All over the world there are rumors and stories of living dinosaurs. One of the key areas is the Likouala swamp region of the Congo which is supposed to be home to the Mokele-mbembe may also contain another dinosaurian: the Emela-ntouka (literally “killer of elephants”). This stout rhinoceros-like creature is reputed to have a penchant for killing elephants with its single horn.
Expeditions mounted in the hope of finding evidence of the Mokèlé-mbèmbé have failed, and the subject has been covered in a number of books and by a number of television documentaries. According to skeptic Robert T. Carroll, “Reports of the Mokèlé-mbèmbé have been circulating for the past two hundred years, yet no one has photographed the creature or produced any physical evidence of its existence.” The Mokèlé-mbèmbé and its associated folklore also appear in several works of fiction and popular culture.
Credit: mokelembembe.com Artwork by Bill Rebsamen
Emela-ntouka
The Emela-ntouka is an African legendary creature in the mythology of the Pygmy tribes, and a cryptid purported to live in Central Africa. Its name means “killer of the elephants” in the Lingala language. In other languages it is known as the Aseka-moke, Njago-gunda, Ngamba-namae, Chipekwe or Irizima.
Lucien Blancou, chief game inspector in French Equatorial Africa in the 1950′s wrote of a ferocious creature in the Congo, larger than a buffalo, that was considered the most dangerous animal by the Kelle pygmies. “…the presence of a beast which sometimes disembowels elephants is also known, but it does not seem to be prevalent there now as in the preceding districts. A specimen was supposed to have been killed twenty years ago at Dongou, but on the left of the Ubangi and in the Belgian Congo.” (translated by Heuvelmans, Bernard, On the Track of Unknown Animals, 1959.)
Credit: Genesis Park
Mahamba is a cryptid rumoured to lurk in the People’s Republic of the Congo, around the Lake Likouala swamp region. It is purported to be an enormous crocodile; reaching lengths of up to 50 feet (15 m). Some have speculated that it is a freshwater relic of the mosasaurs huge, sea-dwelling lizards which were presumed extinct by the end of the Cretaceous period.
Credit: carnivoraforum.com
The Bobangi aboriginals have proclaimed this animal to be unlike any other they have seen, and have only compared it to other creatures, such as aNkoli (the Bobangi word for crocodile) or the legendary Nguma-monene for the sake of comparison. It is also been reported to attack and devour rafts and canoes
Two testimonials of sightings of Nguma-monene exist that were done near the Dongu-Mataba (tributary of the Ubangi River) in the Republic of the Congo. The first was done in 1961; the second ten years later in 1971 by pastor Joseph Ellis. He estimated the length of the (visible) tailpart as 10 meters long (equal to his dugout, no neck or head could be seen), and a diameter of 0.5 to 1 meter. Its color was tending to greyish-brown. When back in the village, it appeared that the subject was taboo. The above and other sightings were gathered by University of Chicago biologist Roy P. Mackal, who led two expeditions to the Likouala swamps in the Republic of Congo, while searching for the Mokele-mbembe
Purported image of Nguma-monene
Credit: cryptozoologie.xf.cz
Missionary Cal Bombay and his wife told Roy P. MacKal, the author of “A Living Dinosaur” that they watched a creature like thisthe one picture below, supposedly a Nguma-monene, for 15 minutes in Kenya. The missionary said the plates were bigger than those in the drawing shown here.
These alleged living dinosaurs were part of a Wikileaks release according to YouTube user WeirdWildSpooky·
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvmWOKMpFZ0?feature=player_detailpage&wmode=transparent]
“The Chinese have had legends for thousands of years of flying reptiles called dragons, and flying snakes as well- something apparently different. Flying reptile dragon images in China are so prevalent, they can easily be considered amongst the most common of motifs. Are they stylized depictions of real flying animals? The ancient Chinese certainly thought they were,” says David Hatcher Childress.
“Similarly, most countries of Europe and the Mediterranean have myths and legends of heroes battling flying reptiles-or dragons. Often depicted as winged snakes or winged alligators, these dragons were a common image as well, and are still used in the crests of royal families. Did dragons-flying reptiles-pterodactyls-still exist in small numbers, even up to the Middle Ages?,” he adds.
Wikileaks Pterosaur filmed in flight, Yantai City, Shandong Province, China.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2s0U44Z3hg?feature=player_detailpage&wmode=transparent]
Other areas in Georgia where people have seen the flying creatures in recent years include the towns of Canton, Lithonia, and Franklin, and a highway between Winder and Athens.
Sighting in Franklin, Georgia
A lady and her two sons were driving on Highway 27, at about 8:15 am, on July 18, 2012, when they saw a “flyin dinosaur.” After yelling at her boys to look at it, she heard confirmation from her older son: It was a pterodactyl. As it glided across the road, they could see that it had a long tail.
