Bizarre Encounters with Raptor-Like Dino Cryptids

One strange case of what appears to be some sort of surviving therapod dinosaurs takes us to the vast moonscape of the Atacama Desert, some 2,000 kilometers north of Santiago, Chile, in South America. Here the parched, hostile landscape is said to have a population of what are often described as 6-foot tall sharp-toothed bipedal dinosaurs, with thick leathery skin, three-toed feet, an upright stance, and razor sharp teeth, often said to have prominent tails and to somewhat resemble reptilian kangaroos. It is most often reported from a stretch of largely deserted highway that that links the cities of Iquique and Arica, where passing motorists will describe having the mysterious creatures run or bound across the road and off into the wilderness, often at dawn or dusk.

What has come to be known as the Arica Monster has been reported since at least 1980, with one of the more notable of these being made by a military officer named Hernan Cuevas, who described seeing a bipedal sauropod that he said was “a huge beast, much like a two-legged dinosaur, with huge thighs,” and which he also mentioned looked like a velociraptor from the movie Jurassic Park. The phenomenon was notably investigated by the TV show Destination Truth, who describes it as a “dinosaur-like bird” and travelled to the region and spoke to several witnesses, among these a family who claimed that their car was circled by a “dog-faced kangaroo-like creature” in 2004, among others. The region is one of the driest places on earth and mostly inhospitable to life, so the Atacama Desert seems like a strange place to run into living dinosaurs, but yet the reports continue to come in from time to time. What is going on here? Who knows?

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Interesting.
“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”