Decryptozoology

Well here’s something interesting. Residents in the remote village of Zhangjiakou, China [a remote village of 4.3 million people] report finding a 60-foot-long skeleton of a dragon. It’s got an elongated body, small arms, small legs, and a canine-like head with horns. The tabloid media took this story and ran with it.

Users of Chinese social media sites immediately started saying the skeleton was hoaxed and placed there, perhaps as a prank or a filming prop. Some witnesses mentioned a lot of the bones look like cow bones. The witnesses didn’t seem to be that concerned or awestruck about it:

Dragonriders of Zhangjiakou, coming to a bookstore near you

Let’s take a look at the osteology of this. It’s hard to get much detail from the low-quality video, but we can get a few things out of it. The single nasal opening would be indicative of a mammal, but synapsids tend to not have homodont teeth. The “horns” (which are textured more like deer antlers) extend to the base of the skull, so we can exclude muntjac - which is what they most resemble. The overall skull shape and prominent zygomatic arches resembles a canine but the closed orbit is more reptilian... or deerlike. So this skull wasn’t taken from a living animal.

Upper left: the Zhangjiakou dragon. Upper right: a reconstruction of general skull anatomy in lateral view. Note the short, circular coronoid process, enclosed orbit, and apparent lack of a jaw joint. Below: coyote and muntjac slulls for comparison, borrowed from Will’s skull page.

It’s faked. Small details of the skull don’t jive with what’s known in nature. The mammal-looking coronoid process is almost joystick-shaped, unlike the flat, elongate process in actual mammals. The skull overall seems to lack the amount of pits and texturing that give real skulls their character. And most importantly, the mandible doesn’t articulate with the skull. In actual skulls, the mandible has a clear articulation with the quadrate - this is where the jaw hinges. Going off the canine-like skull shape, that would be where the zygomatic arches end. But nothing is there. The mandible doesn’t go that far back. Where is the jaw hinge?

The cervical and dorsal vertebrae could plausibly be from sheep, cows or pigs. Interestingly, with the prominent quadrangular deltopectoral crest, the humeri resemble those of pterosaurs, and the bending makes them look like short, chunky versions of archaeopterodactyloid humeri. Problem is, both of them are backwards. In pterosaurs the DPC faces toward the front of the arm and the curvature should bend backwards, whereas here it’s reversed. And given DPCs are muscle attachment sites, you’d wonder what a short-armed wingless dragon would need an expanded DPC for.

The dragon’s humeri compared to that of a pterosaur, oriented the way it’s supposed to go.

Not to mention, if houses are as close as the ones in the background imply, you’d think someone would have seen or smelled a 60-foot-long corpse long before the skin, flesh and organs rotted away this much.

In 1886, Mormon settler Israel Ammon Hutchins raised his G.W. Morse rifle at a strange creature that had roamed onto his ranch, and fearing for his livestock, he shot it. Ever since that day, the identity of this creature, dubbed the “Ringdocus”, has remained not truly known.

In 2014, a video emerged of what was alleged to be a “strange creature” that appeared during the 2011 Tohoku tsunami in Japan. It allegedly appears in the water, climbs up a building, and then vanishes… It’s visible multiple times in the video, with the “big moment” at 2:28.

This doesn’t look like any living thing. I think there was a fire extinguisher or a similar container of gas/foam in the rubble that, due to being in rubble, was probably struck by something and depressurized/fired. Note how the subject of the video always emanates from a single point in the water. This would also explain how it simply fades away in the air, coincidentally near the top of the building.

Back in 2015, a video purporting to show a dodo caught on a trail cam in Costa Rica (note: dodos only ever lived on Mauritius) briefly went viral among the paranormal and cryptozoological communities.

Watching the full video very easily clears up whether it’s real or not:

In looking for fuel for this blog I found this video: 5 Dinosaurs Caught on Camera & Spotted In Real Life! (as if dinosaurs are fictional). It was uploaded by Top 5s Finest, who seems to have a lot of fun uploading clickbait-y Top 5 videos, on SHOCKING topics like UFOs, cryptids, and Things You Won’t Believe About X.

These videos are garbage. They’re very poorly researched, include a lot of demonstrable hoaxes, and include errors a third grader could correct. We’re probably gonna end up looking at a lot of these videos, because it’ll be funny. For now let’ s look at this one.

“Many believe that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a cosmic collision [ed. note: there’s evidence for that],” the narrator begins, “or even that the creatures’ yucky stomach air shrouded the atmosphere [lolwut?]. Others think that surviving species of birds [over an image of The Isle’s Quetzalcoatlus] have evolved out of dino genetics as the small harmless animals we know [does this guy know of ratites?], but could some dinosaurs have survived to be with us here and now?”

5. The WikiLeaks Dinosaur

This trashed closeup of a Jurassic Park Gallimimus has been passed around certain corners of YouTube for years. I don’t know why it hasn’t been rejected as an obvious hoax, but here it has a bs story attached to it about WikiLeaks and the Russian government.

I’m glad I got this piece of crap out of the way early.

The narrator calls it “unusually large and menacing” [Gallimimus is toothless, primarily herbivorous and is the size of a large horse] and in the next sentence calls it small. Apparently, it’s a “modern-day avian dinosaur [we have plenty of those already] called an Ornithomimosu [sic]”. For those not watching the video, he puts the stress on the second-to-last syllable. Clearly, this person knows what he’s talking about!

4. Mokele-Mbembe

Ah yes, the Mokele-Mbembe. We’ll probably make a longer post about the Mokele-Mbembe, an alleged living African sauropod, later. Preliminary guess for the video given: a misidentified elephant.

3. “Megalodons”

The narrator calls it “more prehistoric reptile than fish”. Buddy. Not everything that’s big and dead is a prehistoric reptile. C. megalodon was a shark. Sharks… are not dinosaurs. They’re not reptiles. They’re cartilaginous fish. This should be obvious.

As the video shows some photoshopped image, the narrator claims Megalodon was the inspiration behind Moby Dick and Jaws. They were actually based on the sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale and the author’s interest in regular sharks, respectively. He lists the “megatooth shark” (image of a Megalodon tooth shown, yet the description more matches the megamouth), the coelacanth (called a “giant prehistoric reptile fish”), the giant squid, and the colossal squid… for no reason, this isn’t tied into Megalodon at all. Other than “sightings of massive marine predators aren’t slowing down” no reason is given to believe Megalodon isn’t extinct.

2. Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu

Another dinosaur allegedly from the African jungle. Like the Mokele-Mbembe, we’ll probably expound more on this one later. Preliminary guess for the photo given: an inanimate object in a deceptively shallow lake.

1. The Loch Ness Monster

Ofcourse. I think my intestine ruptured the moment he called it a “dinosaur from the plesiosaur species”. Other than that, not much is really to be said. There have been a lot of words about Nessie’s implausibility already.

This video is a trainwreck. The stats of the video do not instill hope for humanity.

I hate to break it to you but old medieval European dudes were wrong.

And if they’re right, then these are all snakes:

Many early modern bestiaries also count for this. These are whales: