Why the search for the Loch Ness Monster (and other beasts) continues 90 years after that first blurry photograph

Hugh Gray was taking his usual after-church walk along Loch Ness in Scotland one Sunday in November 1933. SHis walk was interrupted when he saw something floating on the water two or three feet from him.

He quickly took several photographs of what he was describing in Scottish daily record as “an object of considerable dimensions”.

A few months earlier, in April 1933, local hoteliers Aldie Mackay and her husband They 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 thing to a dragon or prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life.” »

He described a creature measuring between two and three meters long that carried “a lamb or any animal” for dinner.

Since the first observations, recorded in the second half of the 6th century , the beast was considered a folk tale . However, when Gray captured the oscillating weight with an animal-like tail, It was considered the first photographic evidence of “Nessy” and inspired a kind of monstrous mania.

90 years of this image and the beginning of the obsession with finding the Loch Ness Monster. As a paleobiologist, I want to find out if the kind of monster we think Nessy is could exist and if we should keep looking.

There are plenty of fish in the lake, so enough 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 m . There’s plenty of water to hide in, which is more than all the fresh water in all the lakes in England and Wales. .

Our idea of ​​what the Loch Ness Monster looks like is based on an iconic photograph taken a year after Gray’s. This image showed a long neck extending from the black water.

This is the origin of the idea that the Loch Ness Monster is a living relic from the age of the dinosaurs, seeking a solitary existence in the depths. However, this image was not who it claimed to be, and decades later it was discovered that it had been an elaborate deception .

But there is evidence that supports the existence of three-meter-long beasts that somewhat resembled the Loch Ness Monster. These reptiles are known as plesiosaurs and were exterminated during the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.

Discoveries of plesiosaur fossils suggest they may have lived in fresh water. The fossils included three-meter-long adult bones and teeth and a 1.5-meter-long baby arm bone. However, it is unlikely that the Loch Ness Monster was a plesiosaur.

Unfortunately, the truth comes down to biology. Maybe there is enough food and enough space in the lake, but what is missing are other living monsters similar to Loch Ness. form a viable population of animals to support Nessy’s existence.

In August this year, Inverness hosted monster hunters who traveled the lake with drones equipped with hydrophones and sounding boats, all in the hope of proving the existence of Nessy. They found nothing, strongly suggesting that Loch Ness remains free of monsters.

The mania for hunting monsters isn’t just reserved for the Loch Ness Monster. The Mokele-mbembe is another mythical aquatic beast said to live in the Congo River basin. and it looks like a dinosaur. Like Nessy, I doubt it exists.

But I’m not a total killjoy and I think people should continue their search for seemingly extinct creatures. Let’s take as an example the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf. The last Tasmanian wolf is believed to have died in captivity in the 1930s.

However, a recent investigation found that the Tasmanian wolf may have gone extinct much later than previously thought and may have persisted into the 2000s. In fact, Researchers report that small groups of thylacines may have survived.

A live coelacanth found off the coast of Pumula, on the south coast of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, in 2019. Bruce Henderson/Wikimedia

And sometimes, animals we thought were extinct have returned to the modern world. He coelacanth is perhaps the most famous example.

This fish has a very long collection of fossils, spanning from the Devonian to the end of the Cretaceous. Then they disappeared, presumably lost in the same event that destroyed the dinosaurs and plesiosaurs. Not a single coelacanth fossil has been described in sediments from the Paleogene period until the present day.

But in 1938, a single specimen, caught by fishermen, was discovered on a South African market by the ichthyologist (a marine biologist who studies different species of fish). Marjorie Courtney Latimer .

A search ensued for the next 20 years to trace the population (read the excellent A fish trapped in time ) and we now know two Latimeriid coelacanths in the populations around Indonesia and southern Africa .

The main message is: don’t let anything discourage you from thrill-seeking. , or even monsters. You might find something surprising.

* Neil J. Gostling Associate Professor of Evolution and Palaeobiology, University of Southampton