On a November Sunday in 1933, Hugh Gray went on his usual post-church walk on Loch Ness in Scotland. His walk was interrupted when he saw something floating above the water two or three feet away from him.
He quickly took several photos of what he described to the Scottish Daily Record as “an object of considerable dimensions.”
Just a few months earlier, in April 1933, local hoteliers Aldie Mackay and her husband had described a whale-like beast to the Inverness Courier. Then, in the summertime of 1933, a person named George Spicer declared, “I saw a dragon or prehistoric animal as close to myself as I have ever seen in my life.”
He described a creature two to 3 meters long that was carrying “a lamb or some animal” for dinner.
From the primary sightings recorded within the second half of the sixth century, the beast was considered a folk tale. But when Gray captured the bouncing mass with an animal tail, it was considered the primary photographic evidence of “Nessie” and sparked something of a monstrous mania.
It's been 90 years since this photo and the start of the obsession with finding the Loch Ness Monster. As a paleobiologist, I would like to research whether the sort of monster we predict Nessie may exist and whether we should always proceed the search.
Sophisticated fraud?
There are a variety of fish within the lake, so there’s loads of food. There can also be loads of space. Loch Ness is large, with a volume of seven.4 billion cubic meters and a depth of 227 m. There is loads of water to cover in, which is greater than all of the fresh water in all of the lakes of England and Wales.
Our idea of what the Loch Ness Monster looked like relies on an iconic photo taken a 12 months after Gray's photo. This photo showed an extended neck reaching out of the black waters.
Hence the concept the Loch Ness Monster is a living relic from the times of dinosaurs, in search of a lonely existence within the depths. However, the painting was not what it claimed to be, and a long time later it was deemed an elaborate hoax.
However, there’s evidence of the existence of three-meter-tall beasts that looked a bit just like the Loch Ness Monster. These reptiles are generally known as plesiosaurs and were worn out within the mass extinction at the top of the Cretaceous period.
Discoveries of plesiosaur fossils suggest that they might have lived in fresh water. The fossils included the bones and teeth of a three-meter-long adult human and the arm bone of a 1.5-meter-long child. However, it’s unlikely that the Loch Ness Monster was a plesiosaur.
Unfortunately, the reality comes right down to biology. There could also be enough food and enough space within the lake, but there will not be enough other living Loch Ness-like monsters to create a viable animal population to sustain Nessie's existence.
So why search for Nessie or other monsters?
This August, Inverness hosted monster hunters combing the lake using drones equipped with hydrophones and boats sending out sonar, all within the hope of proving Nessie's existence. They found nothing, which strongly suggests that Loch Ness is freed from monsters.
Monster hunting mania isn't exclusive to the Loch Ness Monster. The Mokele-mbembe is one other mythical water-dwelling beast that supposedly lives within the Congo River basin and appears like a dinosaur. Like Nessie, I doubt it exists.
But I'm not a complete party animal and I believe people should proceed looking for seemingly extinct creatures. Take, for instance, the thylacine or the Tasmanian wolf. The last Tasmanian wolf is believed to have died in captivity within the Nineteen Thirties.
However, recent research has shown that it is feasible that the Tasmanian wolf became extinct much later than first thought, and could have survived until 2000. In fact, scientists report that small groups of thylacines could have survived.
Sometimes animals we thought were extinct have actually returned to the fashionable world. The coelacanth might be probably the most famous example.
This fish has a really long fossil record, starting from the Devonian period to the top of the Cretaceous period. Then they disappeared, thought to have been lost in the identical event that worn out the dinosaurs and plesiosaurs. To date, not a single fossil coelacanth has been described from Paleogene sediments.
However, in 1938, ichthyologist (marine biologist who studies various species of fish) Marjorie Courtney Latimer found a single specimen caught by fishermen in a South African market.
A population search continued over the following 20 years (read the wonderful book A Fish Caught in Time) and we now know of two Latimeriid coelacanths in populations around Indonesia and southern Africa.
The message to remove from that is: don't let anything discourage you from in search of thrills, and even monsters. You might just find something amazing.
Neil J. Gostling, Associate Professor in Evolution and Paleobiology, University of Southampton
Derryck Telford Reid, Professor of Physics at Heriot-Watt University
This article has been republished from Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read original article.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
