Living Dinosaur Claims

"CMI now believes that enough years have passed, and photographs can now be taken with a smartphone, that dinosaurs have died out, and contrary claims require proof, not excuses." — Creation Ministries International, 2018¹

"Every attempt to obtain reliable photographs, films, or footprint casts of this alleged creature has failed." — Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero, on Mokele-mbembe, 2013²

Summary

Young-earth creationists hold that people lived alongside dinosaurs, pterosaurs and marine reptiles, before the Flood and for some centuries after it.  Some went further and claimed that a few survive today:  a sauropod in the swamps of the Congo, plesiosaurs in Loch Ness or the deep sea, and pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea and the United States.  Unlike most claims about the distant past, this one can be tested now.  A surviving lineage is a breeding population, and a population of large animals leaves bodies, droppings, tracks, DNA and photographs.

The findings, case by case:

1. A survivor would need a population, and a population leaves traces. The typical minimum viable population for vertebrates is several thousand animals, though small island populations show that a few hundred can last for millennia. Even a generous 50 to 500 large animals would leave one to ten carcasses a year. No non-avian dinosaur, plesiosaur or pterosaur has been found in any of thousands of Ice Age fossil sites, which are post-Flood on all the main young-earth models. The Institute for Creation Research's own geologist says the dinosaurs "have since gone extinct, leaving no post-Flood fossil evidence."
2. Mokele-mbembe fails as evidence. Since Roy Mackal's expeditions of 1980 and 1981, two dozen or more searches, most of them led by creationists, have returned interviews, an old trail an elephant could have made, sonar records of fish, a film shot with the lens cap on, plaster casts a paleontologist rejected, and noises in thick forest. Lake Télé, the animal's reputed home, is an open lake about 2.5 metres deep. The surrounding swamp is vast and lightly surveyed, so this is the weakest absence in the article, but after 45 years it is no longer a small one.
3. The Zuiyo-maru carcass was a basking shark. The fin fibres taken from the 1977 carcass were elastoidin, a shark protein, and rotting basking sharks take on the same "plesiosaur" shape. Creation Ministries International and Answers in Genesis both tell creationists not to use it.
4. Loch Ness holds no plesiosaur. The loch was under glacial ice until the end of the Ice Age. Its fish can feed only about two tonnes of large predator. A 1987 sonar sweep of the loch by twenty boats left three unexplained echoes, "certainly not 10 metre monsters," and a 2018 survey of DNA in 250 water samples found nothing "remotely related" to a reptile. Plesiosaur necks could not be held up out of the water in the swan-like pose the famous photograph shows, and that photograph was a confessed hoax.
5. The living-pterosaur claims rest on lights at night and second-hand testimony. Eight creationist expeditions to Papua New Guinea between 1994 and 2007 produced, in the words of their main promoter, "no direct proof," and "no American investigator has claimed a personal sighting of anything resembling a pterosaur."
6. The creationist organisations are split. Creation Ministries International retired living dinosaurs and plesiosaurs in 2018: "contrary claims require proof, not excuses." Answers in Genesis has dropped the Zuiyo-maru but still writes that marine reptiles "may still be living today in deep lakes or the deep sea," and Ken Ham's chapter reporting Congo sightings is still on its site. The Institute for Creation Research published the Congo expeditions in 2002 and now says the dinosaurs are extinct. Creation Today and Genesis Park still promote them.

Verdict.  Every case fails.  None is merely unresolved for lack of looking:  the claimants themselves designed and ran most of the searches, for decades, and the searches came back empty.  A living dinosaur would not even have helped the young-earth case much, because a survivor fits the evolutionary model as easily as the coelacanth did.  What the claims have cost is credibility.  Creation Ministries International's ruling is the right one, and the rest of the young-earth movement should adopt it.

Part 1: What is claimed, and what a living population would leave

What the young-earth side claims

Young-earth creationists hold that dinosaurs, pterosaurs and marine reptiles were made in the creation week and lived alongside people.  Answers in Genesis puts it plainly:  "we can boldly state that mankind lived with dinosaurs and pterosaurs after the flood."  On marine reptiles it goes further:  "They may have lived even later (and some may still be living today in deep lakes or the deep sea)."³  So the core claim is that people and dinosaurs lived together in the centuries after the Flood.  Survival to the present day is a further claim.  The young-earth model does not need it.

Some writers made the further claim anyway.  In 2002 the Institute for Creation Research published William Gibbons, who had led four expeditions to Africa, calling it "Perhaps the most exciting prospect for the world of creation science."⁴  Ken Ham's chapter on dinosaurs in The New Answers Book 1, still on the Answers in Genesis website, reports African sightings "usually ... confined to out-of-the-way places such as lakes deep in the Congo jungles" and says the descriptions "certainly fit those of dinosaurs."⁵  Kurt Wise, the creationist paleontologist trained at Harvard, suggested in 1995 that Loch Ness sightings "might be living examples of the archaeocete Basilosaurus," an extinct whale.⁶

Others on the same side have since given the claim up.  Creation Ministries International added "There are living dinosaurs and plesiosaurs today" to its list of arguments creationists should not use in February 2018.⁷  Its reason:  "enough years have passed, and photographs can now be taken with a smartphone, that dinosaurs have died out, and contrary claims require proof, not excuses."¹  Tim Clarey of the Institute for Creation Research wrote in 2020 that the dinosaurs on the Ark "have since gone extinct, leaving no post-Flood fossil evidence."⁸

What a living dinosaur would and would not prove

A living sauropod would be the zoological find of the century.  It would not, by itself, decide between creation and evolution.  Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research saw this in 2015:  "live dinosaurs wouldn't necessarily overturn evolutionary origins theories."  Those who date the extinction to 65 million years ago "would simply build an exception—a dinosaur example of a living fossil."⁹  That is what happened with the coelacanth, a fish known only from fossils until one was caught in 1938.  Living Fossils shows that such survivals sit easily in either model.  So the payoff of a living dinosaur for the young-earth case is smaller than Gibbons and Ham suggested.

