The Dinosaurs of the Lega-Warega People: Racial Memories or Eyewitness Accounts?
See now the behemoth, which I made with thee: he eateth grass as an ox. Behold now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the muscles of his belly. He bendeth his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are woven together. His bones are tubes of bronze, his members are like bars of iron….Job 40:15-18 Darby Translation
“Dragons are by far the most potent and widespread of all mythological beasts, and dragons or dragon like creatures appear in just about every mythology in the world. So omnipresent is the image of the dragon, and so powerful the emotions that it evokes, that Carl Sagan, among others, has suggested that dragons are actually a racial memory of dinosaurs…..” Sagan in “The Dragon’s of Eden” quoted in Dragons edited by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann
In its own modest way this article is fully self contained. That is, I make my claims about science and evolution, present my own views about dinosaur and human interaction (and 65 million years) and provide “evidence” for my claims right here within the article; with photographs. If you choose to read this–hopefully for some of you- you will be-in effect- taking the Red pill.
In my research I’ve read a great many old newspaper articles with dinosaurs or as the term has “evolved”; giant saurian, great reptiles and giant reptiles as the subject. Science has been stating emphatically from almost the very beginning that man Never could have laid eyes on them. The alleged geographical time period between “cave man” ( sic) and dinosaurs has grown and now is quoted like a mantra at 65 million years.
Why? Of all the things in science that scientists admit they don’t know or where they have ultimately been proven wrong how did they so quickly conclude so emphatically that man never saw a dinosaur-and why do they work so hard to make you believe that? Particularly given that one of the most often stated phrases in “science news articles is; “science had previously thought”?
Dinosaurs are a gigantic, mysterious icon of evolution. They are an evolutionary mascot. As hugely massive, almost alien as some of them apparently were they must have been a part of an unevolved world that no longer exists—lending credence to the general theme of evolution—that neither them or us were created by God; we must have “evolved”.
Clearly a class of creature so mysterious and alien to the current world must be a giant proof of the theory? A glitch is that even science admits that crocodiles and alligators and turtles and the fish called coelacanth were around at the time of the “dinosaur” so….if they survived the Great Dying why not the t-rex or some sauropods?
What killed the dinosaur? If evolution promotes the continued ascension of survival of the “fittest” what could be more “fit” than a dinosaur? So where are they? What killed them off? That their own flatulence killed them is an actual scientific theory-as are; killer asteroid, climate change, dinosaur overpopulation, a hyper-cane, a global firestorm, continental drift, competition from mammals and/or a combo of more than one of the foregoing together.
Changes in water levels as a rationale is interesting because science’s Great Dying” when approximately as they estimate 97% of all living creatures died-determined by the finding of their fossils in the fossil record- can be best explained in reality by the “Great Flood” as described in Genesis 7;
Gen 7 21 Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. 24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days
All dinosaurs weren’t destroyed in the flood of course, just those who weren’t on the ark. If you’re a bible believer don’t fret the science. Dinosaurs mostly were hatched from eggs—no need to take anything but a few juvenile species who made up the wider variety of “types” who descended from various parental pairings in the new world.
The word dragon is thousands of years old and is used in the Bible and in ancient texts and histories and in the science media of those times-and in myths and legends to describe what we might call a dinosaur. Winged dinosaurs? See pterosaurs. So while dragon is thousands of years old and a word used in some form in nearly every ancient culture to describe an animal you don’t want to meet on a dark road at night or in the daytime-the word dinosaur is only approximately 175 years old-coined by Sir Richard Owen.
Here’s the point of been trying to get to—the ancient peoples had no idea that man and dinosaur never met; dragons were a real part of many of their existences in terms of actually having to deal with them or in knowing or hearing of others who did. Some of their dragons behaved like animals-killing people and animals for food and being general nuisances or strangely; gigantic plant eaters.
I began -as did many others looking through the art of ancient peoples to see if their dragons looked anything like our dinosaurs and of course many of them do—though modern science ignores them.
