Hello and thanks for sharing :) A few months ago I learned about Mokele-Mbembe, I supposed sauropod living in the Congo, and I immediately became obsessed with the idea of living dinosaurs. Well, there are plenty of living dinosaurs out there, we just call them "birds". After doing more research into the topic it doesn’t seem very likely for a couple of reasons. There’s no evidence of dinosaurs in the fossil record post the Cretaceous period which indicates extinction. Evidence of living fossils like crocodiles and coelacanths are faulty because their survival into the modern day is due to unique circumstances like size, environment, and a slower rate of evolution. That's a common misconception actually. While coelacanths and crocodilians can certainly trace their evolutionary history back to the Mesozoic, these fossil ancestors are not identical to their modern counterparts. We would be genuinely astonished for example, to find the remains of a modern saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) in Mesozoic fossil beds. Indeed, Crocodyloidea (the clade which includes true crocodiles) did not exist at all during the Mesozoic, but arose after the KT extinction event during the Eocene (Darlim et al. 2022). And supposed living dinosaurs, including Mokele-Mbembe, have descriptions more in line with older views of Dinosaurs rather than our more current understandings. The description of Mokele-Mbembe are also so vague and conflicting between different tribes and alleged witnesses that they could also conceivably refer to modern elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus or an amalgam of modern species, not unlike the hippogriff or griffin. But during my research I’m also frequently hear claims along the line of, “a surviving dinosaurs is highly implausible but not impossible.” I’m very curious what you guys think of this claim. The odds of an Apatosaur-sized sauropod surviving undetected in the Central African Rainforests to the modern day is extraordinarily unlikely. Yes, the Congo basin was remote and unexplored by westerners at the turn of the last century, but it's not that remote today. There are over 80 million people who live and work in and around the basin and the forest itself has been fragmented and cut down (so much so that the UN estimates there may not be any primary rainforest left in the basin by 2100). And yet, there still there is no reliable evidence of a sauropod dinosaur. Sometimes absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. If a non-avian dinosaur lineage did survive to the present without detection by the 8 billion current inhabitants of the globe, then it is far more likely to be a small, unobtrusive animal (think Compsognathus-sized), than a great big sauropod with huge dietary and space needs. Is it not impossible for a dinosaur to have survived, and if so why is it not impossible? Or do you think there’s absolutely no way a dinosaur could ever possibly survived? Science does not deal with absolute certainties. At this stage though, we can confidently say all of the available evidence we have indicates non-avian dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period and there is no good evidence for their continued persistence to the modern day. References Darlim, G., Lee, M. S., Walter, J., & Rabi, M. (2022). The impact of molecular data on the phylogenetic position of the putative oldest crown crocodilian and the age of the clade. Biology Letters, 18(2), 20210603. Answer from DarwinsThylacine on reddit.com