What the claim does have is a clear test.  A surviving lineage is not one animal.  It is a breeding population that has lived somewhere every year since the Flood.  Such a population needs a minimum number of animals, and that number of animals leaves bodies, droppings, tracks and fossils at rates that can be estimated.

How many animals a lineage needs

The usual measure is the minimum viable population:  the smallest population with a high chance of lasting a long time.  Lochran Traill and colleagues pooled 30 years of estimates for 212 species.  Standardised to a 99% chance of lasting 40 generations, the median was 4,169 individuals.¹⁰  For reptiles and amphibians, the median of 31 species was 5,409.¹⁰  Michael Lynch and colleagues found that populations "with effective sizes smaller than 100 (and actual sizes smaller than 1,000) are highly vulnerable to extinction" from the build-up of harmful mutations within about 100 generations.¹¹

These are typical figures, not hard floors.  Island foxes have lived on California's Channel Islands for more than 9,000 years in small populations, and "all six populations have persisted for thousands of generations."¹²  So a small relict population of large reptiles is not impossible on genetic grounds alone.  The rest of this article does not rest on genetics.  It uses a deliberately generous range of 50 to 500 animals, well below the median, and asks what even that many would leave.

What 50 to 500 animals would leave

Bodies.  A population that is neither growing nor shrinking loses as many animals each year as are born.  With N animals that live L years on average, about N ÷ L die each year.  Fifty animals that live 50 years leave one carcass a year.  Five hundred leave ten.  Since 1900 that is between 126 and 1,260 dead animals of the size claimed, each with a skeleton of large bones.  None has been found.¹³

Fossils.  The Pleistocene and Holocene, the Ice Age and the time since, are post-Flood on all the main young-earth models, which place the Ice Age after the Flood.  A Creation magazine article still on the Answers in Genesis website says that after the Flood "many of the dinosaurs and other animals are likely to have multiplied across the earth."¹⁴  So if dinosaurs, plesiosaurs or pterosaurs survived to the present, they lived through the whole Ice Age, and their bones should sometimes be buried with the other animals of that time.  The Paleobiology Database records thousands of Ice Age fossil sites.  Not one holds a non-avian dinosaur, a plesiosaur or a pterosaur.

The last column is the largest share that still leaves a one-in-twenty chance of finding none.¹⁵  For scale only:  in the last stage of the Cretaceous, non-avian dinosaurs turn up at 192 of the 235 database sites that hold crocodilians.  No young-earth model claims they kept that share after the Flood.  The point is narrower.  On the record as it stands, any dinosaurs that came through the Ice Age were at most a tiny fraction as common as the crocodiles and turtles that lived beside them.  Clarey's statement that they left "no post-Flood fossil evidence" is correct, and it is a cost to any claim that they are still alive.

This test is strong for the claim that dinosaurs were widespread after the Flood.  It is weak for a single small population in one remote basin, because the Congo basin, Papua New Guinea and the deep lakes have few Ice Age fossil sites of their own.  For those places the test has to be made on the ground, by the searches described in the next parts.

Part 2: Mokele-mbembe

What is claimed

Mokele-mbembe is the name of an animal said to live in the rivers and swamps of the Likouala region of the Republic of the Congo, and in the forests of southern Cameroon next to it.  The earliest account most writers use is a German colonial report of 1913 by Captain Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz.  He described an animal "its size approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus," with "a long and very flexible neck."  He also worded it with care:  a "very mysterious thing" that "possibly does not exist except in the imagination of the natives."¹⁶

The modern search began with Roy Mackal, a biologist at the University of Chicago.  He led expeditions in 1980 and 1981.  His 1980 report concluded that "mokele-mbembe refers to a real animal, not a myth," and gave its size as "up to 10 metres in length," with a neck as thick as "a man's arm to the thickness of a man's thigh."¹⁶  His 1987 book concluded that the description "is accounted for in all respects by an identification with a small sauropod dinosaur."¹⁶  Mackal was not a creationist;  the Institute for Creation Research calls him "an evolutionary biologist."⁹  He thought a sauropod could have survived in the swamp because "the crocodilians in the swamp survived.  That being the case, why not also the Mokele-mbembe?"¹⁶

After Mackal, most of the searching was done by creationists.  William Gibbons led his first expedition in 1985 and 1986 and returned to Congo and Cameroon many times.  In the Institute for Creation Research's Acts & Facts in 2002, after four trips, he wrote:  "I strongly believe that we are a hairsbreadth away from locating and filming a specimen of Mokele-mbembe."⁴  Creation Today asked its readers to fund one of his later trips.  Its 2011 article said "Dozens of expeditions into the swamp have been completed, and lots of evidence gathered to make the remarkable claim that these creatures still roam the earth."¹⁷

What the searches returned

Every expedition returned testimony.  None returned a body, a bone, a tooth, a piece of skin, a dropping, a cast that a specialist accepted, or a usable photograph or film of the animal.  Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero, the most thorough secular reviewers, put it in one sentence:  "Every attempt to obtain reliable photographs, films, or footprint casts of this alleged creature has failed."²