One important thing to mention is illustrated by a quote I often use from Discover Magazine’s Sept. 2000 issue: What Did Dinosaurs Really Look Like”:
…”There is precious little data about dinosaurs to transcend. What the museum scientists know about Indians, whales, and elephants is more than enough to mimic real life. But when it comes to dinosaurs, all they really have to work with is an incomplete jumble of bones. Indeed, if the exhibits department were limited to just skeletal data for its dioramas and reconstructions, these halls would take on a most unromantic flavor. For instance, the Indians in the canoe would lack noses, ears, and breasts, and the diorama artists (ignoring for the moment that they are humans themselves) would be at a loss for what to cover them in—slick skin like a dolphin? Monkey fur? Gorilla hair? As for the blue whale, no one would know to make it blue. And the elephants are a special case. There’s a running joke among professional dinosaur artists that goes like this: Given just an elephant skeleton, they’d probably render a titanic hamster.”
When looking at an ancient artifact or piece of art don’t throw it out (as a dinosaur representation) because it’s not identical to a modern depiction. You may be throwing away the actual depiction of an eyewitness!
What Did Kill the Dinosaurs/Dragons?
What killed the dinosaur? First, the Great flood is responsible for most fossils where most animals of all kinds perished and then down through history; metal armor and advanced technologies like the spear and the crossbow killed them.
Here is a view of the art of an ancient West-African peoples called the Legas-Warega; particularly that of their ancient (but fairly recent geologically) art that archaeologists and museum directors like to call “zoomorphic” and unknown animal. Of course that is a very adequate description of many of the pieces but there do appear to be a few at least potential dinosaur depictions standing out of the group. So much for 65 million years.
The Legas-Warega People
“The Lega people originated in what is today Uganda, and started to migrate from there to their present location in the 16th century. They were fierce warriors, conquering the people whose territory they entered and imposing many of their customs.[1] By the mid-1800s the Lega were surrounded by Arab / Swahili slave posts. Although none of these posts was within the Lega territory, they were constantly threatened by slave raids. For most of the period of the Congo Free State, the Lega territory was within the area that Tippu Tip and his successors had reserved. For a period two Arab agents of the Free State, Munie Chabodu and Munie Mtoro, ruled the Lega and collected tribute in the form of rubber and ivory. They established towns at Micici on the Elila, Shabunda on the Ulindi and Mulungu in the mountains.” Wikipedia
One of the foremost collections of the Lega art is held at the Fowler Museum in L.A. Fowler donated his collection and it contained quite a few items that could raise the issues and eyebrows vis-avis- the whole dinosaur and man discussion.
Fowler Museum: Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora
“One of the largest and finest in the United States, and one of the top twenty African collections worldwide, this collection offers a superb representation of the arts of many African nations, including objects from Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa. The Yoruba collection alone is one of the three finest in the world. It contains a spectacular array of beaded objects, including a majestic throne, elaborate chiefly gowns, and sophisticated divination regalia. … In 1971 the name was changed to the Museum of Cultural History and by 1975 its collections, in numbers and in quality, ranked it among the top four university museums in the country, a stature it retains to the present day.
A large, state-of-the-art facility called the Fowler Museum of Cultural History opened on September 30, 1992, named in recognition of lead support by the Fowler Foundation and the family of collector and inventor Francis E. Fowler Jr. In 2006 the name of the Museum was formally changed to the Fowler Museum at UCLA” Fowler Museum
A candidate for the cover picture of this article-one which left fossils on the African continent is Erythrosuchus. I don’t make the claim that this is in fact an ancient depiction of the crocodile like archosauriform-which supposedly lived over 200 million years ago. My point here is that it is an amazingly accurate depiction to be a “race memory” which is unscientific in the first place. No fanciful creature this depiction by the artist appears to be of an animal the artist was quite familiar with.
Here we present the piece along with several modern depictions of the creature which can certainly be argued are of the same or related creatures.
“Erythrosuchus (red crocodile) is an extinct genus of archosauriform reptile from the Triassic of South Africa and Namibia. Remains have been found from theCynognathus Assemblage Zone of the Beaufort Group in the Karoo of South Africa as well as the Omingonde Formation in Namibia. In the Late Triassic, the ecological niche left by Erythrosuchus was filled by creatures like Saurosuchus and Postosuchus. “ …Wikipedia
Other Potential Dinosaurs in the Fowler Collection
In the final portion of this article we simply present a series of art pieces from the Fowler Collection
Which appear to show that these West African people were familiar with various types of dinosaurs apparently alive much closer to 650 years ago rather than 65 million.
The examples with in each sub-photo are offered again simply to show that as far as modern scientific drawings are concerned they (ancient artists) have fashioned some very acceptable dinosaurs which they must have “interacted” with.
Judge for yourself.
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