Living Dinosaurs

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Do dinosaurs still exist? The question may sound absurd. After all, conventional wisdom holds that these giant reptiles lapsed into extinction some 65 million years ago. Still, occasional reports from remote regions of the earth have kept the issue alive, if only to readers of tabloid newspapers and to the handful of scientists, adventurers, and nature writers who have tried to make sense of the accounts and, where possible, to investigate them. Much of the investigation has centered on a legendary creature generally referred to mokele-mbembe and described as a sauropod-like animal, with a long neck, small head, bulky body, and tail. The first printed mention of the huge, plate-shaped tracks associated with the beast appears in a 1776 history of French missionaries in west-central Africa. In the next two centuries missionaries, colonial authorities, hunters, explorers, and natives would provide strikingly consistent descriptions of the animals supposedly responsible for tracks of this kind. Sighting reports in recent years have been confined to the swampy, remote Likouala region of the Congo.

In 1980 and 1981 University of Chicago biologist Roy P. Mackal led two expeditions to the area, the first in the company of herpetologist James H. Powell, Jr., who had heard mokele-mbembe stories while doing crocodile research in west-central Africa. Neither expedition produced a sighting, though Mackal and his companions interviewed a number of native witnesses. The creatures, greatly feared, were said to live in the swamps and rivers. A band of pygmies supposedly killed one at Lake Tele around 1959. Though the Mackal expeditions were unable to reach the nearly inaccessible Tele, a rival group, headed by American engineer Herman Regusters, successfully made the journey. Over a period of two to three weeks, he and his wife Kia Van Dusen would claim, huge long-necked animals came into view on several occasions, both in the water and in the swampy areas around the lake...

From Arthur Conan Doyle"s "The Lost World" to "Jurassic Park" the concept of dinosaurs being alive today has been a subject for films and books for centuries, but how likely is it that any could have survived for so long ?"The idea ofstill-living dinosaurs has captured the public imagination for well over a century.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, published a 1912 novel called "The Lost World," set in the remote Venezuelan jungle where dinosaurs still survive in modern times. Films such as "Jurassic Park" and "Land of the Lost," which opens Friday, were inspired by Conan Doyle"s vision — in fact the sequel to"Jurassic Park" was titled "The Lost World." "

View: Full Article | Source: Live Science

A new study has suggested that a small pocket of dinosaurs somehow survived the mass extinction 65 million years ago and went on to thrive in an isolated region for up to half a million years."An isolated group of dinosaurssomehow survived the catastrophic event that wiped out most of their kind some 65.5 million years ago, a new study suggests.

Dinosaurs of this "lost world," in a remote region of the U.S. West, may have outlived their doomed relatives by as much as half a million years, according to James Fassett, an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Fe, New Mexico. "

View: Full Article | Source: NationalGeographic

An All News Web reader has contributed a photograph of the Ta Prohm Temple in Cambodia with what appears to be images of a Stegosaurus on it. The picture has sparked intrigue and controversy, is this really evidence that dinosaurs were alive in modern times, could the image have been misinterpreted or it simply a hoax ?"Conventional science has it that the dinosaurs were wiped out many millions of years ago either as the result of climate change or a meteorite hitting earth.

Some researchers, however, claim that dinosaurs might have continued to roam remote parts of the earth as recently as a few hundred years ago. A few even claim that there might be somesmall populations of dinosaurs, otherwise believed to be extinct, surviving in the world’s most isolated forests."

View: Full Article (with photograph) | Source: All News Web