IT AIN’T NESSIE-CERALLY SO

Thursday 28th July 2022

IT AIN’T NESSIE-CERALLY SO

Thanatotheristes degrootorum

Thanatotheristes degrootorum

According to various media outlets there is new evidence for the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, and therefore by extrapolation all of us who believe in the eunuch eel theory for Northern Hemisphere lake monsters are completely wrong. The newspapers are full of it. Today’s Independent says:

“The existence of Loch Ness monster is “plausible”, British scientists have said.

The suggestion came after researchers found fossils of small plesiosaurs – long-necked marine reptiles from the age of dinosaurs – in a 100-million-year-old river system that is now Morocco’s Sahara Desert, suggesting they may have lived in freshwater.

Loch Ness monster enthusiasts have long believed that the historic Scottish folklore could be a prehistoric reptile with a small head and long neck, similar to a plesiosaur. However cynics have argued that plesiosaurs could not have lived in Loch Ness as they needed a salwater environment.

Now the university’s findings, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, suggest the plesiosaurs were adapted to tolerate freshwater, possibly even spending their lives their, like today’s river dolphins.”

There is one problem with this, and all the other, stories. It is complete bollocks. What the authors – Georgina Bunkera, David.Martill, Roy Smith, Samir Zourhic, and Nick Longricha – are saying is that there is now supportive evidence to suggest that plesiosaurs could adapt to fresh and brackish water, as has been suggested as a hypothesis for the Loch Ness Monster. This is a momentous discovery, based on 100 million year old fossils, but as their alma mater, the University of Bath have written: “But the fossil record also suggests that after almost a hundred and fifty million years, the last plesiosaurs finally died out at the same time as the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.”

Sorry kiddies.

Jonathan Downes
Cryptozoologist, naturalist, musician, singer, composer, poet, novelist and Director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology since 1992. Jon was born in Portsmouth in 1959 and spent his infancy in Nigeria and his childhood in Hong Kong. His wife Corinna died of cancer in 2020, leaving him with two stepdaughters and a six year old granddaughter called Evelyn.