Hugh Gray took his usual post-church walk around Loch Ness in Scotland on a November Sunday in 1933. His walk was interrupted when he saw something floating above the water about a meter away from him.
He quickly took several photographs of what he described to the Scottish Daily Record as “an object of considerable size”.
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 summer of 1933, a man named George Spicer said, “I saw the closest approach to a dragon or any prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life.”
He described a creature two to three meters long carrying “a lamb or some animal” for dinner.
Since the first sightings recorded in the second half of the sixth century, the beast has been considered a folk tale. However, when Gray captured the bobbing mass with an animal tail, it was considered the first photographic evidence of ‘Nessie’ and sparked a kind of monster mania.
It’s been 90 years since this photo was taken and the beginning of the obsession with finding the Loch Ness Monster. As a paleobiologist, I want to investigate whether the kind of monster we think Nessie is could exist and whether we should keep looking.
An elaborate hoax?
There are a lot of fish in the lake, so there is plenty of food. There is also plenty of space. Loch Ness is enormous, with a volume of 7.4 billion cubic meters and a depth of 227 meters. There’s a lot of water to hide in, which is more than all the fresh water in all the lakes of England and Wales.
Our idea of what the Loch Ness Monster looks like is based on an iconic photo taken a year after Gray. This image showed a long neck extending out of the black water.
It is the source of the idea that the Loch Ness Monster is a living remnant from the age of the dinosaurs, seeking a solitary existence in the depths. However, this image was not what it claimed to be and decades later it was revealed to be an elaborate hoax.
But there is evidence to support the existence of three-meter-long beasts that looked a bit like the Loch Ness Monster. These reptiles are known as plesiosaurs and were wiped out during the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.
Discoveries of plesiosaur fossils suggest they may have lived in freshwater. The fossils include bones and teeth from three-meter-long adults and an arm bone from a 1.5-meter-long baby. However, it is unlikely that the Loch Ness Monster is a plesiosaur.
Unfortunately, the truth comes down to biology. There may be enough food and enough space in the loch, but what there isn’t enough of are other living Loch Ness-like monsters to form a viable population of animals to support Nessie’s existence.
So why search for Nessie or other monsters?
In August this year, Inverness played host to monster hunters who scoured the lake with drones equipped with hydrophones and boats pinging sonar, all in the hope of proving Nessie’s existence. They found nothing, which strongly suggests that Loch Ness remains monster-free.
Monster hunting mania isn’t just reserved for the Loch Ness Monster. The Mokele-mbembe is another mythical water beast believed to live in the Congo River basin and resembles a dinosaur. Like Nessie, I doubt it exists.
But I’m not a total party pooper and I think people should continue their search for apparently extinct creatures. Take, for example, the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf. The last Tasmanian wolf in captivity was believed to have died in the 1930s.
However, recent research has suggested that it is possible that the Tasmanian wolf became extinct much later than originally thought and may have persisted until the 2000s. Researchers even report that small groups of thylacines may have survived.
And sometimes animals we thought were extinct came back to the modern world. The coelacanth is perhaps the best-known example.
This fish has a very long fossil record, from the Devonian to the end of the Cretaceous. Then they were gone, lost in the same event that destroyed the dinosaurs and plesiosaurs. No fossil coelacanth has been described from the Paleogene period sediments to the present.
But in 1938, a single specimen, caught by fishermen, was found in a South African market by ichthyologist (a marine biologist who studies different species of fish) Marjorie Courtney Latimer.
There was a hunt over the next twenty years to find the population (read the excellent A Fish Caught in Time) and we now know of two Latimeriid coelacanths in populations around Indonesia and southern Africa.
The message of this is: don’t let anything stop you from looking for excitement or even monsters. You might find something great.
Neil J. Gostling, Associate Professor of Evolution and Palaeobiology, University of Southampton
Derryck Telford Reid, Professor of Physics, Heriot-Watt University
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