• Mackal, 1980 and 1981. Interviews with people who described the animal and picked out a sauropod from pictures. In 1981 a hunter named Emmanuel reported a trail of broken branches and flattened grass with round footprints "about 25 centimetres in diameter." "It occurred to him that it might be an elephant." He followed the tracks into the river, found no trace on the far bank, and concluded it was "neither an elephant nor a hippopotamus."¹⁶ Mackal's team visited and photographed the trail later, but had to take the hunter's description of the flattened grass "on faith, because, at this late date, the grass along the river was perfectly upright."¹⁶ Mackal probed the reported sites with sonar. "In all cases only fish were detected, except in one deep pool where three crocodiles were also identified."¹⁶ The 1981 team never reached Lake Télé: the swamp between the Bai River and the lake was "totally impassable." Its own report concluded: "Our expedition found no compelling evidence that Mokele-Mbembe exists, but we think that the historical and anecdotal evidence that does exist is sufficient to warrant further investigation."¹⁸
• Herman Regusters, 1981. Regusters, an engineer from California, did reach Lake Télé. His report describes his wife seeing "a long, serpent-like neck emerging from the water, at an estimated distance of about 30 meters," an episode that "lasted for no more than five seconds."¹⁹ His one photograph shows, in his words, "a portion of the head as it submerged."¹⁹ He also reported that "we measured depths of more than 200 meters" in the lake.¹⁹ Every other survey of the lake, before and after, found it about 3 metres deep, with a few holes to about 6 metres (below). A depth reading wrong by a factor of 70 or more gives little confidence in the rest of the report.
• Marcellin Agnagna, 1983. Agnagna, a Congolese zoologist who had been on Mackal's 1981 team, reported an animal about 240 metres away in Lake Télé, "about 5 meters visible above the water." He tried to film it, but "the author unfortunately began filming with the lens cap on."²⁰ Later versions changed the excuse to a camera left on its macro setting, which Loxton and Prothero note.²
• Gibbons, 1985 to 1986. His team reached Lake Télé after five days on foot, "where we observed gorillas, chimpanzees, large pythons, crocodiles, and turtles, but no large monster." The only physical specimen brought home was a monkey, later described as a new subspecies of mangabey.⁴
• Gibbons, 1992, 2000 and 2002. More interviews, in Congo and then in Cameroon. In 2000, Baka hunters described the animal with "a series of dermal spikes running the length of its neck, back, and tail," which Gibbons calls a feature "unknown to paleontologists until 1991."⁴ The find he means was published in December 1992.²¹ It had been in print for eight years by the time of the interviews, and the expeditions showed their witnesses pictures.
• Creationist expeditions, 2003 to 2009. Milt Marcy, "an American insurance broker and creationist," paid for Gibbons's 2003 trip to Langoue in Cameroon.² In 2004 Marcy funded a return trip led by the creationists Peter Beach and Brian Sass, who brought back plaster casts of marks they took for claw prints. Prothero examined the casts for a television documentary first shown in 2009 and "determined that they were not sauropod tracks."²
• Gibbons, 2012. A trip up the Dja River in Cameroon, partly paid for by Creation Today's readers. The team "heard deep, throaty bellows," but "The thick foliage made it impossible to see what was making those amazing vocalizations." The same letter reports a giant ape called the Dodu, a "water panther," and a horned "elephant killer."²²

Gibbons himself summed up the first two decades:  between 1980 and 2000 "almost twenty expeditions ... searched unsuccessfully to find mokele-mbembe."²  Loxton and Prothero add that "Most of the active explorers seeking Mokele Mbembe have a nonscientific agenda: Young Earth creationism."²  That is not an argument against their findings.  It does mean the searches were run by the people most motivated to find the animal, and they found nothing physical.

The place

The claim has one real strength.  The Likouala swamps "are part of the largest wetland in Africa, covering 62,500 km²," and "all travel is by boat and there is only one road."²³  A survey in 2024 found 38 kinds of reptile and 37 of amphibian around Lake Télé, and 11 of the reptiles and 15 of the amphibians could not be identified and "could be new to science."²⁴  Unknown species do live there, among the frogs and reptiles.

Lake Télé itself is not a hiding place.  The French and Congolese team that surveyed it in 1992 found an oval lake of about 23 km², 6.4 km by 4.8 km.  Three echo-sounder lines across it showed "an extremely regular shallow bottom that gradually slopes from less than a meter near the banks, to approximately 2.5 m of depth some 100 m from the shore, and remains perfectly uniform in the central zone of the lake."²⁵  Under that lies at least a metre and a half of soft mud.  Agnagna, who surveyed it in 1983, gives the same picture:  "generally quite shallow, with a depth of about 2-3 meters," with a few holes to about 6 metres, and dark water in which "visibility underwater does not exceed 50 centimeters."²⁰  An animal could sink out of sight there.  It could not stay down.  Local people fish the lake twice a year and report turtles and crocodiles there, and forest elephants and gorillas around it.²⁵  An animal with a neck two or three metres long, lifting its head to breathe, would be in plain view from the shore.

The swamp forests are not unvisited either.  Wildlife Conservation Society teams survey them on foot.  In the Raphia swamps of the Lac Télé reserve, one team walked 21 transects through the swamp, recording "all observations of great ape nests and dung, all other large mammal signs and all signs of human activity," and counted 1,021 ape nests.²³  Across the Congo basin, teams walked 13,000 km of foot surveys to count forest elephants by their droppings.²⁶  Each forest elephant leaves about 20 dung piles a day, and a pile lasts about 82 days, so one elephant keeps about 1,600 piles on the forest floor at any time.²⁶  A reptile may defecate far less often than an elephant, so this number is a scale, not a prediction.  Still, a population of 50 to 500 animals of elephant size would leave droppings, trails, wallows and feeding damage on the ground that these surveys walk.  None has been reported.

What the claim would need

Fifty animals that live 50 years leave one carcass a year.  The people of the Likouala hunt for food, and Mackal's own report records the story that a Mokele-mbembe was speared at Lake Télé about 1959, and that those who killed it may have eaten it.¹⁶  No bone from that animal, or from any other, has been produced in the 45 years of searching since.

The testimony also proves too much.  The same witnesses, and the same expedition letters, describe the Emela-ntouka, a horned animal said to kill elephants, the Mbielu-mbielu-mbielu, the Nguma-monene, a giant ape and a water panther.  Mackal himself concluded that "hidden in the depths of the Likouala swamps are three large, unidentified animals."¹⁶  If interviews alone establish one of these animals, they establish all of them.

Verdict on Mokele-mbembe

Fails as evidence for a living dinosaur.  The absence of evidence here is weaker than anywhere else in this article, because the swamp is enormous and most of it is visited only by local people.  But it is not nothing.  The expeditions were designed by the claimants, aimed at the places the witnesses named, and repeated for 45 years.  They returned testimony, a trail an elephant could have made, sonar records of fish, and noises in thick forest.  Lake Télé has been mapped:  it is open water about 2.5 metres deep, where an air-breathing animal of the size claimed would have to surface in full view.  The cheapest test is now in hand:  water from the lake was collected in 2024 for environmental DNA.²⁴  Any large reptile living in that water sheds DNA into it.

Part 3: The Zuiyo-maru carcass

What was found

On 25 April 1977 the Japanese trawler Zuiyo-maru, fishing east of New Zealand near Christchurch, brought up a rotting carcass about 10 metres long.  It was so decayed that it "might have spoiled the cargo of fish," so it was thrown back.²⁷  First the assistant production manager, Michihiko Yano, measured it, took five photographs and cut 42 pieces of "horny fiber" from a front fin.  The whole episode took place "within about an hour."²⁸  About two months later Yano drew a sketch of it.  That sketch "unfortunately conflicts with some of his own measurements, photographs, and statements."²⁸

What creationists said

The first creationist report was careful.  Ralph Swanson, writing in the Creation Research Society Quarterly in June 1978, said the Japanese scientists' opinion "was divided."  A creationist "need not commit himself to the belief that such supposedly extinct creatures are still living," but "would not be so very surprised to find it so."²⁷

Later writers were less careful.  Ian Taylor's In the Minds of Men said that "From photographs, sketches with careful measurements, and flipper samples for tissue analysis, it had every appearance of being a plesiosaur," and that "the absence of a dorsal fin discounted the possibility of its being a basking shark."²⁹  That wording was in the first edition of 1984, and it is still in the fifth edition of 2003.  Yet the one clear photograph of the carcass's back shows, in Kuban's reading, "an apparent dorsal fin."²⁸  Creation magazine reprinted the same passage in 1991.  Its web copy now carries an editor's note:  "more recent evidence shows that this creature was a rotting basking shark, not a plesiosaur."³⁰  Glen Kuban, a critic who collected these statements, lists about a dozen creationist writers who repeated the claim between 1978 and 1997, including Paul Taylor:  "Photographs, measurements, and tissue samples all show that it was probably a plesiosaur."²⁸

What the tissue showed

The Japanese scientists published their study in 1978 as a set of nine papers from the Société franco-japonaise d'océanographie in Tokyo.  That volume could not be obtained for this article.  Two accounts of it agree, one by Kuban and one by the creationist Pierre Jerlström, writing in 1998 in the technical journal now published by Creation Ministries International.  Both report that the fin fibres were tested for their amino acids and matched elastoidin, the protein of shark fin rays.  Kuban:  "Elastoidin is a collagenous protein known only from sharks and rays (not reptiles or even other fish)."  The match with a known basking shark held on all 20 amino acids tested.²⁸  Jerlström:  "The majority of the findings clearly indicated that the carcass was a decaying basking shark."  He quotes the Japanese teams' own summary:  "General opinion favours identification as a shark.  A possible method to approach a more accurate identification may be to focus on the basking shark."³¹

The shape is explained by how basking sharks rot.  In Creation Ministries International's words, "their gills and jaws rot rapidly and fall off, leaving the typical small 'neck' with the head."¹  Jerlström and Bev Elliott photographed basking shark carcasses on New Zealand beaches in 1998 and 1999.  One head was "remarkably similar to the head of the Zuiyo-maru carcass as it lay on deck."³²  A later series followed one carcass for 37 days and showed basking sharks turning into "'pseudoplesiosaurs' and headless sea monsters within as little as five weeks."³³  The sketch with its long neck was "made from memory, after the carcass had been discarded, and the bones were Yano's interpolations."³¹

Who has retired it

Every major creationist organisation that has addressed the carcass now says not to use it.  Creation Ministries International lists it among the arguments that "should definitely not be used," because "detailed anatomical and biochemical studies of the Zuiyo-maru carcass show that it could not have been a plesiosaur."¹  That entry is on every archived copy of the list checked, back to 2009.  Answers in Genesis says the same in 2025:  the tissue "was elastoidin, likely from a basking shark," and "this "evidence" should be avoided."³

Verdict on the Zuiyo-maru

Fails.  The only physical evidence from the carcass, its fin fibres, came from a shark.  The plesiosaur shape came from a decayed shark and a sketch drawn from memory two months later.  This is the clearest case in the article, and the creationist literature settled it itself in 1998.  The cost lies in how long the claim lasted after that:  it was still printed as a probable plesiosaur in a creationist book in 2003.

