We are already accustomed to the fact that reports about dinosaurs living in our time come exclusively from Africa. It is not for nothing that such cryptids from the Black Continent as mokele-mbembe and chipquewe are well known to lovers of the paranormal. But it turns out that news of the appearance of modern dinosaurs sometimes has a different address, namely, South America. After all, there are also many places where huge lizards can walk without fear of being disturbed by people. For example, the basin of the longest and deepest river in the world - the Amazon.
Supergiant turtle?
News of the appearance of cryptid dinosaurs in South America first appeared in the 19th century. In 1883, the oldest still published American magazine Scientific American published a short article "Bolivian Zaurian". In it, a certain Brazilian minister claimed that a strange beast of enormous size was killed in the area of the Bolivian Beni River. The article read: “The Brazilian minister sent from La Paz (the capital of Bolivia) to Rio the Foreign Minister photographs of drawings depicting the beast killed on the Beni River after 36 shots. By order of the President of Bolivia, the dried body of the beast, which was stored in Asuncion, was sent to La Paz.
The monster was 12 meters long from muzzle to tail. Its head was like a dog's, its legs were short and with claws. On the legs and on the belly there was something like a very strong skin, like armor, and on the back there was an even more durable carapace, going from ears to tail. The animal's neck was long and the legs were so short that the belly almost touched the ground."
According to the description, it was something turtle-like, but such large turtles existed only in prehistoric times, and even then did not reach such impressive sizes. The ancient lizard pareiasaurus may also fit the description, but it reached a maximum of four meters in length. It is also unclear where the drawings mentioned in the article and the carcass of the monster itself disappeared.
Shooting at Solimoins
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The whole adventure was experienced by the German traveler Franz Hermann Schmidt, his assistant Captain Rudolf Pfleng and the Indian guides who accompanied them on the Solimoins River, as the Amazon section is sometimes called from its confluence with Ucayali and Marañon to the confluence with the Rio Negru, in October 1907. Arriving at a certain section of the river, they noticed there a strange absence of water snakes, alligators and, in general, traces of the presence of any other animals. But in the mud on the shore, there were many unidentified large tracks of some unknown creature. The Indians, seeing these traces, became agitated and began to beg the Germans to leave the dangerous place, but they, in spite of everything, decided to camp there for the night.
The next morning, very fresh tracks of this huge animal were found near the camp. Pfleng said strongly that he wanted to find out where they were leading. However, he did not manage to do anything: suddenly monkeys and birds screamed in the thickets, and then something very large and dark began to burst from there. The frightened Indians, along with the equally frightened Germans, jumped into the boats and began to row away from the shore. Soon they were about 30 meters from the water's edge. Meanwhile, something huge continued to pace in the thickets, branches crackled and branches broke, loud slaps on the water were heard, and screaming monkeys scattered in different directions. Then everything was quiet for ten minutes.
And in the middle of this calm, a terrible monster appeared from the thickets. Its head bobbed at a height of three meters and was about the size of a barrel and shaped like the head of a tapir. The eyes were small and dull, like an alligator. Although the monster was all covered with mud, the travelers managed to see a very thick neck, similar to a snake, but knobby like a crocodile. The animal did not seem to notice them, although it was at a distance of some 40-45 meters. Adventurers saw the front of the body, which was just under three meters high at the withers. In place of the front paws, there were rather some flippers with claws.
Having examined the monster, the Germans decided to shoot him and opened fire with rifles. Although they fired at least seven bullets, the beast was only slightly wounded and disappeared with a noise into the water. The impression was that the shooting did not harm him at all, but only frightened him with its noise. Before the monster was completely submerged and swam away, Schmidt caught sight of a short, knobby, and seemingly heavy tail. The length of the creature reached 10.6 meters. of which 3.6 accounted for the neck with the head. Schmidt and Pfleng fired twice more at the monster as it protruded from the water as it dived out before it finally swam away. No blood was visible in the water, and the dinosaur itself did not look wounded.
It is difficult to say who the travelers met on the Amazon. Judging by the relatively small size and clawed flippers, it was clearly not a Diplodocus or Brontosaurus. Someone suggested that it was a spinosaurus, although Schmidt and Pfleng did not say a word about its very noticeable crest. However, the creature was smeared with mud to disgrace, and the ridge supposedly could not be noticed.
Up to our time
News of encounters with dinosaurs came from South America and later, up to the present day. In the diaries of the famous British traveler, Lieutenant Colonel Percival Harrison (Percy) Fawcett, evidence has been preserved that the Indians and other local residents of the upper Amazon told him about a huge reptile living among the nearby impassable swamps, judging by the description, very similar to a Brontosaurus. In 1931, researcher Harald Westin claimed to have had the "good fortune" of seeing a six-meter-long snake-like reptile in the Rio Marmore, Brazil.
Already after the Second World War, the explorer Leonard Clark, traveling around Brazil, heard stories from the Indians about large animals with long necks that feed on plants. In 1975, a Swiss businessman visited the Amazon with a local guide, Sebastian Bastos. The guide told the European about the huge long-necked animals that the Indians have known for a long time and which hide in the deep parts of the rivers. Bastos even claimed that once he himself collided with such a monster in his boat, and the beast broke the boat in anger, like a match. Finally, in 1995, a group of students of the Faculty of Geology observed two creatures with unusually long necks in the Brazilian Paraguaçu River near Mount Cincora. These creatures were at least nine meters long.
The most recent observations were made in July 2004, and not in the jungle, but in the Atacama Desert, famous for its lunar landscapes, in Chile. A soldier named Hernan Cuevas, along with his wife, two young children and his acquaintances, were driving in a car when he suddenly noticed two gray two-legged lizards ahead. Despite the evening time and the rapidly gathering darkness, Cuevas got a good look at the mysterious creatures. Their skin was bare, without hair and feathers, and their height exceeded two meters.
The Chilean military described the beasts as bipedal dinosaurs with extremely powerful hips. The lizards quickly crossed the road in front of the stopped car and disappeared into the darkness. All passengers were shocked and sat for a while and were just silent. Then they went out and saw three-toed footprints on the ground.
In the same month, in the same area and on the same road, visitors from the Mesozoic were observed by the Abett de la Torre Diaz family. They saw, again, two two-meter growth of lizards, similar to large kangaroos. Unusual creatures jumped over their car, after which two more lizards appeared from somewhere and also ran away. The amazed eyewitnesses managed to notice only their sharp teeth. Later, Abett de la Torre Diaz looked through a weighty book about dinosaurs and said that most of all the dinosaurs they saw were similar to the dinosaurs of the dromaeosaurid family.
In 2009, eyewitness accounts prompted the creators of the American weekly program on the unknown Destination Truth (which specializes mainly in the problems of cryptozoology and has, according to polls, the highest ratings), to send a field researcher with a film crew to Atacama. The idle Yankees found out that several other people observed the two-legged lizards there and that among the local population they even got the nickname "Arika's monster" - due to the fact that these creatures have a strange attachment to the road between the villages of Arica and Iquique. All observations of lizards with "heads like a dog", the earliest of which date back to the 1980s, were made on this section of the road. An interesting detail is the fact thatthat the appearance of monsters almost every time is preceded by a cloud of dust, from nowhere.
In conclusion, let's say that the Atacama Desert is famous for the abundance of ufological phenomena. So much so that Forbes magazine recently recognized it as one of the world's best UFO hunting grounds. So it is possible that the "monsters of Arika" are not people from the Cretaceous period, but the real reptoid aliens from other planets. I don't know if I'm joking or not.
Valdis PEYPINSH