the meteor impact.

 

Fossilized Eggs Tell Story

Near the town of Nanxiong in southeastern China, Zhao has uncovered numerous nests of fossilized dinosaur eggs. Because sediments accumulate over time, the lower part of a rock is generally older. And in the lower, older rocks, he found 11 different species of eggs.

     The last period of dinosaurs is known as the Cretaceous, the period that follows is the Tertiary, and the time of mass extinctions that divide the two is called the K/T boundary.

     At the point in the rocks that Zhao believes corresponds to the K/T boundary, six of the dinosaur species disappear. Eggs of this period also show a spike in levels of iridium, as well as other rare elements.

     However, “The remaining five species overstep the boundary and survive,” Zhao says. Indeed, he finds eggs well above the K/T boundary, suggesting that dinosaurs lived for several hundred thousand years longer than paleontologists thought.

 

Questions Arise on Dating

Other scientists attending the symposium questioned his dating. “It is not the K/T boundary,” says Nieves Lopez-Martinez of Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain. The extinctions and iridium spike, she says, comes from an earlier period of climactic change and possibly volcanic eruptions, about 71 million years ago, which she has detected in rocks in Spain, “not only here, but many other places in the world.”

     “He definitely has an anomaly,” says University of Colorado researcher Emily Bray, but she adds, “I think his boundary is too low.”

     Others were also skeptical, because the rocks surrounding the Nanxiong eggs did not show a rise in iridium amounts.

     Zhao counters that his data also shows the earlier, smaller iridium spike and that rivers and rainfall dispersed the iridium over millions of years.

     The data also argues against the meteor-killed-all-the-dinosaurs scenario, Zhao says. Iridium levels jumped up in three separate spikes near the K/T boundary, something that could not be caused by a single meteor impact.

     Almost half of the eggs near the boundary show defects in their microscopic structure, which Zhao attributes to the high levels of the iridium and other trace elements. And those may be the true dinosaur killers.

     “The cause may have been environmental poisoning and adverse changes in climate,” Zhao says, and he points to the massive volcanic eruptions in India as the probable source.

     If Zhao’s dating of his eggs proves correct, paleontologists will have to reopen their investigations into what killed the dinosaurs.



 

 

Ghost of a Dinosaur

Loch Morar, Scotland -- We are hunting the ghosts of dinosaurs.

That's one theory on the monster or monsters rumored to inhabit Loch Morar, Britain's deepest lake. Folks here call the creature the Morag or the Mhorag, and describe it much like witnesses describe the Loch Ness monster: a humped body with four large flippers, a long neck and a snake-like head -- a critter roughly matching the Mesozoic plesiosaur.

The locals have many sightings to go by. Two lads from Newcastle came fishing here two years ago. Out on the loch they circumvented a rock. Then what they'd thought was a rock raised its long neck and dived, disappearing into the black depths. The two young Englishmen immediately returned to shore and turned in their rented boat, though they'd paid for a full day's use.

"It's bloody dangerous out there," one said.

Sightings date back to the 1800s. Old-timers used to call the eerie humps they saw sliding across the water "funeral boats," dark omens of death.

Among the more recent witnesses was a woman who saw the creature flopping through shallow water on its flippers. Someone else saw two long necks cruising down the loch, side by side, thrust from the water like fence posts. A boater docking his craft saw the monster on the bottom below, before it silently slipped off the shelf and plunged into the deep. A diver seeking a lost anchor found diamond-shaped prints in the shallows; he followed them through the mud to where they dropped off into the dark.

The loch's exact depth is undetermined, but it's definitely more than a thousand feet, deeper than Loch Ness, but not nearly as famous. Unlike the towns along Loch Ness, Loch Morar's more remote communities make nothing of their monster. They've no visitor center, no gift shop. Were this America, some eager merchandiser long ago would have put a Moragarama upon one of the loch's lovely islands and charged visitors 20 bucks apiece, which under the current exchange rate would in Scotland be about two quid, five drams and a kipper, I think. Over time, that means mucho dinero.

Yet the Morarans decline this Jurassic perk. They've no "I Saw Morag" T-shirts, no rubber Morag-head hats. Loch Morar malt whisky doesn't call itself "The Monster Mash." Why? "We don't want some tacky tourist center here," said a resident.

That leaves Loch Morar a scenic, rugged, undeveloped lake on Scotland's west coast, with a rocky trail running along its northern flank. That's the path we took to look for the monster, but we haven't seen the thing.