Part 4: Loch Ness and the living plesiosaur

What is claimed

Loch Ness is a long, deep, dark freshwater loch in the Scottish Highlands.  Its "monster" is often described with a small head on a long neck, and drawn as a plesiosaur.  Some creationist teaching took that reading on board.  A biology worktext from Accelerated Christian Education, used in Christian schools, told students that "Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur."³⁴  Kurt Wise suggested in 1995 that the sightings were of the extinct whale Basilosaurus instead.⁶  In 2025 Answers in Genesis wrote that some marine reptiles "may still be living today in deep lakes or the deep sea."³  Loch Ness is "the British Isles largest and second deepest body of fresh water,"³⁵ so it is the obvious place to test that sentence.

Four tests

The loch is younger than the Ice Age.  The Loch Ness Project's own timeline has a glacier "still carving its way down Loch Ness" 18,000 years ago, and the loch "free of ice" by about 13,000 years ago.³⁶  On a young-earth timeline those dates shrink, but the order does not change:  the loch was under ice during the post-Flood Ice Age.  So any large animal in it must have come in from the sea afterwards.  Some writers have proposed that the sea briefly reached the loch as the ice melted.  The Project calls that idea "still contoversial" [sic].³⁶  Either way, an animal that came in from the sea would have relatives in the sea, where whales are counted and photographed and plesiosaurs never are.

The loch cannot feed a breeding population of large animals.  In 1972 two fisheries scientists, R. W. Sheldon and S. R. Kerr, estimated how much "monster" the loch's fish could support.  Their paper is written as a joke, opening "It is well known that there are monsters in Loch Ness," but its arithmetic is standard ecology.  They put the total at "3,135 to 15,675 kg" and wrote that "A viable population could be quite small but probably would not be less than 10."³⁷  Later sonar counts of the fish, summed up by Adrian Shine of the Loch Ness Project, put the open-water fish of the whole loch at 17 to 24 tonnes.  Predators on that fish "should not amount to more than approximately a tenth of the gross weight," so "we have available a total of approximately two tonnes of 'Monster'."³⁸  Two tonnes shared among ten animals is about 200 kg each.  Sheldon and Kerr reckoned that an animal of the size reported, about 8 metres long, would weigh about 1,500 kg.³⁷  Two tonnes is one such animal, not a breeding population.  Sheldon and Kerr also noted that a stable population must die at a steady rate:  monsters of 100 kg "would have to die at a minimum rate of about 3 per year", and "corpses are never found."³⁷

Sonar has swept the loch.  In 1987 Operation Deepscan ran twenty boats with echo sounders down the loch in a line.  Most of the strong contacts proved to be fixed objects.  Three could not be found again.  The Project's verdict:  "While certainly not 10 metre monsters, they were stronger than fish echoes and lay far deeper."  It suggests seals, which "are now known to visit the loch almost every year."³⁹

The water holds no reptile DNA.  In 2018 the geneticist Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago collected 259 water samples "from various parts of the loch, including its chilly depths, more than 200 metres down."⁴⁰  Every animal sheds DNA into the water it lives in, through skin, mucus and waste.  The team sequenced the DNA and compared it with global databases.  Gemmell's verdict:  "We can't find any evidence of a creature that's remotely related to that in our environmental-DNA sequence data.  So, sorry, I don't think the plesiosaur idea holds up based on the data that we have obtained."  The survey found "a very significant amount of eel DNA," at "pretty much every location sampled."³⁵  It also found DNA from people, sheep, deer, badgers and foxes, so the method picks up large animals that are only visitors to the water.  The results were announced in a university press release in 2019, and no peer-reviewed paper has been found.  That is a real weakness:  the data have not been checked by others in print.

The animal itself

Two facts about plesiosaurs make the classic sighting unlikely on its own terms.  Plesiosaurs breathed air, as Creation Ministries International points out:  "plesiosaurs and other giant marine reptiles need to come up for air, so we should have seen them, just as we have seen giant marine mammals (whales)."¹  A breeding group would have to surface again and again.  And the swan-like pose, head held high on an upright neck, does not fit their skeletons.  A 2017 study of plesiosaur necks concluded that holding the neck up out of the water "can be discounted as the neck could not have been held up sufficiently high."⁴¹  The most famous photograph in that pose, the "surgeon's photograph" of 1934, was a model on a toy submarine, according to a confession made in 1994 by one of the men involved.⁴²

One objection has merit.  Loch Ness is cold, and a reptile might be expected to struggle there.  But oxygen isotopes in plesiosaur teeth suggest they kept their bodies warm,⁴³ so cold water alone does not rule them out.  The food, the sonar and the DNA do.

