Most cryptozoologists are aware of the highly dubious story of a living dinosaur that appeared in the Rhodesia Herald in 1932. Swedish plantation owner JC Johnson claimed to have encountered a 43-foot Tyrannosaurus rex devouring a rhino in the swamps of the Kasai valley in the Congo. The story was accompanied by an unconvincing photo of what looked like a lizard, badly super-imposed onto a dead rhino.
Whilst pootling about on the internet the other day I came across this interesting website: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=214751458&blogId=438717522
(THE LINK NOW WORKS AGAIN)
It showed a second purported Kasai photograph and this one showed not a lizard but a Tyrannosaurus rex. I know nothing about where the picture came from or how old it is but my guess is a modern fake in the style of the petranodon ‘thunderbird’ photo hoax of a few years back. The Tyrannosaur looks like it’s from some stop motion film. It could be Willis O’Brien’s 1918 movie The Ghost of Slumber Mountain in which a Tyrannosaurus kills and eats a Triceratops, or his 1925 offering The Lost World, which has both Allosaurus and a sequence with a Tyrannosaurs killing a triceratops and a Pteranodon. For my money, though, the creature in the photo looks most like the Tyrannosaur in Irving Yeaworth’s 1960 film Dinosaurus! where a living T-rex terrorises a Caribbean island.
If anyone can identify where the monster in the photo comes from it will be me old mate Alan Frizwell, a true dino-movie freak. Over to you, Alan.
You might want to actually check the link before having this posted for millions of web users. The damn link is broken. Hello?!
ReplyDeleteHello Richard,
ReplyDeleteI encountered that photo several years back on a cryptozoology site. I suspect that it was created by the same person that made the fake ropen photo. I can ask him about it.
-Phillip
phillip@livingdinos.com