Why the search for the Loch Ness monster lasts after 90 years

Hugh Gray took an ordinary walk around Loch Ness in Scotland on Sunday in November in 1933. His Ambu was disturbed when he saw something jumping over the water two or three feet from him.

He quickly took a few photos of what he described to the Scottish daily record as “an object with significant dimensions.”

A few months earlier, in April 1933, local hoteliers Aldie Mackay and her husband described a beast similar to whales to the Inverness courier. Then in the summer of 1933 a man named George Spicer said: “I saw the nearest approach to the dragon or a prehistoric animal I've ever seen in my life.”

He described the creation of two to three meters, which was carried by “lamb or animal” for his dinner.

From the first observations, registered in the second half of the sixth century, the beast was considered a folk tale. However, when Gray captured the bounced mass resembling an animal tail, he was recognized as the first photographic evidence of “Nessie” and inspired the type of mania of the monster.

90 years have passed since this picture and the beginning of obsession with finding the Loch Ness monster. As a paleobiologist, I want to examine whether the type of monster, as we think, can exist Nessie and whether we should still look.

Complicated mystification?

There are a lot of fish in the lakes, so there is enough food. There is also a lot of space. Loch Ness is huge, 7.4 billion cubic meters and a depth of 227 m. There is a lot of water to hide, which is more than all fresh water in all lakes of England and Wales.

Our idea on what the Loch Ness monster looks like, is based on a iconic photo taken a year after Gray. This picture showed a long neck stretching from black waters.

It is a source of the idea that the Loch Ness monster is a living relic from the time of dinosaurs, throwing a lonely existence in the depths. However, this picture was not what he claimed and was found, a decades later, he was a complicated mystification.

However, there is evidence to confirm the existence of three-meter beasts that looked a bit like the Loch Ness monster. These reptiles are known as relief and were destroyed during mass extinction at the end of the chalk period.

The discoveries of Plesiosaur fossils suggest that they could live in fresh water. Fossils covered bones and teeth from three meters long adults and a bone of a child with a length of 1.5 meters. However, it is unlikely that the lake monster is a plasiosaur.

Unfortunately, the truth comes down to biology. There may be enough food and space in the lakes, but what is not enough is other living monsters reminiscent of a lake to create a profitable animal population to support the existence of Ness.

So why look for Nessie or other monsters?

In August this year, Inverness was the host of Monster Hunters searching Lake with drones equipped with hydrophones and boats pinging sonar, all in the hope of proveing the existence of Nessa. They found nothing that definitely suggests that Loch Ness remains free of monsters.

Monster hunting mania is not reserved by the Loch Ness monster itself. Mokele-Mbembe is another mythical beast that supposedly lives in the Congo River basin and looks like a dinosaur. Like Ness, I doubt it exists.

But I am not a complete partner and I think that people should continue looking for seemingly extinct creatures. Take, for example, Tylakina or Tasmanian wolf. It was believed that the last Tasmanian wolf died in captivity in the 1930s.

However, recent studies have shown that it is possible that the Tasmanian wolf was extinct much later than the first thought and perhaps solved until 2000. In fact, scientists inform that compact groups of thylacin could survive.

Sometimes animals that we considered extinct have returned to the contemporary world. Coelcanth is perhaps the most famed example.

This fish has a very long fossil recording, from Devonian to the end of the chalk period. Then they disappeared, they thought lost in the same event, which destroyed dinosaurs and plsiosaurs. For today, not one fossil Coelcanth was not described from the sediments of the Paleogen period.

But in 1938 one specimen, caught by fishermen, was found on the South African market by an ichthyologist (a maritime biologist who studies various species of fish) Marjorie Courtney Latimer.

Over the next 20 years, it was about searching for population (read an excellent fish caught on time), and now we know about two Latimeriid Coelcanths in populations in Indonesia and South Africa.

The news of this is: don't let anything discourage you, looking for excitement and even monsters. You can just find something amazing.

Neil J. Gostling, associate professor in evolution and Paleobiology, University of Southampton

Derryck Telford Reid, professor of physics, Heriot-Watt University

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