Who has retired it

Answers in Genesis told the Christian Post in 2012 that Nessie is "a very poor argument to use."³⁴  In 2013, after Accelerated Christian Education agreed to remove Nessie from its worktext, Answers in Genesis's Mark Looy said:  "After multiple uses of sonar and other instruments, the hard observational evidence is just not there for Nessie's existence today.  Any such creature in Loch Ness has likely died out."⁴⁴  Creation Ministries International's 2018 ruling covers plesiosaurs everywhere.¹  But the 2025 Answers in Genesis sentence about marine reptiles in "deep lakes or the deep sea" leaves the door open in general terms, without naming a lake.

Verdict on Loch Ness

Fails.  This is the strongest absence in the article.  The loch is small, enclosed, young, surveyed by sonar end to end, and sampled for DNA.  It cannot feed more than about two tonnes of large predator.  A breeding population of plesiosaurs there would have left carcasses, DNA and clear photographs, and none has turned up.  Wise's Basilosaurus fails on the same tests:  a whale must also breathe at the surface, needs the same food, and would leave DNA as easy to find.

Part 5: Living pterosaurs

What is claimed

The modern claim centres on the "ropen" of Papua New Guinea, especially Umboi Island.  Its main promoters are two American creationists, David Woetzel of Genesis Park⁹ and Jonathan Whitcomb of Long Beach, California.  Both published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly.

Woetzel described the ropen in 2006 from interviews:  "Described as a nocturnal creature, the Ropen possesses two leathery wings like a bat with 'hands' on each wing, a long tail with a diamond-shaped flange on the end, and a prominent beak."  He added that "The most remarkable part of the description is that the creature is reported to have a biolumiscent [sic] capability, like a firefly."⁴⁵  His conclusion:  "It is my contention that the similarities in the several independent lines of evidence produce a powerful argument for a living pterosaur in Papua New Guinea."⁴⁵  Genesis Park still uses that sentence today, and adds that "Two species appear to persist in PNG."⁴⁶

Whitcomb went further.  He wrote in 2009 that "The largest ropens, probably extremely rare, may attain sizes up to 50 ft in wingspan."⁴⁷  By 2012 he had collected reports of 90 sightings in 33 American states as well.⁴⁸

What the searches returned

Eight American creationists made eight expeditions to Papua New Guinea between 1994 and 2007.⁴⁷  What they brought back was interviews and lights.

Woetzel and Garth Guessman left for a "twenty-three-day expedition" to Umboi in October 2004.  Woetzel's own sighting was "a large, yellowish glow" at night, about 3 km away.  "The whole sighting lasted for only a few seconds, too brief to photograph it."  He left disposable cameras with villagers in the hope that they "might yet capture an historic photo."⁴⁵  No such photograph has been published.

Whitcomb's 2009 paper is frank about what the searches found.  "Most ropen sightings are of a bright but brief glow that moves approximately horizontally at about 330 ft (100 m) above ground level."⁴⁷  "Although no direct proof has been presented, the indirect evidence is substantial and intriguing."⁴⁷  And:  "During those thirteen years, no American investigator has claimed a personal sighting of anything resembling a pterosaur."⁴⁷  His own conclusion is that "Until one is captured (or at least until significant photographic or video evidence is obtained), the possibility of living pterosaurs remains in the realm of cryptozoology."⁴⁷

The two main promoters do not agree on what the witnesses described.  Woetzel's team showed villagers pictures and reported that they "consistently picked out the Dimorphodon."⁴⁹  Whitcomb replied that "Of the two reliable eyewitnesses, however, both chose the silhouette of the Sordes Pilosus," a different kind of pterosaur.⁴⁹  The best-known witness, Duane Hodgkinson, who saw a large flying animal in 1944, is given a wingspan of "about 20 feet" by Woetzel⁴⁵ and "about 25 ft" by Genesis Park.⁴⁶  In a 2005 interview transcribed by the critic Glen Kuban, Hodgkinson compared it to a light aircraft of 29 feet.  Woetzel reports that Hodgkinson's companion that day, "an evolutionist, declared that this was not possible."⁴⁵  According to Kuban, Whitcomb's later book acknowledges that the companion "was a biologist, and denies that they ever saw a pterosaur."⁴⁸

The case against

The size is beyond any known pterosaur.  Genesis Park itself gives the largest known pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus, a "36 ft wingspread."⁵⁰  Whitcomb's 50-foot ropens would be larger than any pterosaur ever found, and nobody has produced a bone or a carcass.

The anatomy comes from different parts of the record.  The pterosaurs the witnesses picked from picture books, Dimorphodon and Sordes, are long-tailed forms.  In the Paleobiology Database the youngest record of Sordes's family, the Rhamphorhynchidae, is in the Berriasian, the lowest stage of the Cretaceous.⁵¹  The pterosaurs of the last Cretaceous beds were different:  towards the end of the Cretaceous "many pterosaurs were much larger and lacked the tapering tails said to be one of the hallmarks of living species."⁵²  The ropen as described joins a long tail to a wingspan larger than any pterosaur.  No fossil pterosaur combines the two.

The evidence is mostly lights.  A light seen at night for a few seconds, at a distance of kilometres, is not evidence of a particular animal.  Whitcomb reports that an analysis of one video "specifically eliminated any possibility of meteors, camera artifacts, campfires, lanterns, paste-on photohoax, or car headlights."⁴⁷  That analysis has never been published in full.  The lights may deserve study as lights.  It does not connect them to a reptile.  The claim that the animal glows rests on interviews, not on a specimen.  It would also make the ropen unique among land animals with backbones.  A standard review of bioluminescence lists "terrestrial vertebrates like birds, amphibians, and mammals" among "the few prominent lineages which are not known to be bioluminescent."⁵³

A daytime video turned out to be a bird.  In 2010 a "living pterosaur" video from Papua New Guinea circulated online.  The paleontology writer Riley Black identified the animal as "definitely a frigatebird, probably a female great frigatebird."⁵²  Great frigatebirds have long narrow wings spanning 205 to 230 cm and "a deeply forked tail."⁵⁴  Seen against the sky, a long forked tail and long angled wings look a good deal like a pterosaur.