Sighting in Northern Georgia
In Towns County, northern Georgia, David Schroder has had two sightings within the past few years. His July 2010 encounter was with two flying creatures with wingspans possibly as great at twenty feet. The man’s wife also witnessed them.
A pterosaur sighting need not be in a remote tropical rain forest. According to a recent analysis, by cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb, of 128 sighting reports, 75% of the reported encounters with apparent pterosaurs were in the United States of America, and 5% were in Papua New Guinea. This does not mean that many more of the flying creatures live in the USA; many more Americans have easy access to the internet and email, and are proficient in English, compared with third-world countries like Papua New Guinea.
Sketch by the eyewitness Eskin Kuhn (Cuba, 1971)
Credit: http://www.livepterodactyl.com/blog/Alleged photo of pterosaur killed in the Civl War era. 
The Emela-ntouka is claimed to be around the size of an African Bush Elephant, brownish to gray in color, with a heavy tail, and with a body of similar shape and appearance to a rhinoceros, including one long horn on its snout. Keeping its massive bulky body above ground level supposedly requires four short, stump-like legs. It is described as having no frills or ridges along the neck. The animal is alleged to be semi-aquatic and feed on Malombo and other leafy plants. The Emela-ntouka is claimed to utter a vocalization, described as a snort, rumble or growl.
Horn
The structure of its horn is debated among writers on the subject.[citation needed] The debate runs thus: if the “horn” is ivory, then it would be a tusk (tooth) and not a horn at all. Some rhinoceroses do have tusks, especially the Asiatic one-horned kinds; yet these are not known to inhabit Africa. If the horn is made of bone, then the creature is a reptile, as many fossil reptile groups, such as the ceratopsians, had horns made of bone. Finally, the horn could be made of keratin, as are the horns of African rhinos. However, without a specimen to examine, any attempt to classify the emela-ntouka by this method can only be speculative.
Home
This cryptid is alleged to mainly inhabit the vast shallow waters in the swamps and lakes of the Congo River basin, especially in the Likouala swamps in the Republic of the Congo, and possibly Cameroon. It is also said to inhabit Lake Bangweulu in Zambia. They are claimed to be solitary, herbivorous animals. The inhabitants of the area are alleged to treat the creature with great fear.
History
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J.E. Hughes published his book Eighteen Years on Lake Bangweulu in 1933, in which he reported that an animal that fits the description of an Emela-Ntouka (although not referred to by this name) was slaughtered by Wa-Ushi tribesmen, along the shores of the Luapula River, which connects Lake Bangweulu to Lake Mweru.
Credit: Wikipedia
The Emela-Ntouka was mentioned by name for the first time in 1954, in an article in the journal Mammalia, authored by former Likouala game inspector Lucien Blancou. He stated the Emela-Ntouka was “larger than a buffalo” and dwelled throughout the Likouala swamps. It was also Blancou who first mentioned the fact that an Emela-Ntouka kills elephants, buffalos or hippos when disturbed, much like the Mokele-mbembe’s allegedly renowned hatred for hippos. While both animals are supposedly herbivorous, they also supposedly share a fierce sense of territoriality, and it is for this reason the pygmies are claimed to “fear it more than any other dangerous animal”. In about 1930, an Emela-Ntouka was supposedly killed near Dongou.
Later evidence was contributed by Dr. Roy P. Mackal, who led two expeditions into the Congo in 1980 and 1981. He gathered details on various other cryptids. 1987 saw the publication of Mackal’s book, A Living Dinosaur, wherein he summarized the expeditions.
A planned season two episode of the New Zealand documentary World Mysteries included an interview with a man who claimed to have encountered a dead Emela-Ntouka. He claimed to still possess the animal’s horn, which he removed from the body. The episode was filmed but never aired.
Possible explanations
A popular speculation is that the mythical monster is in fact a relict ceratopsian. Proponents of this idea believe that the Republic of the Congo is home to many prehistoric animals such as living dinosaurs, including the Mokele mbembe and Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu (possibly sauropod or stegosaur dinosaurs).
In 1981, Dr. Roy Mackal while searching the Congo for the Mokele-mbembe, collected accounts of the Emela-ntouka. Mackal initially considered that Emela-ntouka might be a Monoclonius, or a Centrosaurus, both ceratopsians. As such, it might be related to the Ngoubou, which might be a six-horned Styracosaurus. However, Mackal also noted the pygmies did not report a neck frill, which he would have expected on a ceratopsian. Furthermore, the Ceratopsia are absent from Africa’s fossil record. Author Loren Coleman suggested that the Emela-Ntouka is not saurian, but a new species of semi-aquatic rhinoceros
Ceratopsia or Ceratopia is a group of herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs that thrived in what are now North America, Europe, and Asia, during the Cretaceous Period, although ancestral forms lived earlier, in the Jurassic. The earliest known ceratopsian, Yinlong downsi, lived between 161.2 and 155.7 million years ago. The last ceratopsian species became extinct in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, 65.5 million years ago