Some maintain there's nothing to see. "That's rubbish," scoffed one local when asked about the monster matter. The more whisky a witness drinks, the bigger that monster gets, he said. "Put more water in your whisky" is a common retort to anyone claiming to have seen the Morag.

Maybe there's no Morag to see. Maybe what people see is merely a reflection of the monsters that used to be -- "the ghosts of dinosaurs," surmised one resident.

If the ghosts of dinosaurs still drift through the depths of Loch Morar, they don't surface for the amusement of American tourists.

Perhaps that's just as well. Two inquisitive American tourists may be all the locals can tolerate.

 

Did Pterosaurs Survive Extinction?
Dozens of eyewitness accounts and a few intriguing photographs suggest that this flying monster, thought to have died with the dinosaurs, might still exist.

They were the largest creatures to ever attain flight. With wingspans reaching nearly 40 feet, pterosaurs ruled the prehistoric skies for over 100 million years, until they died out with the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.

Or did they?

There have been many modern-day sightings of creatures that by eyewitness description sound like pterosaurs. There are also intriguing rock carvings and even photographs that suggest that this species of amazing flying monsters could have survived extinction, could have soared through the skies of the southwestern United States until very recently, and might still exist in small numbers in remote parts of the world.

Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, but a family of large flying reptiles ("pterosaur" means "winged lizard") that includes the pterodactyl and pteranodon. The pterosaur stood on two rather spindly legs and had wings composed of a leathery membrane that stretched from the animal's extremely long fourth finger to its body. Despite their appearance, they were not related to birds (as dinosaurs are theorized to be), and were highly successful flyers that might have dined on fish and insects.

Modern Sightings

Although there seems to be no hard evidence that pterosaurs did not die out millions of years ago - no pterosaurs have ever been captured and no bodies have ever been found - sightings have persisted. Stories of flying reptiles have been recorded for many hundreds of years. Some think that tales of the "mythical" dragons in the lore of many cultures around the would could be attributed to the sighting of pterosaurs. Here are some more modern accounts:

May, 1961, New York State - A businessman flying his private plane over the Hudson River Valley claimed that he was "buzzed" by a large flying creature that he said "looked more like a pterodactyl out of the prehistoric ages."

Early 1960s, California - A couple driving through Trinity National Forest reported seeing the silhouette of a giant "bird" that they estimated to have a wingspan of 14 feet. They later described it as resembling a pterodactyl.

January, 1976, Harlingen, Texas - Jackie Davis (14) and Tracey Lawson (11) reported seeing a "bird" on the ground that stood five feet tall, was dark in color with a bald head and a face like a gorilla's with a sharp, six-inch-long beak. A subsequent investigation by their parents uncovered tracks that had three toes and were eight inches across.

February, 1976, San Antonio, Texas - Three elementary school teachers saw what they described as a pterodactyl swooping low over their cars as they drove. They said its wingspan was between 15 and 20 feet. One of the teachers commented that it glided through the air on huge, bony wings - like a bat's.

September, 1982, Los Fresnos, Texas - An ambulance driver named James Thompson was stopped while driving on Highway 100 by his sighting of a "large birdlike object" flying low over the area. He described it as black or grayish with a rough texture, but no feathers. It had a five- to six-foot wingspan, a hump on the back of its head, and almost no neck at all. After consulting some books to identify the creature, he decided it most looked like a pterosaur.

Africa's Kongamato

While other reports of pterosaur-like creatures have come out of Arizona, Mexico and Crete, it is out of central Africa that some of the most interesting anecdotes have come. While traveling though Zambia in 1923, Frank H. Melland collected reports from natives of an aggressive flying reptile they called kongamoto, which means "overwhelmer of boats." The natives, who were occasionally tormented by these creatures, described them as being featherless with smooth skin, having a beak full of teeth and a wingspan of between four and seven feet. When shown illustrations of pterosaurs, Melland reported, "every native present immediately and unhesitatingly picked out and identified it as a kongamato."

In 1925, a native man was allegedly attacked by a creature that he identified as a pterosaur. This occurred near a swamp in Rhodesia (now Zambia) where the man suffered a large wound in his chest that he said was caused by the monster's long beak.

In the late 1980s, noted cryptozoologist Roy Mackal led an expedition into Namibia from which he had heard reports of a prehistoric-looking creature with a wingspan of up to 30 feet.