The American sightings fit birds.  Kuban points out that "Many large birds, including herons, egrets, cranes, eagles, vultures, pelicans, flamingos, and frigates, can present superficially pterosaur-like shapes," especially at a distance.  Whitcomb's 90 American reports are spread so thinly that "Twenty one of 33 states have only 1 or 2 sightings."⁴⁸  A breeding population of large flying reptiles in the United States would be reported far more often than that, and photographed.

Africa's kongamato is a story about pictures.  The African "pterosaur," the kongamato, comes from Frank Melland, magistrate of the Kasempa District of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, from 1911 to 1922, writing in 1923.⁵⁵  Local people described a flying creature with a wingspan "from 4 to 7 feet across" and red in colour.  Melland "sent for two books which I had at my house, containing pictures of pterodactyls, and every native present immediately and unhesitatingly picked it out and identified it as a kongamato."⁵⁵  He was fair to both sides.  "The evidence against it lies in the fact that no bribe will induce one to take me to see one, nor to get one to produce a dead one, nor even a bit of one."  The animal was said to be "immortal, so that no remains are ever found."⁵⁵  Melland believed that "some such reptile exists or has existed recently," but he does not report seeing one himself.⁵⁵  Genesis Park, which promotes the kongamato, credits the account to "Frank Welland" in a "1932 book."⁵⁶

Verdict on living pterosaurs

Fails.  The promoters themselves say there is "no direct proof," and that no American searcher has seen "anything resembling a pterosaur."  What remains is night lights, testimony that disagrees with itself, and picture-matching by witnesses who were shown pterosaur pictures first.  Papua New Guinea is less thoroughly studied than the United States, so a small unknown animal there would not be astonishing.  An animal with a 15-metre wingspan that glows at night would be.

Part 6: What the creationist organisations say

The table gives what each organisation has said in print about each claim, with the date.  "None found" means no statement turned up in the research for this article, not that none exists.

Three things stand out.

The trend is toward retirement, unevenly.  Every organisation that has examined the Zuiyo-maru now rejects it.  Creation Ministries International has gone furthest, and its reason is the one this article tests:  enough time and enough cameras have passed for contrary claims to need "proof, not excuses."¹  The Institute for Creation Research moved from publishing the Congo expeditions in 2002 to saying in 2020 that the dinosaurs "have since gone extinct, leaving no post-Flood fossil evidence."⁸  Answers in Genesis has dropped the Zuiyo-maru and Nessie by name, but its general statements still leave room for living dinosaurs and marine reptiles.

Retired claims stay in print.  Ian Taylor's book still called the Zuiyo-maru carcass a probable plesiosaur in 2003, five years after Creation's own technical journal conceded it was a shark.²⁹  Creation Ministries International's 2012 web reprint of its 1999 Mokele-mbembe article carries no note pointing to the 2018 retirement.  Ken Ham's chapter reporting Congo sightings is still on the Answers in Genesis site.

Some secondary accounts overstate their primaries.  Genesis Park says Regusters brought back droppings and footprint casts.  His own report lists neither;  it says of footprints, "We didn't see any footprints.  They were reported."¹⁹  Gibbons's 2002 account turns Regusters's "about 30 meters"¹⁹ into "about 30 feet," and a wake that Mackal's team put at "approximately 5 inches high"¹⁸ into "an 18 inch high wave."⁴  Genesis Park credits the kongamato to "Frank Welland" in 1932;  the author was Frank Melland, in 1923.⁵⁶  None of these errors decides the question.  Together they show the claims growing as they were retold.

Objections and responses

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  The coelacanth was thought extinct until 1938."  Absence of evidence counts for little when nobody has looked, and for a great deal when people have looked hard in the right place.  The coelacanth became known because a trawler brought one in and a museum curator in East London, South Africa, saw the body.⁶²  The living-dinosaur claims have the opposite history:  the places were named in advance, the searches were aimed at them, and they were repeated for decades by people who wanted to succeed.  Loch Ness has been swept by sonar and sampled for DNA.  Lake Télé has been mapped.  The weight of the absence differs from case to case, and this article has tried to say how much each one weighs.

"The native witnesses agree with each other, across tribes and across decades."  They agree about a long neck, a big body and a small head, and they picked sauropods from picture books.  But the pictures came from the searchers' own books:  Melland's "two books" in 1923,⁵⁵ and in 1980 the "picture book of reconstructed fossil animals" that Mackal's team had left on a mission table.¹⁶  The same interviews describe a giant ape, a "water panther" and a horned elephant-killer.²²  Consistent stories are evidence that a story exists.  They are not a specimen.

"The Congo swamps are too big to search."  This is the claim's best point, and the article grants it.  Only a small part of the 62,500 km² of swamp has been surveyed on foot.  But the claim has never been "an animal lives somewhere in the swamp."  It names Lake Télé, particular rivers and particular pools, and those were searched.  A population large enough to last needs to be large enough to leave bodies, and after a century of reports no bone has been produced.

