Dingonek

 

The dingonek was an African cryptid known from lake Victoria and the surrounding rivers.

It was first reported by big game hunter John Alfred Jordan. The incident first made its way to the media through another big game hunter’s book, In Closed Territory, by Edgar Beecher Bronson, in which he recounted Jordan telling the story to him.

Jordan’s encounter happened in 1905. The okapi has recently been discovered. So Jordan had a network of local peoples always on the lookout for unusual large game that wandered into the area, in the hopes of discovering a new species himself. One day his informants told him that a reptilian beast was spotted up the Maggori River. So Jordan and his hunting party, two local men named Mataia and Mosoni, headed up the river in canoes to find the beast. Mataia and Mosoni scouted ahead. They soon came racing back down the river in pure terror, insisting the beast was resting on the river’s shore just ahead. Jordan insisted his two men come with him to face the beast. They were reluctant, but Jordan was able to convince them to come with him.

Jordan spotted the creature basking in shallow water. He said the beast was 15 feet long, and its back as wide as a hippo’s. The dingonek had a leopard shaped head, but as large as a lion’s. It had long white fangs. “Long enough to cleave through a man” As Jordan described them. He described the dingonek’s back as being covered in armadillo like scales, and with leopard like spots. And ending off the creature with a long finned tail which is propelled itself through the water.

Jordan took a shot at the beast with his hunting rifle. He hit the dingonek right behind the ear. In spite of this being a less armoured part of the dingonek’s body the bullet merely bounced off and only served to piss off the beast. The dingonek leaped out of the water above them, coming down on the hunting party’s boats. Jordan and his men leapt from their boats, swam to shore and ran into the bushes, the whole time in a panic. Jordan managed to find his men in the bush. There they waited for a while to make sure the dingonek wasn’t pursuing them.

Days later the three of them returned to the shore of the river where the incident had happened. Jordan was certain he had killed the beast, and its attack on them had been its last dying throws. He found where the dingonek had been resting on the shore, as it had been when his hunting party had scouted ahead for him. There he saw the large imprint of the dingonek’s body in the mud, as well as hippo like tracks with reptilian claws. Yet he couldn’t find the dingonek alive or dead anywhere along the river, in spite of searching for several days.

Bronson was skeptical of Jordan’s story at first. He interviewed Mataia and Mosoni. Their accounts of the events were identical to Jordan’s, which convinced Bronson. Furthermore, a village north of the Maggori river, along the shore of Lake Victoria, was infuriated with Jordan for killing the lukwata, a reptilian guardian of the lake. This creature was described as a dog headed turtle. The villagers insisted that the current outbreak of sleeping sickness was the gods' revenge for the disrespect that had been shown to the lukwata.

In 1913 Charles William Hobley wrote of another encounter with the dingonek. An unnamed man was travelling the Mara River, which also connected to Lake Victoria. There he saw a creature, with the head of an otter, covered in scales and spotted like a leopard. It was also about 15 to 16 feet in length, but he couldn’t be sure, as he didn’t see the whole thing. Oddly, this witness didn’t describe the beast having long sabre teeth, or being particularly wide. He too shot at it, and again the bullet did nothing. The beast slipped into the water and swam away.The dingonek has never been seen again. 

Since then much thought has been put into what exactly the dingonek was, and if Jordan was even being truthful. The veracity of the story relies heavily on how reliable Jordan was, which has been brought into question in modern times. At the time Jordan was considered to have a good reputation, although his reputation, as well as the reputations of pretty much all big game hunters from colonial times, wouldn’t stand up today. Even during his life time Jordan was arrested for ivory poaching. While ivory hunting as been legal when Jordan first moved to African, it had become illegal as elephant populations dwindles, and Jordan refused to give up his old ways. Jordan also made it his personal goal to exterminate all crocodiles from Lake Victoria, even killing 40 of them in one day. He had a self admitted hatred of the crocodile species. While these actions would be abhorrent today, none of them really show him to be a liar, just extremely blood thirsty. As well, Mataia and Mosoni’s account of the dingonek lined up well with the details of Jordan’s story. If he had just paid them to lie for him they would have gotten details wrong.

Still, it’s well known that even today hunters and sport fishers spin tall tails of their actions. There would be even more incentive to do so back then, when the public thirsted for action packed stories from the colonies of daring adventure and new species discovered. This was the time period of penny awfuls and two fisted tales, where news papers and adventure magazines alike would print truthful memoirs of hunters from the colonies, completely fictional stories of jungle adventure and even fantasy and science fiction stories all together, with no distinction between them all. As well, with travel between the colonies and the west taking weeks and any form of electronic communication being in its very infancy, there was very little opportunity to verify these stories. And the publications of the time were not interested in verification anyway. On top of this, the public was very much willing to take the word of these hunters at face value, seeing them as heroes in some cases. If any colonial hunter made up tall tails, no one was going to call them out.

So it’s unknown if Jordans was inclined to make up stories from whole cloth. His own actions don’t really point in that direction, but he was in an environment where he could have easily gotten away with it.

