MOKELE MBEMBE OF THE CONGO (mow-key’-lee mem-bee)"In the swampy jungles of western Africa, reports persist of an elephant-sized creature with smooth, brownish-gray skin, a long, flexible neck, a very long tail as powerful as a crocodile’s, and three-clawed feet the size of frying pans. Over the past three centuries, native Pygmies and Western explorers have told how the animals feed on the nutlike fruit of a riverbank plant and keep to the deep pools and subsurface caves of waters in this largely unexplored region. After a recent expedition there, two American researchers conclude that these stories refer to a real animal, not a myth. Fantastic as it seems, Roy Mackal [University of Chicago] and James Powell believe that this creature, called ‘Mokele-Mbembe’ by the natives, may actually be a dinosaur, perhaps one resembling brontosaurus, which is thought to have died out 70 million years ago." (Anonymous, "Living Dinosaurs," Science-80, vol. 1, November 1980, pp. 6-7). The forbidding Likouala swamp region, located in the northern part of the Congo, is about the size of the state of Arkansas. It was not until missionaries showed natives a sauropod dinosaur that they identified this mysterious animal living along the rivers and deep swamp pools. A vegetarian, the creature will fight with hippos over a territory rich in molombo plants. The Sunday Times of London reported in May of 1999 that members of the Kabonga tribe actually killed a mokele-mbembe! In the fall of 1981 Herman Regusters led a team into Lake Tele and returned with droppings, footprint casts and sound recording unlike any animal known to the Congo Basin area. (Listen for yourself.) Reports of Mokele Mbembe go back to the eighteenth century and in 1919, the Smithsonian sent a team to investigate. Since 1980, over 20 such expeditions have searched the region of the Likouala swamp.