Kongamato — Cryptid Encyclopedia

In 1923, British magistrate Frank Melland was serving in what is now Zambia when local Kaonde people told him about a dangerous creature that lived in the Jiundu swamps. They called it Kongamato — "breaker of boats" — because it attacked small canoes on the river, capsizing them with its wings and beak. Melland listened carefully, then showed his informants a collection of illustrations featuring various animals, both living and extinct. When they reached the image of a pterodactyl, every witness, independently, pointed and said the same thing: "That is Kongamato."

The creature is described as a large flying animal with membranous wings spanning four to seven feet, reddish skin with no feathers, a long beak filled with teeth, and a general appearance consistent with a pterosaur — an order of flying reptiles that supposedly went extinct 66 million years ago. It has no fur, no feathers — just leathery, bat-like wings stretched between elongated finger bones.

Reports of the Kongamato have continued across Central Africa throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Engineer J.P.F. Brown reported a sighting in 1956 near Fort Rosebery (now Mansa) in Zambia, describing a creature with a wingspan of approximately six feet, a long tail, and a dog-like snout filled with teeth. Similar creatures have been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola.

The Kongamato pairs naturally with Africa's other famous "living fossil" cryptid, Mokele-Mbembe, the alleged sauropod dinosaur of the Congo Basin. Together, they represent the tantalizing possibility that Central Africa's vast, largely unexplored swamps and forests could harbor species that the rest of the world believes have been extinct for millions of years.

"When shown illustrations of a pterodactyl, every witness said: 'That is Kongamato.'" — Frank Melland, 1923.