See, e.g., Abominable Science! by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero, where on page 292 it says
Most of the active explorers seeking Mokele Mbembe [a purported sauropod-like creature in the Congo] have a nonscientific agenda: Young Earth creationism (the evangelical Christian belief that Earth was created about 6,000 years ago by God, as described in the book of Genesis). […]
Mokele Mbembe, in particular, is an idea that Young Earth creationists like [William] Gibbons find natural and attractive: “To the Bible believing Christian, the idea of dinosaurs living with man in the past or even some still living today, is scientifically possible. Christians know that God made all the animals, including dinosaurs, about 6000 years ago.”* But the creationists’ fascination with Mokele Mbembe is not merely that its existence seems plausible within a creationist worldview, but that its existence has important ideological or theological ramifications. For some reason, creationists believe that the discovery of a dinosaur in Africa will overthrow the entire theory of evolution.
* William Gibbons and Kent Hovind, Claws, Jaws and Dinosaurs (Pensacola, Fla.: CSE, 1999)
