Nessie, tethered by the neck; models at the Loch Ness Monster Museum - 1987 picture. Photo / NZME
Nessie, tethered by the neck; models at the Loch Ness Monster Museum - 1987 picture. Photo / NZME
The Loch Ness Monster is "plausible", a British university has declared, after finding that some plesiosaurs may have lived in freshwater.
Nessie proponents have long believed that the creature of Scottish folklore could be a prehistoric reptile, with grainy images and eyewitness accounts over the years hinting that the beast has a long-neck and small head similar to a plesiosaur.
However, sceptics argue that even if a plesiosaur lineage had survived into the modern era, the creatures could not have lived in Loch Ness because they needed a saltwater environment.
Now, the University of Bath has found fossils of small plesiosaurs in a 100-million-year-old river system that is now in Morocco's Sahara Desert, suggesting they did live in freshwater.
The fossils include bones and teeth from a 9.8 foot (3 metre) long adult, and an arm bone from a 4.9ft (1.5m) baby.
They hint that these creatures routinely lived and fed in freshwater, alongside frogs, crocodiles, turtles, fish and the aquatic dinosaur Spinosaurus.
"What amazes me is that the ancient Moroccan river contained so many carnivores all living alongside each other," said co-author Dave Martill, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bath.
The plesiosaur teeth even show the same heavy wear patterns of the Spinosaurus, suggesting they were regularly feeding on the same heavily-armoured fish that swam in the river system, rather than simply being occasional visitors.
Dr Nick Longrich, corresponding author on the paper, said: "We don't really know why the plesiosaurs are in freshwater.
"It's a bit controversial, but who's to say that because we palaeontologists have always called them 'marine reptiles', they had to live in the sea? Lots of marine lineages invaded freshwater."
The first complete skeleton of a plesiosaur was first found in 1823 in Lyme Regis, Dorset, by an English fossil hunter named Mary Anning.
The creature was found to have a small head, long neck and four flippers, and was named "near lizard" because it was thought to more closely resemble modern reptiles, compared to the Ichthyosaurus, which had been found in the same rock strata just a few years earlier.
It swam by flapping its fins in the water, much as sea lions do today, and lived from the late Triassic Period into the late Cretaceous Period, around 215 million to 66 million years ago, before being wiped out with the dinosaurs.
Its link to the Loch Ness Monster was first made by Arthur Grant, a veterinary student, who claimed to have nearly hit the creature on his motorcycle in January 1934 and described it as a cross between a seal and plesiosaur. He drew a sketch that resembled the ancient sea creature.
Just a few months later, the Daily Mail published a photograph taken by Robert Kenneth Wilson, a gynaecologist, that also appeared to show a creature with a long neck and small head moving through the water.
The image – which became widely known as "the surgeon's photograph" – later turned out to be a hoax, created by a disgruntled ex-Mail employee who was angry that his father-in-law had been ridiculed by the newspaper for claiming he had found Nessie footprints.
A press release from the University of Bath said the new discovery showed that the Loch Ness Monster was "on one level, plausible".
"Plesiosaurs weren't confined to the seas, they did inhabit freshwater," the release added, but also pointed out that the fossil record still showed that plesiosaurs had died out at the same time as the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
