Cryptid Hunters

Cryptid Hunters is a 2005 novel by Roland Smith about twins living with their uncle who sneak away to search the Congo for a missing dinosaur egg, before his enemy Noah Blackwood finds the eggs.

Twins Cody and Grace O' Hara are thirteen years old. Marty is the athletic, artistic, while Grace is an excellent swimmer , and is very intelligent. "Marty is Grace's 'bodyguard', and Grace is Marty's 'brainguard.'" The twins are adopted by their uncle Wolfe when their parents turn out to be missing on one of their journeys for their jobs as one of the top photojournalist teams in the country. Wolfe lives on his private island called Cryptos located in the Pacific northwest, near Seattle. Wolfe named his island after the Greek island of Cryptos (the Greek word kryptos means hidden). The island's name is appropriate because Wolfe is a cryptozoologist. Everyone visiting his island must wear a nametag that can be used to locate that person anywhere, with the use of a pocket computer that Wolfe's partner invented, called a Gizmo. The Gizmo has 8 main icons:Locate (which shows all the people/ animals/ things that have an identification tag), Teleconference (to talk to other gizmos, of computer w/ web cam), E-mail, Keyboard, GPS, Chat, Video, and a cybervault ( the cybervault holds anything you scan into the Gizmo, or anything you save on it. The information is stored in a satellite, so you still are informed, even if you lose the Gizmo.) Many adventures are to be had on this island and they only get better as they travel to the Congo. Wolfe studies cryptids, animals that are rumored to exist, but have not been proven scientifically such as Bigfoot, Yeti, and Krakken. He has found evidence for an animal called the Mokele-mbembe, which turns out to be a dinosaur [a sauropod]. On airtrip to bring supplies to prepare for the trip, Marty and Grace accidentally fall from the jet through the supply drop. They must get to Wolfe's base, a tree house called the Skyhouse. To get there, they must escape from a band of Blackwood's men, a hunter named Butch McCall, and along the way they find the one thing that every one is looking for. Personal revelations about family lineage make for an interesting ending.