Interesting. Although it seems, like us, they must have found an abundance of dinosaur bones. Maybe even more then us considering they live in the Middle East.

Are they still around?

If you believe the theory of evolution then the answer would be yes. Those dinosaurs would have evolved to different species. The atmosphere changed, and without their hostility of the old atmosphere the dinosaurs changed as well.

If you believe in creationism, then you don't believe they existed at all.

Just glancing through real quick, the Tah Prohm stegosaur has been discussed here heavily, with full support of it either being a stego, or being a normal reptile, with the "plates" being a artistic design on the border, similar to other carvings. It isn't very representative of a stegosaur also, at least from the skeleton.

Keep in mind, in Asia to this day people still dig up dinosaur bones, and treat them as dragon bones. I used to have a article that dealt with the possibility of how the ancients treated fossils, and their was a program on History a while ago that dealt with the idea as having inspired many legends of mythological creatures.

Why are you including the pictures of the known shark?

Thanks for the great ancient artwork showing knowledge of dinos. I've never seen those before or even knew they existed.

I'm going to discount the decomposed shark, but other than that, I like this thread.

Star for you.

Very Interesting post, S&F, I know there are some places that are very remote but I think we would have seen dinosaurs if they were still around. Sea creatures, that a different story, I def. believe they exists and that they could be dino's. Always been interested in this subject, esp Nessie

Jurassic Park would be a ot harder to do in real life that it's presented in the film, and according to them they just filled in the missing gaps with frog DNA.

Keep in mind, animals like the Thylacine, the Mammoth, or the various other extinct species, that have yet to be successfully cloned, or are still only in the hypothetical state.

It's a difficult proccess, even though these animals only relatively recently went extinct, it's difficult to obtain complete DNA for them, and to successfully find a way to produce them. As well as getting a good example of the specimen, something that'd be difficult to do with social animals.

I like your compilation, because it's not just another Mkoele-mbembe thread. Personally, I'm sure some prehistoric aquatic creatures are still roaming around, too.
S+F

I thought this entry of Dragons was interesting:

Around 600 B.C., during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian artist fashioned bas reliefs on bricks used in the enormous archway of the Ishtar Gate and the high walls of the approach road. The bas reliefs consist of three animals, and each row of bricks displays numerous images of one of them. The rows alternate, some showing lions, others rimis (as the Babylonians called them), and still others sirrushes (dragons).

The dragon, of course, was a purely imaginary animal. Or was it?

Willy Ley has described the sirrush, which he considered a "zoological puzzle of fantastic dimensions," thus:
... a slender body covered with scales, a long slender scaly tail, and a long slim scaly neck bearing a serpent's head. Although the mouth is closed, a long forked tongue protrudes. There are flaps of skin attached to the back of the head, which is adorned (and armed) with a straight horn....

I will mention later that Dragon stories range from the West, to the East, to the North and to the South. Yet many of these nations did not have any communication or knowledge that they existed, yet how do these cultures come up with the same type of animal? The story continues:

The Apocrypha's Book of Bel and the Dragon relates a curious story: that in the temple of Bel, Lord of the World, Nebuchadnezzar's favored god, the priests kept a "great dragon or serpent, which they of Babylon worshipped." The king challenged the Hebrew prophet Daniel, who had been going about sneering about nonliving gods of brass, to dispute this god, who "liveth, and eateth and drinketh; you canst not say that he is no living god; therefore worship him." To remove himself from this quandary, Daniel poisoned the animal.

The fortieth chapter of Job in the Old Testament, though written anywhere from 100 to 1300 years earlier than the Ishtar Gate's construction, may refer to the sirrush by another name:

Behold now Behemoth ... he eateth grass as an ox. Know now his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass, his bones are like bars of iron.... He lieth under the shady trees, in the cover of the reed, and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.... His nose pierceth through snares.

The behemoth's identity has long puzzled biblical scholars, who have not doubted that Job was writing of a real animal, even if no satisfactory candidate among known animals seems to exist. Mackal offers this interpretation: "The behemoth's tail is compared to a cedar, which suggests a sauropod. This identification is reinforced by other factors. Not only the behemoth's physical nature, but also its habits and food preferences are compatible with a sauropod's. Both live in swampy areas with trees, reeds and fins (a jungle swamp)."

So what did they think the creature could have been? a real life animal, the most logical thing. Yet the animal described could not have possibly been alive during the time of Man and could not have been made up from a fossil.

The discoverer of the Ishtar Gate, German archaeologist Robert Koldeway, gave serious thought to the possibility that the sirrush may have been an actual animal. Unlike other fantastic beasts in Babylonian art, he noted, images of the sirrush remained unchanged over centuries. What struck him about these depictions was the "uniformity of [the sirrush's] physiological conceptions."

The sirrush, he said, was more like a saurian than any other animal. Such creatures did not coexist with human beings, he wrote, and the Babylonians, who were not paleontologists, could not have reconstructed a saurian from fossil remains; yet the Old Testament states explicitly that the sirrush was real. All this considered, he was reduced to speculating that the Babylonian priests kept "some reptile" in a dark temple and led the unsuspecting to believe it was a living sirrush.

Now we have evidence to back up these claims from an archeologist who stated that they could not have possibly been forged by the Babylonians because they were not paleontologists. Yet, to make his claim more reasonable he states: that it was just some animal or just 'some reptile' and led the 'unsuspecting to believe it was a living sirrush'.

Now a little question comes up. If you tell a person that a sirrush (dragon) is in a dark temple or a holy temple and must be worshipped. They are not going to believe you, however, if you show them they will believe you. Basic psychology. Even if you show one person, chances are the majority will not believe it, unless they see it. Like Bigfoot believers vs. Skeptics of Bigfoot.

The Babylonians are known to have penetrated equatorial Africa, home of the mokele-mbembe, and Ley, Bemard Heuvelmans, and Mackal have all suggested that in the course of their travels they heard of such creatures, perhaps sighted them, or even brought a specimen home with them. This is not an unreasonable hypothesis, if we assume that mokele-mbembe exists.

On the other hand, some modern scholars, for example Adrienne Mayor, dispute the assumption that the ancients did not know of, or had no interest in, prehistoric animals. Mayor has written, "Reliable ancient sources relate that, when fossils were discovered in antiquity, they were transported with great care, identified, preserved, and sometimes traded. Reconstructed models or the remains of 'unknown' species were displayed in Greece and Rome." She adds that ancient writings seem to indicate that "some representations and descriptions of crypto-animals in antiquity were based on reconstructions from skeletons of living or extinct animals." If such was the case with the sirrush, however, the fossilized remains would have had to be brought in from elsewhere. Dinosaur fossils did not exist in Mesopotamia.

While we all know that ancient fossils were transported to Rome and Greece, this was not a wide spread out practice. There is equal evidence to show that past fossils were not handled with great care, but molded into weapons and just thrown away or to the side. And a great question remains how did the fossil get to Mesopotamia since none were there.

I will dig deeper into dragons very soon. I promise.