Mokele-mbembe

A creature said to live in the Congo, which a German animal collector took for a brontosaurus in the early 1900s. By 2011, BBC News reported, more than 50 expeditions had found no scientific evidence.

A 2011 BBC News report compared the mokele-mbembe with Loch Ness. Edward Guimont writes in Contingent Magazine (2019) that early in the twentieth century two animal collectors from Germany, Hans Schomburgk and Carl Hagenbeck, said they had heard of a reptile known to African people and to European hunters in Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Some Africans took it to be the mokele-mbembe of legend; Hagenbeck was convinced it was a brontosaurus.

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid (2020) writes that Bölsche's book set down von Stein's view that the creature was local folklore and no real animal. Von Stein wrote with care, Dunning says, that it probably lived only in the minds of people there.

Wikipedia says that from the early to mid twentieth century it drew the attention of cryptozoologists and young Earth creationists. Creationist groups often paid for the expeditions, hoping to find evidence that would contradict evolution, and cryptozoologists led many of them. BBC News counted more than 50 expeditions from outside the region by 2011, with no scientific evidence apart from a big footprint shaped like a claw, which a French missionary noted in 1776, as have others since.

The BBC Two series Congo, in its episode Spirits of the Forest, follows Baka people as they look for Mokele Mbembe, which the programme page calls a fearsome beast.