"Scientists would suppress a living dinosaur because it threatens evolution."  The searches were not run by hostile scientists.  Mackal was a mainstream biologist who hoped to find the animal, and most later expeditions were run by creationists.  A living sauropod would make the career of whoever found it.  And it would not threaten evolution.  The Institute for Creation Research's own writer says evolutionists "would simply build an exception—a dinosaur example of a living fossil."⁹

"The population could be tiny and dying out, too small to leave much trace."  A population that small, after 4,500 years on the young-earth timeline, faces the genetic risks in Part 1.  Island foxes show that a few hundred animals can last, but that is a few hundred, not ten.¹²  Even ten animals die at a steady rate.  Sheldon and Kerr made exactly this point about Loch Ness:  monsters of 100 kg "would have to die at a minimum rate of about 3 per year", and yet "corpses are never found."³⁷

"Plesiosaurs could survive in the deep sea, where nobody looks."  Plesiosaurs breathed air.  An animal that must surface to breathe is seen by ships, as whales are, and its carcasses wash ashore, as whales' do.  Creation Ministries International makes this argument itself.¹  The carcasses that have been examined after being called plesiosaurs, like the Zuiyo-maru and those followed on New Zealand beaches, have turned out to be sharks.³³

"Not every sighting can be a mistake."  Not every sighting has to be.  Some lights over Papua New Guinea, and some wakes on Loch Ness, may never be explained.  An unexplained light is evidence of an unexplained light.  It becomes evidence of a pterosaur only when someone produces a pterosaur.

From the creationist side:  "Giving up living dinosaurs concedes ground to evolutionists."  Nothing in the young-earth position depends on it.  Answers in Genesis states that its belief that people lived with dinosaurs rests on Scripture, "not because of the above or other evidences."³  Creation Ministries International dropped the claim for the reason that matters to a skeptical reader:  "contrary claims require proof, not excuses."¹  Keeping a failed claim in circulation costs more than dropping it.

From the skeptic's side:  "Why give these claims any attention?"  Because creationist organisations advanced them, some still do, and readers meet them.  The fair way to retire a claim is to state it in its promoters' own words, say what it predicts, and show what the searches found.

"The eDNA study is a press release, not a paper."  This is correct and it is a real weakness.  The Loch Ness DNA results were announced in 2019 and no peer-reviewed paper has been found.  The verdict on Loch Ness does not rest on that study alone.  The food supply, the sonar and the loch's history each count against a breeding population of large animals on their own.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The 1978 Japanese report on the Zuiyo-maru was not obtained. The tissue result, that the fin fibres were shark elastoidin, is reported here through two secondary accounts, Kuban's and Jerlström's, which agree with each other but are not fully independent. The volume is held in Japanese libraries.
2. The Loch Ness DNA results are unpublished in a journal. The sample count is given as 259 in 2018 and 250 in 2019, and the raw data have not been checked.
3. Lake Télé's 2024 water samples have not been reported. The Wildlife Conservation Society collected them "for subsequent eDNA analysis." A result that found no large reptile would close the Lake Télé claim. A result that found one would reopen everything. It is the cheapest decisive test in this article.
4. The wider Likouala swamp has never been surveyed for an unknown large animal. Existing surveys count apes and elephants. River eDNA sampling or camera traps along the rivers the witnesses name would test the claim directly.
5. The physical items from the Congo were never published. Regusters's sound spectrum, his films, and Agnagna's 1983 film are cited but have not been released. Genesis Park now plays a 4.5-second "vocalization recorded from Lake Tele" with no recording details.⁶¹
6. The ropen lights have not been measured. The only analysis, by Clifford Paiva, is unpublished. A spectrum or a thermal image of one of the lights would settle whether it is a living source.
7. The Ice Age fossil test uses the Paleobiology Database, which under-samples the Quaternary and has few sites in Central Africa or New Guinea. The bound is therefore conservative, and it says little about one small population in one remote basin.
8. Dates and details disagree among the Congo sources. The killing at Lake Télé is dated to the 1930s,¹⁹ the late 1950s,¹⁸ 1959¹⁶ and 1960⁴ by different accounts. Mackal's 1982 and 1987 reports of the same 1981 expedition disagree about whether hippos and gorillas were present. Lake Télé is 3 metres deep by every survey except Regusters's, who reported "more than 200 meters."
9. Several creationist sources could not be read: Gibbons's books of 1999 (with Kent Hovind) and 2010, Whitcomb's Live Pterosaurs in America, and the outcomes of expeditions reported in 2012 and 2022.

Verdict

No credible evidence shows that any non-avian dinosaur, plesiosaur or pterosaur is alive today.  Every case examined fails.  The Zuiyo-maru carcass was a shark.  Loch Ness cannot feed or hide a breeding population of large reptiles.  The ropen is lights and second-hand stories.  Mokele-mbembe is the hardest case to close, because its swamp is vast and lightly surveyed, but the places named by its witnesses have been searched for 45 years and have produced no body, bone or photograph.

The claim was always a testable one, and that is to its credit.  It was tested, mostly by its friends, and it failed.  A surviving population leaves bodies, droppings, DNA and fossils at rates that can be estimated, and none has appeared.  The young-earth case lost nothing by these failures except credibility, because it never needed living dinosaurs:  people living alongside dinosaurs after the Flood is a claim about the past, and survival to the present was always an extra.  Creation Ministries International drew that conclusion in 2018.  The rest of the movement should follow it, and should mark its own retired articles as retired.

Sources