If such a creature exists, new research shows how the Loch Ness monster could have never been a plesiosaur.The legend of Nessie has been around for decades, with imaginative people describing it as a snake threaded through a turtle, leaving many to believe that it could be a prehistoric dinosaur of some sort.
The plesiosaur is a marine reptile that lived 160 million years ago. It sported long neck - in many cases as long as its body and tail combined. Scientists have pondered over the why an animal would need such a long neck. Leslie No? of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, UK has an answer.
Plesiosaurs, he says, used their long necks to reach down and feed on soft-bodied animals living on the sea floor. During a vertebrate paleontology meeting in Canada last month, No? examined the fossils of a plesiosaur called Muraenosaurus.
Calculating the articulation of the neck bones, he concluded the neck was flexible and could move easily when pointing down. ... However, the osteology of the neck makes it absolutely certain that the plesiosaur could not lift its head out of the water - as most alleged pictures of Nessie show. - discovery
I disagree. The photo of Nessie we all know (above left) is an admitted fake made with clay attached to a toy submarine, but there still could be a real one. Nessie could still be a surviving ancestor of the plesiosaur living in caves below the lake. This new research tells us that a neck coming out of the water like this means the creature is probably not evolved from a plesiosaur, but what if you just see a hump in the water and not a neck?
1 comment:
I agree. The Surgeon's Photo is a well-established hoax. But that does not invalidate the hundreds of
sightings and the highly suspicous sonar and underwater camera footage that's been taken. Nor does it
mean that Nessie could not be a relative of the plesiosaur just like Mokele Mbembe could be a relative of
the apatasaur.
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