People have put a lot of thought into trying to identify what the dingonek was if everything Jordan said was true. There’s a long list of creatures the dingonek as been believed to be mistaken for, monitor lizards, hippos, crocodiles, leopards. The dingonek has also been associated with a grouping of mythical beasts from across Africa known as ‘water lions’. These water lions are sabre toothed cats that inexplicably live in water, in spite of not really having any adaptations to do so. They sit on the border between mythical beast and cryptid, clearly having their origins in local mythology, but also having claims of being seen in modern times. Still, not one of them are said to be scaly, or hybridized with as many different animals as the dingonek.

As well, the dingonek has been thought of as some extinct species, like an ice age giant pangolin which used to live in the area. Which brings me to the other extinct creatures that the dingonek has been associated with, which is dinosaurs.

Young Earth creationists have over the years, tried to associate literally every African cryptid and mythical being with some sort of dinosaur, no matter how tenuous the connection is. Such is their absolute insistence that dinosaur still exist in African. Their reasoning is, Africa is filled with primitive jungles and dinosaurs lived in primitive jungles, there for dinosaurs live in Africa. Let me explain how that’s not accurate.

First Africa isn’t a primitive jungle. Most importantly, not all of Africa is a jungle, the majority of it is savanna and desert. The rain forests and monsoon forests that do exist in Africa are quite young, with the vast majority of them disappearing during the ice age when Africa became entirely arid. African has gone through quite a few climate changes over the Cenozoic. While Africa has been consistently warm, it has varied drastically in levels of aridity and moisture.

Secondly, dinosaurs didn’t really live in ‘jungles’ as we picture them today. Dinosaurs lived in a wide variety of environments, from desert to swamp. However, thick, closed in jungles as we think of them today didn’t really exist in the Mesozoic. This is for two reason. Just like elephants push over trees and open jungles up, so did dinosaurs, on a much larger scale, to the point where trees evolved to not grow as close together so they would have a better chance of being avoided. Secondly, the tallest trees in most Cretaceous ecosystems were conifers, with under-stories of deciduous plants being small trees, bushes and herbaceous plants. So there wasn’t really a closed canopy during the Mesozoic. The forests of the Mesozoic would have been very different in structure and species from the Cenozoic, and not really comparable. Could there have been some closed canopy forests? Probably, cedars today make very thick closed canopies, to the point of shading out everything on the forest floor. But these aren’t very biodiverse places, and the majority of dinosaurs wouldn’t have lived there.

Regardless of how flawed their reasoning is, creationists insist the dingonek is a dinosaur, specifically a ceratopsian, which is certainly a choice. The dingonek is shaped more like an ankylosaurid, and it’s a predator. Most people would be scratching their heads as to how anyone would come to that conclusion. Although anyone who knew about the dingonek before reading my article is probably screaming “Why haven’t you mentioned the horn yet?”

It’s been more than a hundred years since Jordan's encounter with the dingonek, and over retelling of its story the appearance of the dingonek has changed quite a bit. The dingonek has become more slimmed down and cat like, completely losing its hippo-backed shape. It also gained pangolin scales instead of armadillo armour. I can understand the logic behind this, pangolins are Africa’s armoured mammal, armadillos live in South America. Still it doesn’t match the original description. The dingonek also gained a spike on the end of its tail, which wouldn’t help much while swimming. But most confusingly of all, the dingonek gained a single unicorn horn on its head. I have no idea why, or where this came from. But it’s this version of the dingonek which inspired the ceratopsian comparison, which it’s still not close to. And to top it all off, the dingonek is said to be deadly venomous, being able to inflict its venom with both its tail spike and sabre cat fangs. Sure, why not.

 So that’s where the dingonek was about a year ago when I added it to my to-do list. In the mean time the internet found out about the dingonek, and the internet did what the internet does. There’s been some more changes. Now the dingonek has a mane of tentacles around its neck, and the pangolin scales have become dragon scales, and it has a scorpion tail instead of just a spike! It lost its leopard spots too. And it’s not just one artist going off the rails. I can trace this back to a specific artists, but others have followed suit. And I’ve found some Youtubers and bloggers describing the dingonek based on this version. The crazy part is, this all appears to have happened organically with no one involved realizing this version is inaccurate. 

It’s funny, most cryptids I research start out very bizarre, and over the years all their uniqueness gets worn down until it’s just another plesiosaur, or a giant bat, or another local version of bigfoot. Yet the exact opposite has happened with the dingonek. It started out as a highly strange hybrid of creatures, already stretching the bounds of credibility, and over the years more and more crazy elements have been added to it. It’s now completely divorced from whatever African folklore it may have originally sprung from. It’s just like an old hunting story, where the buck that avoided your shot just keeps getting bigger and more magnificent in retelling, until the situation is so outlandish that only you and your hunting buddies could ever believe it.

 Sources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QW5I0xPwGA

https://abookofcreatures.com/2019/06/17/dingonek/

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dingonek

https://www.shakariconnection.com/john-alfred-jordan-books.html