From time to time, people observe in remote parts of the Earth animals similar to dinosaurs that have survived to our times. This happens most often in Africa and South America, where the jungle, tropical and very warm.
However, there is one story from eyewitnesses who saw a creature similar to an ancient tyrannosaur not in the jungle, but in northern Canada. And this is not a modern story from the Internet, but a story from a century ago. That is, from those times when paleontology was just in its infancy.
This story was published in 1908 in the French magazine Je Sais Tout and took place a couple of years earlier. It told the story of two hunters from the cold wastelands of the Yukon, which borders Alaska. San Francisco banker James Lewis Butler and local gold miner Tom Limor traveled to the Yukon in the Clear Creek area to hunt moose.
They managed to get on the trail of as many as three moose and they already got close to the animals, but then something strange happened.
When two men watched the moose from a short distance, one large moose suddenly twitched in alarm and looked at something behind the trees that the hunters did not see. Then this moose let out a loud warning roar and all three moose immediately rushed away in a panic. At the same time, the hunters were more surprised at what could frighten the moose so much than by the fact that they missed their prey.
Soon they again followed the trail of these elks, in order to catch up and shoot them. The trail of running animals went from the thickets to the swampy wasteland and suddenly the moose tracks crossed the tracks of a completely different animal unknown to hunters.
These new tracks were enormous, about 80 cm wide and almost 150 cm long. And between the tracks there was a trail of dragging, as if left by a giant tail. This depression in the mud was so deep that it quickly filled with swamp water.
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Hunters tried to follow these tracks, but they soon turned towards the rocks and disappeared into a dark ravine near the Partridge Creek. The hunters did not dare to go there and turned back.
Then Butler and Limor went to a remote outpost called Armstrong Creek to find assistants there and, with them, again follow the tracks of the unknown huge beast. There they met with the writer Georges Dupuis, who later published an article about the case in a magazine. Together with the hunters and Dupuis, five local Indians and the French-Canadian missionary Pierre Lavagnou went in search of the monster.
This reckless company of adventurers returned to the gorge, in which the traces of the beast disappeared, and soon they saw something there that it turned out to be very difficult for them to describe, since none of them had seen anything like it before.
The strange animal was about 15 meters long and weighed at least 40 tons. Its body was covered with sparse and coarse black hair, like boar stubble. The creature stood on two strong hind legs, its mouth was full of sharp teeth, and one horn flaunted on its muzzle.
Having survived the first shock of the encounter with the strange beast, the team settled down behind the rocks and watched the creature for about 10 minutes. According to the scientist missionary Lavagnu, this creature resembled an extinct ancient lizard and he even remembered its name - Ceratosaurus.
It is curious that the first Ceratosaurus skeleton was found at the end of the 19th century in North America.
While people were watching the dinosaur, the monster did not seem to notice people at all and slowly wandered further into the wasteland. Only when he disappeared from sight, panic attacked people out of fear, especially the Indians, and they flatly refused to pursue this creature.
Back at Armstrong Creek, Butler and Limor attempted to recruit more volunteers to return to the wasteland and gather more weapons and supplies. But alas, no one believed them and no one else went anywhere with them.
The most daring of the two hunters' companions was the missionary Lavagnu. A year later, in the winter, he went hunting in the same area and saw the same dinosaur again. This time he held a caribou deer in his teeth and ran along the frozen stream.
In history, this Yukon dinosaur is known as the "Monster of River Partridge" and subsequently many biologists have tried to solve this riddle. According to most, this whole story was just a fiction, and among the factors they pointed to the trail seen by the hunters of the tail dragging. And dinosaurs of this family kept their tails raised in the air for balancing and were not dragged along the ground.
Or maybe it was not a ceratosaurus at all, but only a species similar to it? Or has it been dragging its tail because of evolution? Given that there have been no more dinosaur sightings from the Yukon since then, we will not be able to solve this mystery anytime soon.